COLUMN ONE : Iraq on Road to Nowhere? : Army deserters rob travelers. Villagers offer their daughters for sale. Foreign truckers with a window on the politically troubled nation say people have been reduced to banditry amid the chaos.

Truck drivers in this desert town measure Iraq’s disintegration in miles--the fearsome miles they travel on the highway to Baghdad to deliver the meager goods that are all that is left of Jordan’s once-thriving trade with its eastern neighbor.

On the 14-hour desert drive, truckers must contend with half a dozen Iraqi army checkpoints, as well as army deserters who now roam the highway as armed marauders. They travel during daylight, in convoys of five or six, for protection.

Still, “every driver who travels to Baghdad risks his life,” said one independent trucker who travels there twice a month. “We have had drivers disappear, and no one even asks what happens to them.”

Five years after the United Nations punished President Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait by imposing broad economic sanctions on Iraq, a once proud and spirited people has been reduced to a nation of beggars and bandits, the truckers say.

“Before the war, Iraq was the most hospitable and orderly country in the world,” the independent trucker said. “The villagers would offer us cold drinks and welcome us. Now, they offer us their wives and daughters for a [Jordanian] dinar or two [$1.50 to $3].”

This is the Iraq that Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel Majid fled on Aug. 8. He led a convoy that included his brother (head of Saddam Hussein’s personal guard), their wives (two of the president’s daughters) and at least 15 other army officers west on a trek along the same Baghdad-Amman highway that the truckers ply.

When he sought asylum from Jordan’s King Hussein, Majid made humiliatingly public a split in a family that for years has been riven with rivalries, divisions and deadly feuds but has always managed to keep its iron grip on one of the Middle East’s most strategically important states.

Majid’s defection has Western and regional governments wondering whether the combination of growing social and economic chaos in Iraq and divisions within the regime might finally topple the dictator who led his country into two devastating wars in a decade.

“It’s a measure of their paranoia, Saddam and his sons’, that they have driven away close members of their family,” said Hamid Bayati, London representative of the Supreme Council for Islamic Resistance in Iraq, one of many Iraqi opposition groups.

Architect of Iraq’s military buildup during the 1980s, Majid was unmolested as his fleet of Mercedes-Benz sedans and Land Rovers spent much of a day speeding through the desert, he told reporters. Reputed to be the second most powerful man in a regime built on terror, he was not questioned at the many checkpoints and slipped easily across the border at Terbil.

Once in Jordan, he said that it was the sort of misery that the truckers have seen firsthand that drove him to abandon his position as a member of Iraq’s ruling elite and call for the overthrow of Hussein, who is also his cousin.

Members of the regime are protected from the hardships of daily life. The economy has seen a 5,000% increase in prices since Iraq’s disastrous invasion of Kuwait in August, 1990, which ended with Baghdad’s crushing defeat by a U.S.-led international coalition in February, 1991.

The people, Majid said, are suffering.

He offered no details, and studying Iraq remains an exercise in looking through a glass darkly.

But reporters who have visited the country in recent months have written about food shortages, soaring prices and lawlessness that grips the countryside outside Baghdad. The dinar, which once was worth more than the dollar, is trading at an exchange rate of 2,000 dinars to the dollar.

The United Nations estimates that as many as 1.1 million Iraqis need humanitarian assistance, including basic food rations, vaccines and other medicines. Iraqi doctors say cases of severe malnutrition are no longer rare.

Even the tightly controlled state-run newspapers routinely publish stories now about rampant street crime and corruption in the army, the ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party and even the regime itself. The tales usually detail harsh punishments that criminals and corrupt officials receive, but they say much about the growing state of disorder.

Often, however, the best window available on Iraq is that offered by the business people and workers--such as the Jordanian truckers--who return again and again and have built networks of Iraqi friends and business contacts.

Watching up close as life along the highway crumbles, the truckers are not surprised that even such a pillar of the regime as Majid chose to escape.

They are light-years from the family intrigues that many analysts believe played a role in Majid’s break with Hussein. But they have watched the country that serves as the tragic backdrop to the family wars become an economic and social shambles.

Marauders have been known to shoot drivers as they knelt in prayer on the side of the road, then make off with their trucks and cargo, the drivers said.

At Iraqi army checkpoints, soldiers threaten the drivers, stop them for hours and demand bribes before allowing them to drive on. These days, the independent trucker said, soldiers are so desperate for basics that they usually can be bought off with a loaf of bread or a few cigarettes. But sometimes the soldiers have been known to attack drivers.

Majid indicated at a news conference held four days after his defection that the degradation is so widespread that it may actually be possible to topple Saddam Hussein.

From the grounds of King Hussein’s Raghadan Palace, Majid sent shock waves through the region by urging the army, civil servants and the elite Republican Guards that he helped create to bring an end to Iraq’s suffering. “Be prepared for the coming change, which will turn Iraq into something modern,” he admonished the Establishment of which he was so much a part.

The time had come, Majid said, “to establish new and developed relations with the world and get rid of what is shameful and what caused the backwardness of the society.”

A string of relatives, starting with Hussein’s son Uday, has traveled to Amman since the defection to demand Majid’s return, or at least the return of the daughters. They have been stiffly turned away by the royal palace.

Within days of the defection, senior CIA officials, the head of Saudi intelligence and U.N. representatives were traveling to Amman to visit Majid. As Hussein and other senior Iraqi officials ranted in Baghdad, branding the defector a “traitor dwarf” and denying that his flight would damage the regime, governments lined up to hear what the general had to say.

Both the United States and the United Nations are eager to hear Majid’s accounting of Iraq’s secret weapons programs. He spent years procuring the hardware and technology to build the nation’s nuclear, chemical, missile and biological weapons programs.

