The Fadhil Al-Jamali Government in Iraq, 1953–54

Abstract

In July 1958, a group of army officers led by Abd al-Karim Qassem and Abd al-Salam Arif staged a revolution in Iraq which put an end to the Hashemite monarchy and the ruling social class. This revolution was the crest of the radical-nationalist-revolutionary wave which had arisen in the Arab world in the 1950s, and which put an end to the conservative regimes, elites and ruling classes in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, and brought the new socio-political forces to power in those countries. Between 1954 and 1958, the radical-nationalist political forces in those countries, of which the most cohesive were the 'Free Officers' regime in Egypt and the Ba'ath Party in Syria, adopted and integrated into their nationalist concepts, each at its own pace, a leftist orientation and terminology and neutralist trends with regard to the interbloc Cold War. The rise of these political forces and their ideological trends expressed the rising social force constituted by the westernized modern middle stratum, which had formed the basis for the expansion of pan-Arab nationalism since the 1930s. In the 1950s, when revolutionary nationalist regimes arose in Egypt and nationalist-radical and leftist-revolutionary trends and organizations in other Arab states, Iraq was still ruled by a conservative monarchy, with its leading group of senior politicians from the conservative ruling class. Iraq became the flagship of the alliance with the west; at the same time, the new radical forces in the Arab states viewed it as the symbol of conservative and antirevolutionary reaction and submission vis-a-vis Britain.1 The Iraqi-Egyptian competition for hegemony in the Fertile Crescent and the Arab world now gained a new dimension: that of an ideological-social struggle between revolutionary Egypt, which had adopted a neutralist orientation in the international arena and had begun a rapprochement with the USSR since 1955, and conservative Iraq, which was identified with the western bloc. During Fadhil al-Jamali's term of office as Prime Minister of Iraq, between 17 September 1953 and 29 April 1954, a last attempt was made by the senior politicians and bureaucrats of the conservative ruling class, who understood that, in order to survive, the regime would have to undergo a controlled process of socio-economic and political change and reform, as a means of halting the political unrest among the westernized middle stratum and the poorer