The seizure of power at the centre in 1958 was possibly quicker and easier than any of the military conspirators had anticipated. By the same token, they found themselves almost immediately in command of all the financial and administrative resources of the state. Some of their civilian allies believed that this would open the way for a radical assault on the systems of privilege and exclusion which characterised Iraq's deeply inegalitarian society, allowing political life to be refounded on a more liberal and democratic basis. However, the very ease of the transfer of power encouraged rather different thoughts among the immediate victors of 1958. ʿAbd al-Karim Qasim and his military allies soon discovered the immense powers of patronage conferred upon them. The seductions of office worked on them as powerfully as they had on Nuri al-Saʿid and the sharifian officers who had found themselves, a generation previously, in positions of command in the new state of Iraq.

The gravitational pull of the Iraqi state exerted its force on the men who came to power in 1958. In seeking to master that state and to stay in command, they were destined to follow a logic suggested both by the distinctive politics of Iraq and by the way they had come to power. In the first place, conspiracy within the officer corps and beyond became the practical norm.