The New King of Babylon? : Iraq: Saddam Hussein has created a personal image of a man for all the people. He is portrayed as father, desert chieftain, businessman, farmer, soldier and statesman.

I, Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon,

I am the son of Nabuplossar, King of Babylon.

I who erected the Ezida Temple,

I who built Procession Street,

The Street of the Forgiven Son,

The Street of Nebu,

And paved it with shimmering stones.

Nebu, you the divine minister,

Grant me immortality.

--Inscription at Babylon

The tour guide at a reconstructed palace in Babylon described with enthusiasm the restored monuments of the ancient city--the lion sculpture, the brick reliefs of bulls and griffins, the newly planted hanging gardens.

Then she got to the throne room and, with a sweep of her hand, pointed to the empty platform. “This is where the leader Saddam Hussein had his throne. This is where Saddam Hussein sat,” she said, voice rising in pride.

The short, stout woman looked around at the quizzical faces, then caught herself with a nervous laugh. “I mean Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar had his throne here.”

The guide could be forgiven for the gaffe, for even here at this 4,000-year-old site on the banks of the slow-moving Euphrates, the handwriting on the wall says that Saddam Hussein is Iraq’s ruler for the ages.

Hussein, Iraq’s president and self-described leader of the Arab world, has created for himself a regional personality cult unrivaled in the world of the 1990s.

The phenomenon creates a landscape in itself. Giant portraits decorate plazas, traffic circles and government and private buildings throughout the country. His mustachioed face greets you at the airport in black-and-white photos, at the currency exchange desk on color calendars, on roadside signs on superhighways into Baghdad, at hotel entrances, in government offices. (In the Information Ministry, one office has four portraits placed so that no matter which way you turn, he is there.) Television offers no escape: The nightly news relentlessly begins with reports of the president’s daily activity. Neighborhoods are named after him. Sports arenas. Schools. Bridges. A slice of newly annexed Kuwait.

To view these images is to gaze at a conception of power and, in no small way, to get a glimpse of the national obsessions of one of the Middle East’s most fractious societies.

The fatherly image that dominates the personality cult clashes with the violent means that Hussein used to achieve and keep power. The assassinations, executions, jailings and persecution of political opponents have made it all but impossible for anyone to challenge Hussein.

As for the image, wrote Middle East expert Frederick W. Axelrod in his book “The New Iraq,” “Clumsy and rigid as they are, such attempts to inundate Iraq’s political culture with the image of its energetic leader have, by their sheer weight, imposed on the public mind the suggestion that there is no true alternative to Saddam Hussein’s leadership in Iraq.”

In his countless public portraits, Hussein is presented as a man of the people--of all the people in this ethnically and religiously split land. Sometimes he is shown as fatherly, with a child bouncing on his knee, sometimes wearing a Western suit for the benefit of businessmen and bureaucrats. Sometimes he is the desert chieftain in flowing robes, the hunter with Tyrolean hat and shotgun, the dandy in Panama hat and open shirt, the farmer in shirtsleeves trading chitchat with craggy-faced peasants, the statesman sitting in the gilt presidential chair.

He is up to date, depicted standing in front of a futuristic landscape of skyscrapers or in a series of pop art portraits a la Andy Warhol. He is eternal, as in Babylon, where a billboard has him sharing a scene with Nebuchadnezzar near the tower of Babel.

For Iraq’s Shiite Muslim population, whose loyalty to a state dominated by a Sunni Muslim minority was long suspect, Hussein is revealed on posters at prayer, on a rug, palms up in a gesture of supplication, eyes looking to heaven. The image is striking given the secular nature of the quasi-socialist Arab Baath Socialist Party that Hussein leads.

As a sop to Iraq’s restive Kurdish population, Hussein poses in a blue robe and turban typical of Kurdistan.

The personality cult flowered during Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran, a conflict that began in 1980 and took hundreds of thousands of lives on each side.

The war, initially a conflict over the waterway formed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, became thoroughly identified with Hussein. Iraqis came to refer to the conflict as a new version of the ancient war between Mesopotamia, the historical forerunner of Iraq, and Persia, which was to become Iran.

Military portraits are the most common homage to Hussein. He’s a paratrooper in beret, an infantryman in helmet, a much-decorated officer holding a ceremonial saber.

One painting shows him standing in front of a battlefield replete with chariots and bowmen.

Such heavy-handed efforts to link Hussein’s dictatorship with Iraq’s past is one of the most striking themes of his self-aggrandizement. He tries to line up not only with the most ancient of rulers, but also with more recent ones who until just a year ago were viewed as corrupt pawns of foreign powers.

Last year, he rehabilitated Faisal I, who led the Arab Revolt against Turkish rule in World War I. Faisal had been promised rule over Syria by his British allies but was betrayed and given Iraq as a consolation prize. Last year, Hussein renovated Faisal’s tomb, along with those of other members of the royal Hashemite family, and he restored an equestrian statue of Faisal to a Baghdad square.

The Hashemites were overthrown in a bloody coup in 1958.

Hussein has not stopped at just reviving the Hashemites’ dignity; he has decided to join them, in a way. Conveniently, a family tree has been discovered in the southern town of Kerbala that purports to show that Hussein, just like the deposed monarchy, is related to the Prophet Mohammed.

Even Jordan’s King Hussein, a Hashemite but no kin to Saddam Hussein, has started calling the Iraqi leader “cousin.”

Saddam Hussein makes much of his tenuous contact with another Arab hero--Saladin, the Medieval nemesis of the Crusaders. Both came from the same village, Tikrit, north of Baghdad.

No ruler in ancient Mesopotamia is beyond association with Hussein. In the basement of the Martyr’s Monument, a massive Baghdad shrine to the Persian Gulf War dead in the form of a split Oriental dome, a new exhibit traces Hussein’s life in photos. There’s the wattle hut where he was born, photos of him as a jug-eared schoolboy who got high marks in school in singing and history, of a gangly teen with only a hint of the mustache that would flourish later in life, of an underground revolutionary who tried to kill a prime minister and fled into exile, of a hunted nationalist exile in a variety of disguises, of a smiling leader with wife and baby.

Punctuating this epic biography is a photo of what appears to be a relief of the type that originated at Babylon. On the right is a gowned figure of Hammurabi, who ruled 4,000 years ago and earned eternal fame for devising the world’s first code of law. He is handing a copy to--who else?--Saddam Hussein, who is wearing a suit and tie for the occasion.