Hussein Names Half-Brother to High Iraqi Post : Mideast: The move puts security forces in family hands. It may show the strongman is worried about loyalty in top ranks.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on Wednesday named his half-brother to the powerful post of interior minister, putting the country’s ruthless security forces firmly in family hands.

The appointment was the Iraqi strongman’s second move in a week to bind allegiance with blood, and it signaled his apparent concern about loyalty in the top ranks. His brothers, sons and cousins are dedicated to protecting the president, because, if he falls, they will go down with him, Baghdad-based diplomats point out.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said Wednesday that he sees signs that Hussein is “increasingly isolated and cut off” and that “he can rely on fewer and fewer people.”

The increasing use of family members in the Iraqi government is an act of “desperation,” Cheney said in an interview with editors of The Times in Los Angeles.

“It is increasingly a very narrow base on which his power rests,” Cheney said. “That is probably good if you are hopeful that he will be gone from the scene in the near future.”

Despite this erosion of power, Cheney said he isn’t sure how much credence to put in reports about increasing disloyalty to Hussein.

“If there were to be mounted a successful operation against him from inside, it would probably not be visible to us or visible from the outside until after it happened,” he said. “If we can see it, he can probably see it--his security services are so pervasive that it would have to be very well hidden to succeed, and that almost by definition would mean it would not be visible to somebody from the outside.”

Nonetheless, the secretary remarked: “My belief still is that he will not survive. He has put his country through a terrible ordeal. There is an increasing loss of respect for Saddam Hussein on the part of the Iraqi population.”

In Baghdad, the new interior minister is Wathban Ibrahim Hassan, who has been both governor of Salah ad Din province, the family stronghold north of the capital, and head of military intelligence. In announcing the appointment, the official Iraqi News Agency, in a brief report monitored in Nicosia, did not say whether Hassan will retain the two lesser posts.

He takes over as interior minister from Ali Hassan Majid, a Hussein cousin, who was named defense minister a week ago. Majid and Hussein himself are the most feared members of the family clan based in Tikrit, the capital of Salah ad Din province.

Three years ago, during the Iran-Iraq War, it was Majid who ordered a poison-gas attack on Kurdish civilians in the village of Halabja. In the early months of the Persian Gulf conflict, he ran the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.

Hassan is the oldest of the president’s three half-brothers, all longtime confederates of Hussein as he plotted for power in Iraq’s violent political world. Another, Barzan, is Hussein’s No. 1 man in Europe, ostensibly the Iraqi representative to the United Nations in Geneva but reputedly the head of Iraqi intelligence and covert operations on the Continent. The third, Sabawi, heads Iraq’s secret police.

Ousted in the shake-up of family power last week was Hussein Kamel Hassan, a presidential cousin and son-in-law. He was defense minister and previously minister of industry and military industrialization. In that post, during the Iran-Iraq War, Kamel built the Iraqi military machine and was responsible for the chemical and nuclear warfare programs.

Although Kamel is a Tikriti and is related by blood and marriage, Hussein is depositing the critical security posts in the hands of Majids and Tulfahs, two families that are closer kin to the president through his mother’s two marriages. Some non-family, non-Tikriti revolutionary comrades of the president in the ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party still hold high office. But the politics of Iraq have become almost exclusively tribal under the pressures of the post-Gulf War conditions.

There has been no subsequent report of Kamel’s fate or the reason he was sacked. Foreign analysts had described him as a possible successor to Hussein if power in Baghdad were transferred peaceably. But Wednesday’s appointment of another relative to a top position indicates Hussein has no intention of stepping aside despite his country’s desperate situation.

Reports from Iraq this week have outlined worsening crises in the domestic economy and relations between Baghdad and the Kurds. A Kurdish emissary, Sami Abderrahman, left the capital Tuesday after agreeing to a government demand that the Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas vacate all cities in northern Iraq or face a continued blockade of goods and services from the south.

The final Kurdish decision will be made by Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, leaders of the major political unions. But Hussein was forcing their hand by moving Iraqi troops toward the city of Irbil in the Kurdish heartland. Although his regime retains enough military power to suppress the Kurds in the north and the Shiite Muslims in the south, Hussein has been able to do little to improve life in Baghdad and the Sunni Muslim territory in the center of the country.

In a report Wednesday from Rome, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said that most Iraqis face major food shortages. A recent FAO mission to Baghdad, it said, “confirmed a deterioration in the food and nutrition situation.”

Relief workers told the U.N. representatives that the government can supply only a third of the Iraqis’ food needs at subsidized prices. Supplies are available on the open market, but prices have increased nearly seven-fold since Hussein sent his army into Kuwait in August, 1990, triggering the crisis that led to a lopsided defeat by U.S.-led allied forces and rigid cease-fire conditions this year.

The U.N. Security Council has voted to let Baghdad sell oil to raise money for food, but Hussein has rejected the requirement that international agencies oversee the distribution.

Times staff writer Ralph Vartabedian in Los Angeles contributed to this report.