Middle East: No Time for Prudence

MIDDLE EAST

In Iraq these days, a Premier can be a little too good. A case in point is ex-Premier Abdel Rahman Bazzaz, who, despite his notable achievements while in power, suddenly found himself out of a job last week.

A quiet, scholarly former diplomat, Bazzaz returned to Iraq last September from an ambassadorial post in London, and became his country's first civilian Premier since Iraq became a republic in 1958. Launching a policy of "prudent socialism," Bazzaz halted the trend toward nationalization, guaranteed private investment against expropriation, and restored a glimmer of prosperity to his oil-rich nation, which had been suffocating under doctrinaire socialism. Unquestionably, Bazzaz' greatest triumph came last month when he succeeded in winning agreement on a peace formula for ending the government's costly five-year war with the 1,000,000 Kurds who roam Iraq's mountainous northeast.

Success was making Bazzaz a popular and independent national figure—too popular and too independent, in fact, for the comfort of the army officers who hold the real power in Baghdad. So last week, although he had just returned from Moscow with an arms deal that could only please the military, the army forced him to resign. "It appears," Bazzaz wrote President Abdel Rahman Aref in his letter of resignation, "some of my actions have not brought you pleasure."

In as new Premier came retired Army General Naji Taleb, 50, a career officer who helped overthrow the Hashemite King Feisal II in 1958, and joined in the successive coups against the Abdel Karim Kassem and Baathist governments in 1963. Taleb pledged his new government to the old Bazzaz aims of national unity, agrarian reform and the Kurdish peace settlement. The general's only change, in fact, was to revise Bazzaz' "prudent socialism" to "fair socialism."