Cult of Saddam Hussein Grows as War Drags On : Third World: The poor and oppressed need a hero, an analyst says. In Iraq’s leader, they’ve found one.

Samir Saad al-Din Nimr had little interest in politics until the Gulf War gave him a new hero two weeks ago.

Nimr, a cab driver, does the 550-mile run from Amman to the Iraqi capital of Baghdad over what is now the most deadly stretch of road on Earth. He dodges the allied strafing and bombing runs, going in empty in his Chevy van and running out overloaded with war refugees. And every day, he listens to news of the war and his new hero on the Mother of Battles radio station from Baghdad.

“Hey, did you hear?” Nimr called out to his fellow drivers and Jordanian friends when he emerged from the war zone about noon Wednesday to spread the news of the day.

“Saddam went 20 kilometers into Saudi Arabia. He took it and then gave it back. It was just to show he could do it.”

“Saddam is God!” shouted Abdul Ahmad, another driver who made the run Wednesday. “Even if every single American comes here to fight, they cannot face him even standing alone.”

Such is the stuff of the emerging cult of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

After two full weeks of bombing have battered Iraqi targets and driven much of Iraq’s military elite ever deeper into their bunkers, Hussein himself continues to grow stronger and more popular by the day, according to scores of Arabs, Muslim leaders and political analysts.

Hussein’s personal following, long confined mostly to the Iraqi leader’s own back yard, is now spreading throughout the Arab, Muslim and Third Worlds.

“Simply by standing up for so long to the punishment of this massive and modern allied force, Saddam has become larger than life,” said a European analyst in the Persian Gulf. “He’s playing to a lot of audiences that have too few heroes and already, win or lose, Saddam’s image is going to be with us for years, maybe decades, to come.”

A Palestinian woman who lived for several years in Hussein’s Iraq expressed even more dramatically just how the Iraqi leader’s star has risen.

“I know this man. I know his evil,” she said on Wednesday during a visit to the Jordanian border crossing here, explaining that she was born in Kuwait but went to school in Iraq. “In the Iraqi schools, we weren’t allowed to think. We just did what we were told, what he and his party chose to tell us. And when I finished school, I had no idea how to do anything at all.

“This is Saddam Hussein, and I know this. But now, it is different. He is an Arab fighting those who have oppressed us, those who stole our lands. And even though I know he is doing this only for his own ambition, only to save his own skin, really just exploiting us in the process, I am, after all, an Arab.

“Given the choice between George Bush and Saddam Hussein, I’d choose Saddam any day.”

And so have many others, as the Hussein phenomenon has spread through the Middle East and beyond.

In the last two weeks alone, Hussein’s photograph has inspired entire towns in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu to form “Saddam Hussein clubs” and issue a nationwide calls for volunteers to join Iraq in battle. It has been carried through the streets by thousands of Muslims who stood in front of police bullets in the north Indian city of Ghaziabad. It has drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets in Algeria, Yemen, Pakistan and Tunisia. And it has led hundreds of families from Amman to Rangpur, Bangladesh, to name their newborn sons Saddam.

A hot item in the Jordanian capital of Amman are the Saddam souvenirs at a downtown trinket shop--Scud missile key chains emblazoned in gold Arabic letters with “Al Hussein” (the Iraqi name for the missiles), and lapel pins of the Iraqi leader superimposed on a cartoon of an outbound missile, captioned, “East or West, Scud Is Best.”

Refugees fleeing Hussein’s war-torn nation for their homes in Sudan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and even Romania this week spoke with deep admiration and near-awe about an embattled leader whose aura of invincibility grows by the day.

His strategic ploys, such as temporarily capturing the Saudi border town of Khafji on Wednesday, reinforce the belief among Arabs like Samir Nimr that Saddam Hussein actually could win this war against all the nations arrayed against him.

“This will be a long war; you tell Mr. George Bush that,” said Talal Deeb, a Palestinian accountant fleeing besieged Kuwait city this week after spending 24 years there. “Saddam is strong, he is victorious.”

“Saddam will eat you Americans alive!” shouted a Jordanian refugee from Kuwait as he stood in a long line of cars at the Ruweished border post, which is decorated with a prominent poster of Hussein. “He can eat everything. He can eat rocks, snakes, donkeys, trees, missiles and soldiers.”

