Leadership: The Man Behind A Demonic Image

By PAUL GRAY.

Confronted by a formidable coalition of arms, he fires missiles at civilians in a noncombatant state. Taking a terrible pounding from the air, he sends some of his best planes and pilots to the airfields of a neutral country, leaving his troops and citizens that much more defenseless. He parades visibly mistreated POWs before TV cameras, arousing the disgust and wrath of the powers arrayed against him. He releases hundreds of millions of gallons of oil into the Persian Gulf, threatening not just his neighbors but also his own people with ecological disaster.

Seen simplistically and from afar, Saddam Hussein comes across as a figure seldom found outside the pages of comic books or pulp fiction: the villain who will stop at nothing, an Arab Dr. No alive and menacing in the Middle East. Some are content to leave it at that. The demonizing of Saddam has escalated along with the war and seems omnipresent in the West. Last week the op-ed page of the New York Times ran a David Levine drawing titled The Descent of Man. Running from left to right were representations of Clark Gable, a gorilla, a chimpanzee, a cobra and, finally, a diminutive, flyspeck Saddam standing waist-deep in an oil slick.

Those not content with the bogeyman view of current events still find Saddam difficult -- devilishly difficult -- to understand. The simplest solution may be that proposed by a Saudi prince: "We always thought he was possessed of a pure criminal mentality, but now he is going crazy." The madman theory seems a bit more respectable, intellectually, than simply calling the Iraqi a monster. Long-distance psychoanalyzing of Saddam has been going on for some time, particularly in the U.S. and Israel, with not very helpful results. He suffers from malignant narcissism. He craves challenges. He is paranoid, distrustful of everyone and everything. The root cause of the current gulf carnage can be traced to his unhappy childhood.

The trouble with such statements, even if they could be proved accurate, is they explain far too little. Of course, Saddam, like everyone else, has been shaped by nature and nurture, genetic predispositions plus the conditions of the world around him. The reason so many in the West find him baffling is an unwillingness or an inability to understand what those conditions were and are.

He grew up in a culture soaked in conspiracy. Living impoverished, in a mud hut, he witnessed a world up for grabs. Power was being abandoned or ceded by the colonialist overlords. Along with a shared anti-Western pan-Arabism, most Arabs of the 1930s and '40s had the old loyalties, to family, tribe and religion. In the fresh air of change, these mixed explosively, perhaps nowhere more so than in Iraq, which after independence in 1932, for three decades * experienced bloody and repeated coups and countercoups. The upheavals ceased in 1968, when the Baath Party won power and installed a regime so ruthless that effective opposition was simply crushed.

One of the principal architects of the Baath success was Saddam. Placed in charge of domestic security, he forged Iraq's ubiquitous and terrifying intelligence network. He murdered his enemies and, when appropriate, his friends. He did not finally get to be President of Iraq by being a nice guy. If he now thinks, as is widely assumed, that people all around him are trying to kill him, that may be because, for much of his adult life, people all around him have been trying to kill him.

The frequent allusions in the West to Saddam's "paranoia" thus make his behavior seem more complicated than it really is. He does not have to fantasize enemies; he has inherited and made enough to last several lifetimes. His invasion of Iran in 1980 is often cited as a headstrong blunder. True, Saddam could not have foreseen the initial defeats and the debilitating eight- year war that would follow. But hindsight suggests that he would probably have provoked Iran into battle even if he had known all the consequences at the outset. From his point of view, the alternative was worse: the militant Islamic fundamentalism, fanned by the Ayatullah Khomeini, would arouse Iraq's Shi'ite Muslims, some 55% of the population, leading not only to Saddam's overthrow but also to the domination of his Arab state by the descendants of the ancient Persian enemy. Would this really have happened? Saddam did not wait for an answer.

Nor did he bide his time last year while the gulf sheikdoms conspired to strangle Iraq's economy. For that is how he viewed events -- and his perception rests at the heart of the present crisis. Battered by the war with Iran, $80 billion in debt, he expected gratitude from the likes of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia for having spared them, as well as himself, the zeal of Khomeini's revolutionaries. He wanted higher oil prices; instead, production in the gulf went up, and his revenues went down. He wanted to lease islands for ports and loading berths on the gulf from Kuwait; no deal. All the while, Kuwait was slant-drilling oil out of a field that crosses the border between it and Iraq, and his rich neighbors were pestering him to repay the billions he had borrowed to fight a war that served their interests. Frustration led to rage. In fact, Saddam's grudge against Kuwait had been festering for some time. During the war with Iran, he asked permission for his troops to make temporary use of Kuwaiti territory in preparation for battle. Kuwait refused. Saddam's reaction, reported by a former bodyguard: "They refuse? Perfect. One day, the Kuwaitis will be gnawing their knuckles."

Similarly, Saddam's grievance against Israel is based on something more than run-of-the-region Arab hostility to the Jewish state. Much of the world cheered in 1981, when Israeli bombs destroyed Iraq's nascent nuclear capabilities. But by his lights, Saddam suffered an unprovoked attack, resulting in destruction and humiliation. Ever since then, according to Paul Rogers, senior lecturer in the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford in England, Saddam has lived on notice that he could expect the same treatment again: "In the mid-'80s, Iraq concluded that at some point in the early 1990s it would face an Israeli attack." Israel, Saddam and his advisers decided, would never accept an Iraq with nuclear weapons.

Neither, for that matter, would a number of other nations, prominently including the U.S. Who wants to see Saddam with the Bomb? Certainly not George Bush and the Israelis; also not Syria's President Hafez Assad, who personally loathes his Arab neighbor. Saddam's nightmare assumes a different shape: an array of enemies, in a constellation he has long anticipated, determined to prevent him from the means of defense and destruction they possess in abundance.

To see the world as Saddam sees it is certainly not to condone the vision. He would probably approve of some of the unflattering adjectives that can be attached to him, including dangerous, devious and distrustful. These qualities can disarm, overpower or outsmart those not equally well prepared. Saddam has survived and prevailed within a system that favored the feral and punished the mild, and his actions have only served to worsen that system for those who follow him. If anything, he has, consciously or not, made the lives of his subjects and enemies more harrowing than they were before. Moving from the mud hut to a place at the world's table is hard work; no hostages will be taken. Has he exploited Middle East tensions and hatreds for his own purposes and hunger for power? Certainly. Are those tensions and hatreds real, no matter what use Saddam has made of them? Unfortunately, yes.

The greatest current illusion holds that getting rid of Saddam, either by - dropping a bomb into his bunker or by leaving him to the mercies of his own disappointed, defeated people, will cut the knot now choking the Middle East. Saddam dead -- viewed by many Arabs as another victim of the Great Satan -- will buy relief, but the fury will return: another revolution in the wheel of rage that has been grinding in that part of the world for centuries. Saddam's most enduring legacy may be his refusal to halt that process. Even his enemies concede him a certain charisma and brilliance. Could he, after suffering and clawing his way to power, have used his influence to bring peace to the region? He did not try, and, in any case, the world is no longer waiting for an answer.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Riyadh and Scott MacLeod/Amman, with other bureaus