Arabs (66 page)

After the Free Officers gave instructions to loyal soldiers to divert their trucks from the highway toward the capital, the rebel soldiers took up positions in key points of the city. One detachment made its way to the Royal Palace to execute King Faysal II and all members of the ruling Hashemite family. Others went to the homes of high government officials. Orders were given for the summary execution of Prime Minister Nuri al-Sa‘id. Colonel Abd al-Salam ’Arif led a small detachment to take over the radio station to broadcast word of the revolution and to assert the Free Officers’ control over Iraq.

“This is Baghdad,” ‘Arif intoned over the airwaves in the early morning hours of July 14, 1958, “Radio Service of the Iraqi Republic.” To the Iraqi listening public, this was the first indication of the end of the monarchy. The edgy ’Arif paced the room between his broadcasts, anxious for word from his co-conspirators on the success of their revolution. Around 7:00 A.M. an officer in a blood-stained uniform burst into the room holding a submachine gun in his right hand and confirmed the death of the king and royal family. ’Arif began to shout “
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!
[God is great!]” at the top of his voice. He then sat at a desk, penned a few lines, and disappeared into the broadcast studio, repeating to himself, “
Allahu Akbar
, the Revolution was victorious!”
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Yunis Bahri followed the first reports of the revolution through ‘Arif’s broadcasts. “We did not know what was happening either inside or outside the capital,” Bahri recalled. “The people of Baghdad crouched in their homes, confused by the sudden shock of events.” Then ’Arif called the people into the streets to support the revolution and track down its enemies.

Though ‘Arif knew that the royal family had already been killed, he called on the Iraqis to attack the royal palace, as though he sought to implicate the Iraqi people in the crime of regicide. He also offered a reward of 10,000 Iraqi dinars for the capture of Nuri al-Sa’id, who had managed to escape his assailants at dawn—only to be caught disguised as a woman and lynched the following day. “When the people of Baghdad heard the incitement to attack the royal palace and Nuri al-Sa’id’s palace, they left their homes overcome with the desire to kill, murder, rob and plunder,” Bahri recalled. The urban poor leaped at the opportunity to plunder the fabled riches of Baghdad’s palaces and to kill anyone who got in their way.

Yunis Bahri took to the streets to witness the Iraqi Revolution firsthand. He was appalled by the carnage that greeted him. “Blood flowed in a violent stream down al-Rashid Street. The people applauded and cheered when they saw men dragged to death behind cars. I saw the mob drag the remains of the body of ’Abd al-Ilah after they had made an example of him, gratifying their thirst for revenge upon him. Then they hanged his body from the gate of the Ministry of Defence.” The crowd pulled down the statues of King Faysal I and General Maude, the British commander who first occupied Baghdad in 1917, and set fire to the British Chancellery in Baghdad.
In the atmosphere of mass hysteria, anyone could be mistaken for a man of the ancient regime and lynched. “It was sufficient for anyone to point a finger, saying ‘That’s [cabinet minister] Fadhil al-Jamali!’ for the crowd to seize and bind the man’s legs and drag him to death without hesitation or mercy, while he screamed in vain and called upon God, the prophets and all the angels and devils protesting [the mistaken identity].” Baghdad was unrecognizable, “ablaze in fires and drenched in blood, the corpses of the victims scattered in the streets.”
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While the violence raged in the streets of Baghdad, Colonel ‘Arif continued to issue statements and orders throughout the day over the national radio station. He ordered the arrest of all former Iraqi cabinet ministers, as well as the ministers of the Arab Union, both Iraqi and Jordanian. As the day wore on, lower-level figures were singled out for arrest, from the mayor of Baghdad to the chief of police. By the afternoon they were calling for broadcasters and journalists who were considered sympathetic to the monarchy. Yunis Bahri, who had assisted Nuri al-Sa’id, was named as a sympathizer of the fallen government and was arrested the following day. He reached the Ministry of Defence just as al-Sa’id’s mangled corpse arrived in the back of a jeep.

The men of the old order were rounded up like sheep and led off to a new prison converted from an old hospital in a suburb of Baghdad known as Abu Ghurayb. The prison of Abu Ghurayb would gain notoriety as the torture chamber of Saddam Hussein and, later yet, of U.S. forces following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Bahri was detained in Abu Ghurayb for seven months before being released without charge. He and his wife returned to Beirut early in 1959 to find a new government and the civil war at an end.

I
n Lebanon, the opposition forces celebrated the fall of the monarchy in Iraq. They believed the Hashemite monarchy was a British puppet state and that the Free Officers were Arab nationalists in Nasser’s mold. They took comfort in the fall of the pro-Western government in Iraq and redoubled their efforts against the Chamoun government in Lebanon. As Chamoun recorded in his memoirs, “In rebel neighbourhoods, men and women had gone into the streets, filled cafes and public places, joyful, dancing with a frenetic joy, threatening legal authority with the fate that had been that of Baghdad leaders. On the other hand, a great fear had spread to those Lebanese committed to a peaceful and independent Lebanon.”
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The Lebanese state, shaken by civil war, was now threatened with collapse. Chamoun invoked the Eisenhower Doctrine two hours after receiving news of the violent revolution in Iraq (Lebanon had the distinction to be the only country ever
to invoke the doctrine). With the U.S. Sixth Fleet on hand in the Eastern Mediterranean, Marines landed in Beirut the very next day.

The United States intervened in Lebanon to prevent the fall of a pro-Western government to Nasserist forces. The American show of force on behalf of its Lebanese ally included 15,000 troops on the ground, dozens of naval vessels off the coast, and 11,000 sorties by naval aircraft that made frequent low-level flights over Beirut to intimidate the warring Lebanese. U.S. troops remained only three months in Beirut (the last American forces were withdrawn on October 25) and left without firing a shot.

