<p>To fathom the cruel complexities of Saddam, one must explore the
world and the anger that shaped him
</p>
<p>By Paul Gray--Reported by Dean Fischer/Riyadh and Scott
MacLeod/Amman, with other bureaus
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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
