THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE MONUMENT : SADDAM HUSSEIN; A Political Biography, <i> By Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi The Free Press: $22.95; 309 pp.)</i>

OK, I dare you: Say one good word about Saddam Hussein. He is so fabulously notorious as villains go that all reason, let alone a sense of historical proportion, flies out the window at the mere mention of his name. People who a year ago could barely find Iraq on the map now feel they know all they need to know about its leader: He’s a despot on the order of Hitler; he had to be stopped; end of story. In that context, this scholarly but very accessible volume is disquieting, if not downright subversive.

Not that the two authors, who spent five years on this political biography, think of Iraq’s leader as anything but “ruthless.” But they dare to suggest a complex view of things, and that can be unsettling. It takes courage to write of the earlier Hussein: “Some of Saddam’s social projects were decidedly progressive. Major efforts were invested in education. . . . Heavy emphasis was also placed on the emancipation of women, including legislation ensuring equal pay and outlawing job discrimination on the basis of sex.” They also point out that later on, Saddam backtracked as he recast himself as a fit Muslim alternative to the Ayatollah Khomeini and condoned the killing of adulterous wives.

Overall, this is a surprisingly objective and knowledgeable look into internal Iraqi politics, even though its principal author, an Israeli, seems to have been barred from visiting Iraq. Not his fault, but a shame, for the book fails to evoke any sense of ordinary Iraqi life or to suggest how the machinations at the top of that society play out down below. Still, it is the best book out now on a man who clearly is much more interesting and enigmatic than the cartoon figure we love to hate.

The authors make good on their goal: “to get beyond the popular caricature of ‘the butcher of Baghdad,’ a label which tends to demonize rather than explain the ruthless ways of Saddam Hussein.” The result is provocative and demonstrates that digging out historical fact, and not just gossip, can be fun.

Did you know that Saddam Hussein, as recently as five years ago, was secretly working a deal with San Francisco’s Bechtel Corp. to get Israel’s approval to build an oil pipeline along the Israeli border through Jordan? Or that in the same period, the United States extended a $1-billion credit as part of a broad supportive opening to Saddam? Or that Saddam’s long history of opposition to Kurdish nationalism may have something to do with the fact that approximately two-thirds of the country’s oil production comes from a predominantly Kurdish area and that Kurdistan is Iraq’s main granary?

Perhaps this isn’t as sexy as the lunches of Hollywood hustlers or the alleged extramarital and extraterritorial flirtations of Nancy Reagan, but there might be some reader interest in a serious political history of a country that we came close to obliterating. Hussein emerges as a pretty mean character, but not so very different from the rest of the megalomaniacs who have gotten so many people killed in recent history, including our current friend in Syria. This is one tough guy from a very nasty block.

The world of young Saddam--fatherless, poor and at the mercy of a wicked stepfather--is described here in the words of Thomas Hobbes as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”--a world in which cruelty and survival become synonymous. His background prepared Saddam for success in a political world in which assassination was the accepted mechanism for changing governments; indeed, he directly participated in an attempt on the life of the country’s ruler when he was only 22. But the authors caution that Hussein’s bloodthirsty ways were not unique and that indeed “this ruthlessness has not so much to do with personal whims as with the nature of the Iraqi state”--a state, they note, “in which naked force has constituted the sole agent of political change.”

Some of the stark deeds of this “ruthless pragmatist,” such as the aforementioned botched assassination of Gen. Abdul-Karim Qassem--who, by the way, was the first to oppose the newly independent Kuwait in 1961--are clearly documentable. Others, repeated freely in the popular press, are discounted here. For example, although it’s a great story, the much-repeated tale of Saddam picking up a Shiite dissident, tossing him alive into an acid bath and calmly watching as the body dissolved is retold here, but this time it is put in the category of “numerous Shiite stories seeking to blacken Saddam’s image (that) can be neither confirmed or denied.”

A new horror, recounted here for the first time, places Saddam at the site where prisoners were tortured. But in this instance, an Iraqi Jew, accused of being a Zionist spy, is saved from torture by the sudden appearance of Saddam, who orders: “Do not touch this man, he is a good man. I know him. Let him go.” Interviewed for this book in Israel, where he now lives, the accused spy speculated that he owed his freedom to the fact that he was a good-tipping customer when young Saddam was still selling cigarettes on a Baghdad street corner.