But the emerging international cult worship of the Iraqi president is not without its calculated inspiration, most of it engineered by Hussein himself and his cadre of information advisers.

When allied air strikes disabled Iraq’s international communications facilities, his advisers arranged for a Cable News Network team in Amman to bring in a mobile satellite dish this week and air an exclusive 90-minute interview with Hussein by CNN reporter Peter Arnett.

The interview was broadcast worldwide and, according to dozens of analysts who scrutinized the videotape over and over again, projected Hussein as confident, relaxed and, if anything, stronger than he was even before the war began.

“He’s back in his element,” commented the European analyst, who has studied the Iraqi president for several years. “Before the (Jan. 15) deadline, we were seeing clear signs of stress in Saddam. His face was puffy and his voice hollow, almost like Hitler right before the end.

“Look at him now. His eyes are sharp. His grin is back. And he’s doing what he does best--fight a war. Saddam Hussein is not, after all, a peacetime president.”

On the heels of the CNN interview, Baghdad redoubled its propaganda efforts, permitting a carefully selected group of two dozen journalists, mostly Europeans, to re-enter Iraq late Wednesday.

The Iraqis’ selection of the press group, among them a French television crew, British newspaper writers and a large contingent of Turkish journalists, was consistent with Hussein’s strategy of appealing directly to public opinion in nations he sees as weak links in the anti-Iraq alliance. At the same time, he continues to reach out to his natural audiences in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

Jordan’s Crown Prince Hassan, who doubles as a keen political analyst not only of the region but of Saddam Hussein specifically, said the Iraqi leader’s cult following cuts across ethnic, religious and socioeconomic lines.

“Why is he popular, someone was asking me?” the prince said in a recent interview with The Times. “The reason he’s popular is he has become a symbol, many symbols, in fact.

“Politically, he’s a symbol because he has emphasized linkage (between Kuwait and the Israeli-occupied territories), and achieved it through a violent act now--the attacking of Israeli targets. And, economically, again, it’s the question of equity. We are talking about 300 million people between Cairo and Islamabad by the end of this decade--70% of them under the age of 15. You can’t say that the new regional security arrangement in the Gulf is going to guard against extremism . . . .

“And, of course, now you have this tragic, politicized, religion business--the crusade, the jihad. It’s irrational but, unfortunately, it will run very deep in people, especially when you have a situation where people are looking inward.”

For Rami Khoury, former editor of the English-language Jordan Times and now a political commentator in Amman, Hussein’s personality is custom-made for nurturing all of those audiences.

“The way Saddam thinks is very methodical,” said Khoury, himself a Palestinian. “He is not irrational. He is not crazy. He has power. He is more experienced in power than (Gen. H. Norman) Schwarzkopf, (Gen. Colin L.) Powell, or Bush.

“For him, this is a battle of historic proportions, a battle of destiny,” he added. “To Arabs, Iraq is the country that stood up and challenged the West.”

It is that same “underdog” perception that has endeared Hussein to the impoverished and oppressed throughout the Third World, even in non-Arab nations where Muslims are in the minority.

In a predominantly Hindu vegetable market of New Delhi, for example, praise for Saddam Hussein is daily fare among the lower-class vendors and shoppers. Radios blare the news throughout the day, and cheers go up when there are reports of downed allied planes, captured American pilots or military assaults like Wednesday’s raid on Khafji.

“Look at him,” said one vegetable vendor of Hussein on Thursday. “Look how he’s fighting against so many armies better equipped than he is. He is one man fighting a dozen countries.”

And, sure enough, in a public opinion survey released this week, the nation’s prestigious daily newspaper the Times of India reported that 50% of a random selection of Indians believe that Hussein will win the war.

But it is back on the refugee trail out of Iraq and across Jordan that one is almost constantly reminded of the cynicism that lies just beneath the surface of Hussein’s soaring new cult of personality.

As George Simplicio, a 7-foot-tall Sudanese student fleeing the northern Iraqi city of Mosul after two years at a technical school there concluded on Wednesday: “Yes, Saddam is still strong, stronger than before. If this war goes on for a long time, of course, the people are going to starve from hunger in Iraq. The people will weaken, and already many want to leave. But Saddam, of course, he will just keep on growing.”

New Delhi bureau researcher S. Gopal contributed to this story.