THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE MONUMENT : THE MONUMENT; Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq, <i> By Samir al-Khalil (University of California Press: $35, cloth; $16.95, paper; 168 pp., 71 black-and-white illustrations)</i>

Six years ago this month, Saddam Hussein had an odd idea. As President of Iraq, he proposed the construction of a monumental victory arch in downtown Baghdad. In the midst of a bloody war for ideological domination of the Arab world, Hussein proclaimed that the arch would be built in anticipatory celebration of the impending triumph of his nation over neighboring Iran--a triumph that never came, of course, despite the loss of scores of thousands of Iraqi and Iranian lives.

Still, the monument was opened to the Iraqi public on Aug. 8, 1989. Displayed in photographs in Samir al-Khalil’s new book, which analyzes its meaning for the Baath regime, the Victory Arch is among the latest in a long line of modern construction projects that utterly transformed Baghdad in the 1980s. It is also among the most bizarre colossi the contemporary world has yet seen, and that includes those lining the Las Vegas Strip.

The Victory Arch actually is a pair of identical archways marking the opposing entrances to a vast parade ground near the center of the city. Two forearms and fists, enlarged 40 times from plaster casts taken of Saddam Hussein’s own arms, burst forth from concrete representations of an exploding ground. Each fist clenches a curved, 24-ton sword of stainless steel--the sword of Qadisiyya, where the Persian Empire fell to invading Arab Muslim armies in AD 637, thus paving the way for the Islamicization of what is now Iran.

That a cast of Hussein’s own arm today wields the legendary sword amounts to a rather blunt bit of symbolism. From the start, Al-Khalil points out, the Iraq-Iran war was referred to in all Baath propaganda as “Qadisiyyat Saddam,” or Hussein’s own divinely protected battle against the evil forces of Iranian corruption and “the liar Khomeini.”

The materials also are symbolically loaded. The stainless steel from which the swords of Qadisiyya are made is said to have been forged from the weapons of fallen Iraqi “martyrs.” Below, suspended from the bases of the forearms, hang nets cast in bronze; the helmets of 2,500 slain Iranian soldiers cascade from each.

The twin arches, as you might guess, are immense. Where each pair of swords cross at the apex of the arch, the modern Iraqi flag waves atop a 23-foot pole. The flags stand at the height of a 13-story building.

Samir al-Khalil doesn’t think much of the aesthetic merits of this monument. He is not alone. The vulgar weirdness of the thing--even judging from the perfunctory black-and-white illustrations in the book--is matched by an evident absence of formal skill in critical matters of scale, material, composition, siting and such.

But let’s not be ponderous, a sin that only gets compounded when the subject of a weighty diatribe is obviously crummy art. Simply, Hussein’s Victory Arch looks like a Gargantuan Baathi bowling trophy, and it’s about as gracefully subtle.

Samir al-Khalil is the pseudonym of an expatriate Iraqi intellectual whose 1989 book, “Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq,” was retroactively embraced, in the face of impending war, barely a year after its largely ignored publication, as an erudite analysis of a social and political culture that remains a mystery to many in the West. His use of a pseudonym is evidence enough of the danger the author and his family faced upon publication of the highly critical book.

“The Monument” is similarly harsh on Hussein’s Baath regime, this time for its aesthetic crimes. The strength of the inquiry will be found in Al-Khalil’s admirable elucidation of Iraqi cultural traditions and their complex social and political inflections during the past 40 years, which played their part in the design and fabrication of the arch. He shows how the debate on modern Iraqi art has centered on the concept of turath --imperfectly translated as heritage --and how legitimate efforts to find an authentic visual language for the contemporary expression of Arabic turath has been vulgarized, by Hussein, as kitsch.

Saddam Hussein’s rapid redevelopment program for Baghdad in the 1980s exacerbated the problem. “The faster ‘old’ Baghdad disappeared,” Al-Khalil provocatively writes, “the more urgent became the desire to fantasize about how wonderful it always was.” A phony and debased heritage-- turath as kitsch--has been elevated as the aesthetic hallmark of Hussein’s regime. Its epitome is the vulgarization of the Arabic heritage embodied in the Victory Arch.

The critical laceration offered in “The Monument” is a plea for artistic authenticity. As diagnostician, Al-Khalil devotes two pivotal chapters in the middle of the book to what he sees as the perfidious precedent for the new Iraqi legitimization of kitsch: American Pop art. He maintains that Pop elevated the ordinary, mass-produced consumer object to the aesthetic plateau of high art. Hussein’s souvenir-style Victory Arch would thus have been unthinkable without the international success of Pop.

This interlude is more than merely disconcerting (who could ever have imagined the names Andy Warhol and Saddam Hussein would be someday linked as a chapter heading?). It is also erroneous and trivializing. Al-Khalil’s grasp of Warhol’s art and Robert Venturi’s architecture--focus of the second Pop chapter--is so shallow, ill-informed and frankly naive as to wreck the final argument of the book long before it arrives. These days it’s common to declare that Westerners are hopelessly awash in stereotypes about Arabic culture--I declared it yet again a few paragraphs back--but, in matters of American Pop art and Postmodern architecture, Al-Khalil returns the woeful favor.

Hussein’s Victory Arch is not aesthetically repugnant for any reason having to do with Warhol’s paintings made from silk-screened photographs of Campbell’s soup can labels, or because Venturi set the modernist architecture profession on its ear by extolling the undeniable pleasures of vernacular building types. The Victory Arch is a bust as a modern monument because the design process by which it took shape was not modern at all, but positively medieval.

Hussein did not outline a program for his monument and then commission gifted artists to create a form that would illuminate, elaborate and refine their patron’s crude and lumpish aspirations. Instead, Hussein himself sketched the monument he wanted to see, then hired professional artists to fabricate his dilettante vision. (The eminent Iraqi sculptors Khalid al-Rahal and, following Al-Rahal’s untimely death early in the project, Mohammed Ghani executed the design under close supervision of the president.)

Major modifications certainly were introduced along the way, and there’s no telling who--Saddam or the others--initiated what in the final form. But, it is not too much to say that, more than anyone else, Hussein is the artist of the Victory Arch.

That Saddam Hussein is a terrible artist, prone to sentimental bathos and vulgar symbolism, is plain to see. And what should one expect of an egomaniacal amateur except kitsch on a grandiose scale? Al-Kahlil acknowledges that Hussein has peremptorily acted as an “artist-president” in the creation of the monument, imposing “the art of popular taste” on sculpture through the force of his political authority. But this has nothing whatever to do with the aesthetic imperatives of Warhol and Venturi. Because the author doesn’t understand their achievements, he doesn’t recognize that elaborate citation of their art is simply beside the point.

One wonders if the negative, oddly out-of-place invocation of Warhol and Venturi might in fact be a hedge against the future--that is, a caution to his countrymen against the kind of modern, Western society Al-Khalil clearly does not want a post-Hussein Iraq to become.

For Iraq, like many developing nations in the world today, faces a daunting conundrum: Since the very idea of modernity is a Western one, is it possible for a nation to really modernize without becoming Westernized in the process?