IRAQ: Man on Camelback

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In most Arab lands of the Middle East, young army officers with revolutionary social ideas and anti-Western feelings may be riding high. But they have yet to unseat Iraq's tough Strongman Nuri es-Said, 68, the coolheaded camelback raider of Lawrence of Arabia's World War I anti-Turk desert revolt, who boasts: "I was risking my life for the Cause of Arab independence before Nasser was out of his swaddling clothes."

Nuri has often been accused of being a British stooge. It took courage for him to keep Iraq in the anti-Communist Baghdad Pact, along with Britain, after Britain invaded Egypt. Nuri declared public sympathy for Egypt, and sought to prove his devotion to the Arab cause by outdoing everyone else in crying that Israel must be wiped out. All the while, Egyptian, Syrian and Moscow radios launched fierce propaganda attacks against him, in similarity of phrasing that suggested collaboration. Last month bloody rioting erupted in Baghdad and An Najaf, and Radio Cairo shouted that "the traitor" was doomed.

But Nuri proclaimed martial law, closed schools, clapped on heavy censorship and arrested about 100 political foes. Last week his Baghdad government announced that five opposition leaders had been court-martialed and sentenced for under mining public security. Kamel Chaderchy, former Minister of National Economy and Transport and head of the left-wing National Democratic Party, was sentenced to three years' hard labor. "Nuri has ridden out the storm," said U.S. Ambassador Waldemar John Gallman, and took off for a month's home leave.