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now available to those who controlled the government.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Nuri al-Said was an important
political figure in Iraq. His views favored the countries of the West—
in particular, Great Britain and the United States. He held the office
of prime minister several times—but even when he was not in
public office, Said wielded great power in the country. With his pro-
Western position, he angered many Iraqis who still resented the
British presence in Iraq’s affairs. Said was not interested in democ-
racy, however, and built his own power on personal relationships
and ties with important families within Iraq. He formed a political
party, Hizb al-Ittihad Al Dusturi (the Constitutional Union Party),
and used it for his own advancement.
After the Constitutional Union Party won a majority in the
1953 elections, Nuri became Iraq’s minister of defense. One of his
goals was to make the army completely obedient to the state,
because he realized that an independent army corps could be
dangerous to his ambitions. Although most of the senior officers
supported Nuri, many younger officers did not. They secretly
formed a group called the Free Officers and began to talk about
resistance to the government.
The concept of Arab nationalism—of building a single state in
which the Arabs were united—had never gone away. The problem
with this concept was that nearly every Arab leader thought he
should be the head of the united Arab state. But during this time
the strongest of the Arab leaders was Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had
come to power in Egypt in 1952. Nasser wanted to bring about a
pan-Arab state, headed by Egypt, the largest Arab country. He also
wanted to modernize Egypt and undertook a series of development
projects. In 1956, after British and U.S. financial assistance dried
up following Egypt’s purchase of Soviet arms, Nasser announced
that he would nationalize the Suez Canal. This decision sparked a
joint attack, for the purposes of securing the canal, by France,
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ISTORY TO
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