Political stability returned to Lebanon under the brief American occupation. The commander of the Lebanese army, General Fuad Shihab, was elected president on July 31, 1958, putting to rest the opposition’s concerns of an unconstitutional extension of Chamoun’s rule. President Chamoun’s term of office ended on schedule, on September 22. That October, President Shihab oversaw the creation of a coalition government combining loyalist and opposition members. Arab nationalist hopes that Lebanon would throw in its lot with Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic were dashed, as the new Lebanese government called for national reconciliation under the slogan “no vanquished and no victor.”

 

The Iraqi Revolution left Jordan totally isolated and threatened by the same Arab nationalist forces that had swept away the much stronger monarchy in Baghdad. King Hussein’s first reaction was to dispatch his army to put down the revolution and restore his family’s rule in Iraq. It was an emotive response rather than a rational calculation. Even if his overstretched, underarmed forces had managed to overpower the stronger Iraqi army, there were no surviving Hashemites in Iraq to restore to the throne (the only surviving member of the family, Prince Zeid, was then serving as Iraq’s ambassador to Great Britain and lived in London with his family).

Hussein soon recognized the vulnerability of his own position, and how easy it would be for his enemies in the UAR to overthrow him now that he no longer had Iraq to back him up. As he recalled his own army, which had reached 150 miles inside Iraq, Hussein turned to Britain and the United States on July 16 to request military assistance. As in Lebanon, foreign troops were seen as essential to prevent outside intervention in Jordan. It was a great risk for Hussein to turn to the former imperial power, so discredited by the Suez Crisis. Yet the risks of going it alone were even worse. On July 17, British paratroopers and aircraft began to arrive in Jordan to contain the damage of the Iraqi Revolution.

 

At the height of the Cold War, when political analysts conceived of whole regions of the world as dominoes at risk of falling, officials in Washington, London, and
Moscow alike believed the Iraqi Revolution would set off an Arab nationalist sweep. They were convinced that the Iraqi coup had been masterminded by Nasser and that he was intent on bringing all the Fertile Crescent under his dominion in the United Arab Republic. This in part explains the speed with which the United States and Britain intervened to prop up the pro-Western states in Lebanon and Jordan.

All eyes now turned to Egypt—to sound out Nasser’s views on recent events—and to Iraq, to see what Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim intended to do. Would he bring Iraq into union with Syria and Egypt, creating the Arab superstate that would redress the balance of power in the region? Or would the traditional rivalry between Cairo and Baghdad be preserved in the republican era?

According to Nasser’s confidant, Mohamed Heikal, the Egyptian president had misgivings about the Iraqi Revolution from the outset. Given the extraordinary volatility of the Arab world in 1958, and the tensions between the Soviets and the Americans, further regional instability could only represent a liability for Egypt.

Nasser was meeting with Tito in Yugoslavia when he first learned of the coup in Baghdad, and he flew directly to Moscow to meet with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on July 17. The Soviets were convinced that Nasser had orchestrated the whole affair and were concerned about the U.S. reaction. Khrushchev admonished Nasser, saying, “Frankly we are not ready for a confrontation. We are not ready for World War Three.”
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Nasser tried to convince his Soviet ally that he had no part in the events in Baghdad, and he tried to secure Soviet guarantees against U.S. retaliation. The most that Khrushchev was willing to offer was to conduct Soviet-Bulgarian maneuvers on the Turkish border to discourage the United States from deploying Turkish troops in Syria or Iraq. “But I am telling you frankly, don’t depend on anything more than that,” Khrushchev warned the Egyptian president. Nasser reassured Khrushchev that he had no intention of seeking Iraq’s accession to the UAR.

The new Iraqi government was itself divided on whether to seek union with Nasser or preserve the independence of Iraq. The new leader of Iraq, Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim, was determined to rule an independent state and had no intention of delivering his country to Nasser’s rule. He worked closely with the Iraqi Communist Party, seeking closer ties to the Soviet Union, and was cool toward the Cairo regime that had clamped down upon the Egyptian Communist Party. Qasim’s second-in-command, Colonel ‘Arif, played to the Arab nationalist gallery in calling for Iraq to join Egypt and Syria in the UAR. Qasim ultimately arrested his coconspirator and had ’Arif imprisoned, condemned to death, and reprieved (in 1963’Arif would head the coup that would overthrow and execute Qasim).

For the next five years, Qasim took Iraq down the road of rivalry, rather than unity, with Egypt, and relations between Iraq and the UAR deteriorated in mutual
recrimination. Iraq’s failure to join the United Arab Republic was a great disappointment to Arab nationalists across the Middle East, who had seen in the bloody revolution the possibility of uniting the three great centers of Arabism—Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad.

The Arab world had been utterly transformed by the Egyptian Revolution. In the course of the 1950s Egypt had emerged as the most powerful state in the region and Nasser the undisputed leader of the Arab world.

Nasser rose to the peak of his power in 1958 with the union of Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic. The union sent shock waves across the Arab world that nearly toppled the fragile governments in neighboring Lebanon and Jordan. Arab nationalists welcomed the prospect of the collapse of the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan and of the pro-Western Christian state in Lebanon in the expectation that both would join the United Arab Republic. The Iraqi Revolution of 1958 that overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad seemed the harbinger of a new Arab order, uniting Egypt and the Fertile Crescent and fulfilling the hopes of Arab nationalists in a united, progressive Arab superstate. For one brief, heady moment, it looked as though the Arab world might break the cycle of foreign domination that had marked the Ottoman, imperial, and Cold War eras to enjoy an age of true independence.