NEWS ANALYSIS : Once Again, Hussein’s Greed Destroys Iraq’s Chance for Leadership : Replay: Two disastrous wars within a decade have stripped the nation of power and influence.

History is repeating itself, as it often does in the Middle East. The public display of war prisoners, the threat of unveiling a secret “mother” weapon and the defiant promise to fight on against overwhelming odds are all vintage Saddam Hussein from the days of the Iran-Iraq War.

The irony of this echo from the recent past is that for the second time in a decade the Iraqi president has let his stubborn greed for securing a place in Arab history dim what would seem to be a far more important objective: the emergence of Iraq as the paramount power in the Persian Gulf.

Had Hussein, in fact, not launched two disastrous wars--one against Iran in 1980, the other against Kuwait in 1990--Iraq today might well be the leader of the gulf, as Iran was in the 1970s under Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

Iraq’s military power would have been unchallenged, its economic resources would have bought Baghdad influence in setting Arab policy and Hussein’s leverage would have reached from Arabia to the conference halls of every nonaligned summit.

Instead he has cast his country into bankruptcy and a war that his army, the world’s fourth largest, cannot win. Against him, in addition to the U.S.-led Western coalition, stand the only three Arab countries that, besides Iraq, exert true influence on the Middle East’s balance of power: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Their presence alone represents a spike driven into the heart of so-called Arab unity.

In an editorial extraordinary by the standards of the Arab world’s normal brotherly restraint, one Saudi newspaper, the Arab News, advocated driving Saddam Hussein from power, saying, “The whole malignant tree must be cut down.

“The simple truth is that there will never be peace in the region while Saddam Hussein remains president of Iraq,” the editorial said. “He has to go. Otherwise, though his military power will be largely destroyed after the present conflict is over, he will bounce back again in three or four years, with a new military machine, threatening who knows where.

“Saddam Hussein has proved time and again that he is a liar and a cheat. His promises are worthless. He reneged on the 1975 Shatt al Arab treaty with Iran and he lied to King Fahd (of Saudi Arabia) and President (Hosni) Mubarak (of Egypt) when he said that he had no intention of invading Kuwait. He can never be again trusted.”

Hussein, who understands little of the world beyond the Middle East, began the series of miscalculations that would lead to his present predicament in 1980. Iraq was flush with oil money and Baghdad, awash with new five-star hotels and sparkling conference halls, was preparing to host the summit of nonaligned nations that would make Hussein the de facto leader of the Third World.

In September that year, Hussein invaded Iran, seeking a quick kill over a state whose strength had been sapped by revolution and religious fervor.

By 1986, the stalemated war had become the longest major conflict in modern Middle East history and the costliest engagement in terms of casualties between two countries anywhere since World War II.

Yet there was hardly anyone in Baghdad who remembered how the war had started or why it was being fought. The Iraqis knew what they were fighting against but were not sure what they were fighting for. To a man, though, the Iraqis had convinced themselves that hostilities had been initiated by Iran.

All that Iraqis understood for sure was that this was a war between two men, Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, more than one between two nations. The same peculiarity seemed to occur before the Persian Gulf War when Hussein and President Bush were exchanging threatening videos to be played on American and Iraqi television, respectively.

During the Iran-Iraq War, Hussein made good on his promise to introduce a “mother” weapon. It was the French Exocet missile, but it was not decisive in the war. Nor did the “war of the cities”--the indiscriminate firing of Iraqi and Iranian missiles into each other’s population centers--prove militarily decisive.

Hussein also frequently put Iranian prisoners of war on display for visiting journalists, in violation of the Geneva Convention.

In one visit to southern Iraq, journalists were escorted to a camp holding several hundred Iranian prisoners. The prisoners were lined up in the dark and told to answer any questions the reporters had. The POWs were very young, often no older than 15 or 16, and wide-eyed with fear at seeing the Americans, whom they understood only as strangers who might do them harm.

“We shouldn’t be party to this,” one of the journalists said, and before any questions were asked, the Americans got back on their bus and left.