Saddam does not come across as rabidly pro-Palestinian or as anti-Israel as his recent rhetoric and Scud-missile attacks might suggest. For example, he was an accessory of sorts to the Black September massacre of Palestinians in Jordan in 1970. Despite the presence of 20,000 Iraqi troops in Jordan at the time, and supportive sloganeering about the Palestinian cause from Saddam, “not a single Iraqi soldier moved to the rescue of the Palestinians.”

Iraq also was responsible for undermining the Arab oil boycott that followed the Yom Kippur war by refusing to cut production or prevent Iraqi oil from being shipped to the boycotted countries. And of course there’s the more recent approach through Bechtel to Israel, which suggests Saddam would do business with the Jewish state, or anyone else for that matter, if it helped him expand his power. He is a prisoner of ambition, rather than ideology, whether based on Arab nationalism or radical economics.

From the beginning of his reign, the authors write, Saddam “had structured the economy in a way that would cement his power with the support of a new, entrepreneurial middle class.” His policies encouraged the private ownership of agriculture, and as a consequence of the drain of the war with Iran, “many state-owned corporations were sold off to the private sector at very attractive prices . . . (and) price controls on all goods were lifted.” In addition, Hussein pushed through an opening to wealthy Iraqis living abroad and to western companies to invest in Iraq.

Oddly enough, these moves to boost the economy by bringing it in line with what were considered rational Western business practices were undermined by his waging an exhausting and primitive war against Iran over ancient grievances. However, in this retelling, Hussein seems to have had little choice, given the fearsome belligerence of the Iranian leadership.

After the war with Iran ended, there were signs of a political relaxation in Iraq, beginning with a November, 1988, general pardon of political prisoners and a pledge to form a multiparty democratic system. Such moves are viewed in this book as part of an attempt at modernization and opening to the West made necessary by the economic exhaustion of the Iran-Iraq war.

The devastating costs of the nearly 10-year war put Hussein’s survival very much at risk. He had to produce quickly some material rewards for his people to compensate for the enormous suffering they had endured. And it was precisely this goal that was, in Hussein’s mind, being undermined by the actions of Kuwait prior to his invasion of that country. In this book, the invasion, while not by any means justified, is explained as a logical consequence of Saddam’s preoccupation with surviving in a world that he views in stark if not paranoid terms.

And, as the old joke has it, even paranoids have enemies. The basis for Hussein’s raging hostility toward Kuwait is laid out in a refreshingly fair manner, placing the emphasis on raw economic motivation rather than romantic expansionist fantasy.

Iraq emerged from the war with Iran in a hopeless economic position, with a $250-billion estimated cost of reconstruction and an additional $80-billion foreign debt. At the then current price of oil, Iraq’s total oil revenues amounted to only $13 billion a year, making it quite obvious that victory had brought some rather grim prospects.

The huge standing army remained the basic jobs program and Saddam’s only means of retaining power. When the army was partially demobilized, there were no jobs for the returning heroes, who soon became disgruntled. Using this otherwise useless military strength to threaten the oil-rich gulf states into new aid and higher prices for oil held a certain brutal logic. Every dollar rise in the price of oil meant another $1 billion for Iraq.

From Hussein’s point of view, his holding the line against the ayatollah had saved his Gulf allies as well as Iraq, and it was now time for them to pony up. The answer from Kuwait was particularly obdurate: “The Emir of Kuwait would neither reduce oil production, nor forgive his wartime loans to Iraq, nor extend Baghdad additional grants.” Hussein, in May of 1990, only months before the invasion, termed the Emir’s position a declaration of war against Iraq.

As the authors note, “Unfortunately, the Kuwaitis failed to grasp the seriousness of their situation.” Instead, they fired off a memorandum to the Arab League saying that “by no means will (we) yield to threat and extortion.” And the rest, as they say, is history.

Could the war have been avoided? This book suggests it could have. The Saddam who emerges in these pages is vicious enough, but not stupid or generally irrational. For all of the reasons we have heard before, he thought the West would stay neutral when he attacked. If either Kuwait had been more yielding or the United States more decisive in its warning, there is every reason to expect that the Saddam Hussein profiled in this book would have backed off.

As the long-run costs of the war become more obvious and we shake off the stupor of celebration, this book should provide an important starting point for a re-examination of how all this madness came to pass.