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But it is simply not possible to pour $250 million into an economy, as Nuri has done since 1951, without setting off great social changes. The word that there are plenty of jobs to be had in Baghdad has penetrated to the most backward sharecroppers, and peasants are arriving in Baghdad from the big southern estates at the rate of ten truckloads a day. Nuri's success in suppressing last winter's disorders he rightly regards as "the political first fruits of our development program. Our people have jobs. They live better now. A man making $2.80 a day on a steady job does not take a few cents from an organizer who wants him to join a riot."
The Plains of Abraham. In seven years, Iraq's per capita income has advanced from $84 to $140. It is the Development Board's proclaimed purpose to double the country's standard of living in the next ten years. So far, the country bears little resemblance to the Eden where men first created agriculture and civilization. The western deserts are so flat that huge, air-conditioned buses arrow across them between Baghdad and Damascus by night at 80 miles an hour, navigating by compass and the stars. Ur, the great city from which Abraham went forth 4,000 years ago to settle the land of Canaan, now lies not far from salty swamps peopled by neolithic Arabs who live in circular boats made of rushes calked with bitumen. The Hanging Gardens of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, the pleasure domes of Haroun al-Rashid's Baghdad, all created when the valley sustained populations three times as great as now, are vanished with Nineveh and Tyre.
Booming Baghdad. The characteristic sight of the Iraqi countryside has long been the earth-floored mud hut—cold and dank in winter, a noisome furnace in summer—in which 90% of the population subsist in barebone poverty and endemic disease. Today, the old order it represents is changing under the impact of Nuri's development program. The population of Baghdad has doubled in five years (to about 1,000,000), and the capital is booming. Streets are jammed with American cars, creating a monumental traffic problem that the Development Board's new bridges over the Tigris have not begun to solve. The board's bulldozers are flattening 300 slum houses and bazaar shops to open a new freeway through the city center. Now that the floods have been stemmed, the city is spreading be yond the dikes where handsome villas are rising for the new, well-to-do middle classes. So many streets are still unpaved that during the rainy season hostesses hire servants to carry guests from their cars into the house. Shantytowns mushroom all over Baghdad, one of the worst of them in a palm grove barely 500 yards from Nuri's house.
Under Development Board plans, mud-colored Baghdad is going to take on splendor before long. France's Le Corbusier will build a sports stadium, and 88-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright returned enthusiastically from Baghdad last week ready to create an opera house "like nothing in the world" on an island in the Tigris. By any planner's standards, these should qualify as "impact projects."