Saddam Hussein Held Hostage by His Obsession With the Arab Myth : Profile: In the context of his own dark, conspiratorial world, Iraq’s leader becomes a predictable creature.

I will endeavor to be one flame among many, no matter how bright I shine, and one sword among many, not the only sword.

--President Saddam Hussein of Iraq

Who is this man, Saddam Hussein? Is he the reincarnation of Saladin, the ancient warrior-hero of Islam’s Golden Age--or is he another Idi Amin, the coldblooded exterminator? True, violence comes effortlessly to Hussein, but does he not speak of gloried goals that stir passions in the Arab heart?

Is he, as his biographer would have us believe, the man of compassion who works late at his desk, his youngest daughter, Helga, at his side? She waits for the story he has promised to tell her, then falls asleep on the couch. Hussein wraps her in a blanket, carries her to her room and pulls the bedcovers snugly over her shoulders.

Or is he the man with ice water in his veins who calls together senior party officials and watches them squirm as he announces the names of traitors, slowly and with theatrical pauses to puff on a cigar? One at a time, the accused are led off to be executed, leaving each survivor to wonder if the next death warrant will be for him.

To the West, Saddam Hussein often seems little more than a thug, driven by blind ambition and reckless impulse. But in the context of his own dark, conspiratorial world, in a fragmented Iraq, whose heritage bleeds with violence and whose intellectual curiosity seems to reach back no further than the revolution of 1968, he becomes a predictable creature, a man of charm and cunning surrounded by an echo chamber of party loyalists.

“Saddam Hussein is very impressive,” said Hermann F. Eilts, director of Boston University’s School for International Relations, a retired diplomat whose career in the Middle East spanned 31 years. “He doesn’t rely on histrionics; he doesn’t pound the table. You come away from a meeting with him thinking, ‘This is a fellow who has strong views on things and who’s really very genuine, an earnest guy--and when he says something, you can count on it.’ ”

What is oddest about the adulation that the Arab masses have heaped on him in the aftermath of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait is that, unlike the men he most admires--Nebuchadnezzar, Tito, Nasser, De Gaulle--Hussein is hailed because of words, not accomplishments. His conquest has been over his own people. His vision of a reborn Arab nation stretching from the Arabian Sea to the Atlantic Ocean has proved to be fiction.

Hussein is a hostage of that myth. His obsession with it--and with the nationalistic Baath Party--helps explain both his motivation and his success in answering the Arabs’ longstanding and deep-seated need to translate the absolute power of God into a father figure of unquestioned authority.

For Hussein, who has seen almost nothing of the world beyond the shores of the Fertile Crescent, a powerful Iraq is synonymous with the restoration of shattered Arab dreams. The lost civilization of Mesopotamia, he believes, is his to reclaim.

“The glory of the Arabs stems from the glory of Iraq,” he said in 1979, a year before invading Iran. “Throughout history, whenever Iraq became mighty and flourished, so did the Arab nation. This is why we are striving to make Iraq mighty, formidable, able and developed. . . .”

That same year he told Fuad Matar, his quasi-official biographer, of his admiration for Nebuchadnezzar, the ancient king of Babylon: “. . . What is most important to me about Nebuchadnezzar is the link between the Arabs’ abilities and the liberation of Palestine. Nebuchadnezzar was, after all, an Arab from Iraq, albeit ancient Iraq. Nebuchadnezzar was the one who brought the bound Jewish slaves from Palestine. That is why, whenever I remember Nebuchadnezzar, I like to remind the Arabs--Iraqis in particular--of their historical responsibilities. It is a burden that should not stop them from action, but rather spur them into action because of their history.”

Hussein, now 53 and a field marshal--though he was never in the army and he flunked the examination for the Iraqi military academy as a youth--was born in central Iraq, the son of an impoverished farmer. His small village had no feudal class.

“I never felt at a social disadvantage,” he has said.

Encouraged by his cousin, Adnan Khairallah--who would become minister of defense and would die mysteriously in a helicopter crash in 1989--Hussein went off to school at the age of 8, against his family’s wishes and with a pistol strapped to his side.

