A Quality of Progress

From the site of the fabled Tower of Babel in the south to the remote mountain homes of Kurdish tribesmen in the north, the young (21) King of the ancient land of Iraq traveled last week at the head of a caravan of Cadillacs and Chryslers bearing guests from 13 nations. The purpose of King Feisal's 2,000-mile journey: to show off progress on the second anniversary of Iraq's $1.2 billion, five-year national development program. "The most impressive thing in the Middle East today," glowed U.S. Ambassador Waldemar J. Gallman.

In Baghdad, while thousands of Iraqis gathered to cheer both their King and his astute, farsighted minister, 68-year-old Nuri es-Said,Feisal snipped the royal gold scissors and opened to regular traffic two $4,500,000 bridges across the Tigris. In another quarter of the capital the King dedicated a 1,250-unit housing project which boasts schools, a mosque and "gossip squares," where Iraqis may indulge their favorite national pastime. The housing program's long-range goal: 400,000 dwellings--new roofs for one-third of Iraq's population of 5,000,000.

No More Slaves. In town after town, Iraqi villagers slit the throats of fatted animals to honor the visiting King. He opened the first 16 miles (Baghdad to Al Mahmudiya) of a projected 1,250-mile roadbuilding program; he dedicated a $12 million, 25,000-spindle textile plant at Mosul, Iraq's second city, which under the program was also receiving a sugar factory, a bridge, a housing project and a new vocational-training school. On a 148,000-acre tract 20 miles from the site of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, the young King presented ownership deeds for 40-acre plots of land to 20 landless fellahin. The land transfer was particularly symbolic to Iraqis: it marked the first time the area has been irrigated since Mongol hordes wrecked their elaborate irrigation systems 700 years ago. Gaunt, copper-skinned E'Elawi Aboud was one of the first to receive his deed. "My father, my father's father and I have all worked the same land for the same sheik's family," said E'Elawi Aboud. "The sheik got half the crop and treated us like slaves. Now I hope things will be different."

In Sulaimaniya, stronghold of the often rebellious Kurds, King Feisal directed the lowering of a huge, crane-borne cornerstone into the depth of the mighty gorge on the Little Zab River. When the Dokan Dam is completed, it will control costly floods, irrigate 800,000 acres of now barren land.

Iraq's development program is a daring gamble against time. A whopping 70% of the country's more than $200 million-a-year oil royalties goes to the National Development Board,* headed by Premier Nuri himself, and including on its ten-man board two foreign experts, one American, one British. Its budget is bigger than the government's; the board is vested with massive authority, but it has used it well and sagely. There are complaints of corruption, and of politicking in the allocation of projects to please powerful sheiks, but on balance, Western observers find far more to praise than to blame. It took political courage (and a strong hand) to concentrate on long-range projects rather than on quick handouts in a land where the majority of the people live in mud huts and share the poverty of the Middle East.

"We Aim to Change." "In Iraq today," said a senior Iraqi official, "there is only one source of wealth: oil. We propose to use our oil income while we have it to create other sources of wealth. We aim to change everything. But we propose to do it by evolution, not revolution. Nasser's way is not our way." As the only Arab member of the Baghdad Pact, Iraq is

Nasser's chief rival in the Arab world. What did the program boil down to, a questioner asked: Was it socialism, state capitalism, or what? The official smiled. "We have a good word in Arabic. It is eimar. It means when you finish a house or complete some worthwhile thing, it has a quality of progress. We call our program eimar." Resting overnight in his summer palace at Sarsange, shy, Harrow-educated Feisal found eimar's reception encouraging: "The people seem to feel that we are doing something important for them."

* When the Syrians blew up the Iraqi pipelines to the Mediterranean during the attack on Suez, the program suffered a $700,000-a-day loss of revenue.

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