Brother screamed at Arab brother last week in a way that suggested that Arab brotherhood is a sometime thing. In Cairo, President Nasser's marchers swung dead rats and dogs from mock gallows to show their hate for Premier Kassem and his Iraqi Communist allies. In Baghdad, Kassem supporters plastered the city with portraits of President Nasser's grinning countenance superimposed on pictures of donkeys, hyenas and dancing girls.
Nasser's Voice of the Arabs raged that Kassem was an apostate whose followers had torn up the Koran outside his office door shouting: "Death to Arab nationalism, death to Islam!" Nasser, who hitherto has hesitated to make a jihad, or holy war, against his Arab enemies, now invoked this highly charged cry against the Kassem regime and its atheist Communist comrades. (Use of such dangerous religious passions for political purposes may be effective against the Reds, but it also upsets Lebanese Christians and other non-Islamic Arabs.)
Fast as the Communists could pass the ammunition, Radio Baghdad fired back that Nasser was the honorary President of the Egyptian Freemasons' lodge and hence, naturally enough, a partner of Zionism. Who was to blame for the unsuccessful Mosul uprising? "The blood of Mosul's free men will haunt you, Gamal," railed the Baghdad announcer. Taunted Radio Cairo: "Iraqis now call their government 'the rule of the Red butcher.' "
Most Favored Nation. Caught somewhat in the middle was Soviet Russia. Last week, "pained" at the anti-Communist shouts of Communism's first Middle East beneficiary, Nikita Khrushchev blandly complained that Nasser was only fussing because the Iraqis would not let him annex their country. Though relations with Nasser "will continue as before," said Khrushchev, "our sympathy with Iraq is greater," because "Iraq has a more progressive order of things."
Khrushchev delivered this "friendly" warning at a Moscow reception marking the signing with Iraq of a major new $138 million Soviet loan agreement. The agreement, pledging the Iraqis a twelve-year credit for building a steel mill and at least 14 factories, thrust the Soviet Union into Britain's old place at the center of oil-rich Iraq's economic development. The first 80 Soviet technicians, said Iraq's Communist-lining Economics Minister Ibrahim Kubba. would arrive within a month.
Nikita Khrushchev proclaimed his wish to continue supporting Nasser, but at his press conference on Berlin threw in a few side remarks about the dictator of the Nile that were meant to wound and were bound to sting. "President Nasser," said Khrushchev, "is a rather young man and rather hotheaded, and he took upon himself more than his stature permitted. He shouldn't do it. He might strain himself."