What shaped Hussein’s character as much as anything was the Syrian-dominated Baath Party, a pan-Arabist monolithic institution that had all the trappings of a religion. With a doctrine that is both anti-humanist and anti-Communist, the Baath exercises its supremacy over all society, including the army. It searches for no universal truths or moral guideposts, seeing the world instead in extremes. Everything is black or white, good or evil. The end justifies the means, and fear becomes a pillar of the party’s legitimacy.

Baath ideology “is about fabricating a parochial world view made up exclusively of social myths,” Samir Khalil, the pseudonym of an Iraqi dissident, writes in “Republic of Fear,” a book about modern Iraq. “These myths are culled from Arab and Islamic tradition and organized intellectually with the help of a host of concepts borrowed from the left. Arab unity, freedom, Arab socialism and the struggle against imperialism and Zionism are some of the catchwords of the mythology. . . . The combination of myths and organizing concepts like imperialism acts as a filter in relation to the outside and provides a model--not of what Arab society is, or what it might realistically change into, but what it is willed into becoming.”

A homemade ideology formed on the premise that the outside world was permanently hostile was an appealing one to Arabs in 1956--it was the year that Egyptian President Gamal Shawki Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and in which Britain and France, in collusion with Israel, attacked Egypt. And Hussein joined the Baath Party. Within three years, he was part of a five-man hit team assigned to ambush and assassinate Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Kassim.

Hussein was not supposed to fire and was charged only with providing cover for his four comrades as they withdrew.

“But as the operation got under way,” his biographer writes, “his excitement mounted and he drew his machine gun from the folds of a long cloak he had borrowed from his uncle . . . and fired at Abdul Karim Kassim’s car.” The assassination was botched, and Hussein, wounded in the leg, fled to Syria, then to Egypt. Only 22, he had already earned a reputation as a sort of ideological Al Capone.

Back in Iraq, a country where one in five members of the labor force today is involved with security, his ascension to power in 1969 was marked by almost casual violence. Stalinesque purges claimed the lives of hundreds of party officials and military commanders. “Pioneers” in the party’s youth wing informed on parents any time disloyalty was suspected, and a party cell known as halqa policed the streets and factories.

Hussein’s eldest son, Uday, who had wanted to be a nuclear scientist, was exiled to Switzerland after publicly clubbing to death the official palace food taster, who had introduced a mistress-to-be to his father.

Even heroes from the war against Iran lost their commands and disappeared from sight, presumably because they had shared the limelight with Hussein.

During the war, a writer for the West German magazine Stern asked Hussein if it were true that 300 high-ranking military officers had been executed during the conflict.

“No,” Hussein replied. “However, two divisional commanders and the commander of a mechanized unit were executed. This is something very normal in all wars.”

If he considered such executions normal, it was because in his narrow Baathist focus on a hostile world the individual’s responsibility is to the party, not to himself.

“That,” he has said, “is why we say that human rights will depend on the time, the conditions and the circumstances. They will always be in step with the revolution and its principles.”

Throughout his career as a professional militant whose only work has been inside the party, Hussein has been consistent and unbending, an Arab nationalist with an orchestrated image. He spoke out as long as 10 years ago against the presence of non-Arab troops in Arabia, criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and led the movement to expel Egypt from the Arab League after Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel.

His was the last Arab government to restore full diplomatic relations with the United States, broken as a result of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

For two decades now, Hussein’s singular pursuit has been to build Iraq into a major power and to make his people a manifestation of the Baath Party. He has been frighteningly effective--and with no voices left inside Iraq to offer advice or dissent, chances are good that he is convinced of the correctness of his decisions, whatever the ramifications may be. Of all the things the Arabs hold dear, there are none he understands better than power and the lure of the past.

When Fuad Matar asked if Hussein ever dreamed of filling a role such as that of Nebuchadnezzar or Saladin, an Arab hero who fought the Crusaders, the Iraqi leader replied without hesitation.

“By God, I do indeed dream and wish for this,” he said. “It is an honor for any human being to dream of such a role.”