THE MIDDLE EAST: The Dry & the Wet

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Telephones jingled in five Baghdad embassies. A procession of limousines, national flags aflutter from their fenders, drove up outside Iraq's yellow brick Foreign Ministry. One by one, the ambassadors of Britain, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan marched inside to receive a note from Iraq's Foreign Minister Hashim Jawad. When they had left, the U.S.'s gangling Ambassador John Jernegan was ushered in and got the same word verbally. Later, at a press conference to which Western correspondents were not invited, Premier Abdul Karim Kassem, Iraq's strongman, announced publicly what the ambassadors had been told privately: Iraq was withdrawing from the Baghdad Pact.

The decision had been implicit from the beginning, in the revolt that toppled the throne, killed the King and his pro-Western Premier, Nuri asSaid, and brought Kassem's army clique to power last July. The timing was what counted.

Forget Nasser. The State Department and the British Foreign Office, not yet abandoning all hope of Kassem, put Kassem's action down to his desire to express solidarity with the Arab world. By withdrawing from the pact, Kassem freed himself from Nasser's accusation that Iraq was still allied to the "imperialist" West. To his assembled editors last week, Kassem suggested: "Forget Nasser. Do not waste time replying to criticism from abroad that does not bother us at all."

But it was plain that Nasser was getting himself committed to the downfall of Kassem, and to the Communists who surround him. Last week Nasser made the sternest accusation one Arab can make about another: that Kassem was "soft" on the Jews, having refused (said Nasser) to join in a "decisive battle" against Israel last fall. And at Cairo's 1,000-year-old Al Azhar University, world center of Islamic learning, the rector or "sheik of Islam" urged the Iraqi faithful "to rise as one man" in defense against Communism's alien and atheist threat to the faith.

Beset by the possibility that the Iraqi antagonism to him might spread to his own unhappy northern province of Syria, Nasser traveled one day to an aluminum army hut hurriedly set up on the border between Syria and Lebanon. There, protected by tanks and antiaircraft guns, he met Lebanon's President Fuad Chehab for the first time. Reported gist of their agreement: Chehab would back Nasser in his dispute with Iraq if Nasser guaranteed that he would not try to incorporate Lebanon into his United Arab Republic.

Red Desires. It may be that Kassem withdrew from the Baghdad Pact only to quiet Nasser. But the more worrisome likelihood is that Kassem is responding to another pressure on him. The Reds, in the guise of helping him in his consolidation of power, have made four demands on him. The first was to denounce the Baghdad Pact, as he has just done. The second was to purge his army and his administration of people whom the Communists object to. This too is going on. The Reds demand vengeance against all who participated in the Mosul rebellion (TIME, March 23). Of the original junta of two dozen army officers who overthrew the monarchy, five have now been purged. About 120 officers above the rank of major have reportedly been retired. Thousands of civil servants have been removed from their posts.