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greeted with enthusiasm in the West; though the United States was not a signatory, it associated itself with Britain’s commitment to equip and train the Iraqi armed forces. Nuri, however, either failed to see or chose to ignore its negative effects at home. The Soviet Union, as a self-proclaimed anti-imperialist force in the world, was regarded as a friend and ally by most Arab nationalists, particularly the younger officers in most Arab armies and above all by the Free Officers who had overthrown the Egyptian monarchy in 1952. Because Nuri believed that his relationship with Iraq’s generals ensured his control of the army, he seemed indifferent to the growth of an undercover Free Officer movement in its junior ranks. Communist subversion was what worried him; and, from his resumption of the premiership in 1954 onwards, he conducted a campaign of repression against the Iraqi Communist Party, but also against all dissidents, wherever disorder or its threat was evident. He was also, meanwhile, attempting to invest Iraq’s growing oil revenues, so as to raise the level of general prosperity, create work and increase material wealth.
    The trend of events, however, was against him. Nuri was now increasingly seen as a figure of the past. The Arab Revolt and the overthrow of Ottomanism no longer seemed the central events of modern Arab history, as they had done to the ageing generation of Sharifian officers who had ridden with Lawrence of Arabia. The younger generation looked to leaders untainted by association with the British and French, who had won their spurs in the war against Israel, even at the cost of defeat in the field, and who saw the Soviet Union as a better source of support for a united Arab nation than the old régimes of the West. Egypt’s Colonel Nasser was their
beau idéal
. He was outspokenly anti-Western, pragmatically pro-Soviet and a champion of Arab independence in every form. His nationalization of the Suez Canal won him adulation throughout the Arab world. When it provokedFrance and Britain to conspire with Israel in an attack on Egypt in November 1956, even Nuri aligned himself with Arab protest, breaking off relations with France and excluding Britain from meetings of the Baghdad Pact. However, he also took action against anti-Western street protesters in the major cities and displayed in other ways his continuing pro-Western stance.
    His opponents responded by forming a National Front in February 1957, combining the older domestic parties and the Communists with the new Ba’ath (Renaissance) Party, a secular and modernizing organization founded in Syria in the previous decade by the Arab Christian Michel Aflaq. The Front quickly established close connections with the Iraqi Free Officers movement, an undercover organization which modelled itself on the Egyptian Nasserists. Nuri again failed to detect or else ignored these developments, apparently believing that his management of Iraqi foreign policy during the Suez crisis had secured his domestic position. In June 1957 he retired from the premiership once more, though continuing to control the government from behind the scenes. He remained ostensibly outside politics until March 1958 when, following the union of Egypt and Syria in a United Arab Republic (UAR), he resumed the premiership, on this occasion as head of an Arab Union of Iraq and Jordan, hastily formed as a riposte to the creation of the UAR in the last days of the previous administration.
    The logic of the Arab Union was that both of its component states were Hashemite monarchies. Monarchy, however, outside Jordan, was almost as discredited in the eyes of nationalists as the pro-Western régimes that underpinned it. It attracted no support from the Free Officers who were instigating their own measures to secure Iraq’s future. Under the leadership of Brigadier Abd al-Karem Kassem and Colonel Abd al-Salim Arif, they had decided to overthrow the Hashemite dynasty, declare a republic and