Since the war, he has worked hard to conceal elements of those programs from U.N. inspectors. Scrapping Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction is a key condition for the easing of U.N. sanctions.

But the United States is hoping Majid also will provide details about a secretive regime built upon clan loyalties that the West has always had a hard time understanding.

“This is a lot more serious than any defection that had taken place previously,” said David Mack, deputy assistant secretary of state for the Middle East during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf crisis. Considered the department’s leading expert on Iraq at the time, Mack is now a Middle East analyst for a private consulting firm in Washington.

Majid’s defection was spectacular confirmation of the belief that Saddam Hussein’s base has been steadily narrowing since the Gulf War and now rests on his closest relatives, Mack said.

“Saddam has always survived through a combination of what he can do for people and what he can do to people,” Mack said.

With Majid’s defection, which follows that of several less important figures, “the question is, how much can Saddam do for people these days? As sanctions continue, not much,” said Mack. “And it is also clear he can do less and less to them, because more and more are getting out of his reach.”

Travelers coming from Baghdad since Majid’s defection agree that the atmosphere is tense, but there are conflicting reports about a heavier presence of Republican Guards in the streets. The Iraqi opposition claims that Majid supporters have been arrested and that open fighting has broken out within Hussein’s family.

At his Amman news conference, Majid predicted a crackdown on members of his family and others in the wake of his defection. But he denied reports that he left because he was on the losing end of a feud with Hussein’s sons and half brothers. He insisted that he decided to leave only after expressing dissenting views about government policy for months in the Iraqi Cabinet.

King Hussein backed up Majid’s claim, saying he was “shocked” when Majid told him, during a visit to Amman two weeks before the defection, about the conditions in Iraq.

“He got fed up with the way his country was run,” King Hussein told Yediot Aharonot, an Israeli newspaper that published the interview Monday. “This man was very troubled by mistakes made by his country’s leadership: internally, toward the citizens of Iraq; regionally and also in the context of Iraq’s relations with other countries in the world.”

King Hussein, who was a close ally of Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s and who stood by the Iraqi president after he invaded Kuwait, said he was unaware of how far Iraq’s situation had deteriorated until he met with Majid.

“The things I heard from him contradicted what I heard from other senior Iraqis who visited Amman,” King Hussein said. “They tried to create the impression things were going well. . . . When I understood what was really happening in Iraq . . . it was a terrible shock for me.”

“The king need only have read Iraqi newspapers to know that the situation in Iraq was horrific,” scoffed Amatzia Baram, head of the Mideast history department at Haifa University in Israel.

Saddam Hussein has long had little control over northern Iraq, where Kurds remain in revolt against the regime and the U.S.-led international coalition maintains a “no-fly” zone. He also has had little control over southern Iraq, where Shiite Arabs remain defiant and the allies police another “no-fly” zone.

“For the past year, I have noticed an increasing desperation, even among well-to-do Iraqi businessmen,” said Emad Zeitoun, a Jordanian trader who has done business with Iraq for years.

Even the envoys of Majid’s Ministry of Industrialization, who would slip across the border to illicitly buy materials no one is supposed to sell to the Iraqis, have been coming with ever-shorter shopping lists, Zeitoun said.

The strain of the U.N. economic sanctions, analysts say, has eroded support for the regime among the large Sunni Muslim families who have been its backbone and exacerbated divisions within the immediate family.

“The problem for Saddam now is that there is a growing perception that the family is disintegrating,” Baram said. “And in Iraq, perception is reality.”

Those closest to Saddam Hussein include:

* The Majids, the clan from which both Hussein Kamel Majid and Saddam Hussein come.

* The Ibrahims, who are Hussein’s half brothers.

* The Khairallahs, who are related to Hussein’s mother.

* Hussein’s sons, Uday and Osai.

Reports have emerged in recent months of infighting among those groups, with Uday and Osai Hussein reportedly exercising ever more power and challenging, in particular, the Majids.

But the disaffection extends beyond the immediate family, said former U.S. official Mack. “There is a lot of unhappiness in the Sunni Arab community,” he said.

The Sunnis are one of the many religious or ethnic groups in Iraq and are thought to make up no more than 20% of the population. But they have long served as the ruling elite. Under Hussein, power became concentrated in the hands of a few Sunni families, including his own clan.

In recent months, three large Sunni clans that have long been pillars of the regime’s pervasive security Establishment have broken with Saddam Hussein. One of the families that has contributed heavily to the security forces, the Dulamis, instigated riots outside a prison after a family member--a pilot--was arrested, tortured and killed, according to Mack.

Hussein “is essentially down now to depending on his own sons. That’s a pretty narrow power base,” Mack said.

Iraqi opposition figures say it was Uday Hussein’s shooting of Saddam Hussein’s half brother Watban Ibrahim Hassan at a family anniversary celebration marking the end of Iraq’s war with Iran on Aug. 8 that may have triggered Majid’s flight.

Uday published a story in his newspaper, Babel, saying the shooting was an accident.

Members of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a Kurdish opposition party, said that Uday shot Watban, his wife, son and three guards, killing all but Watban on the spot. In a statement issued in Damascus, Syria, the PUK claimed Tuesday that Watban later died in a hospital. He had been dismissed as Interior minister in May by Saddam Hussein.

“Uday is clearly out of control,” said one leading U.S. analyst on Iraq. “Daddy can’t control Uday.”

No one can say with any certainty whether or when the family upheaval that became at least partially public might finally wrest power from Hussein.

“I have become very cautious in making such predictions, because I believed that it should have happened four or five years ago,” said Mack. But one thing is certain, he said: Majid will not “simply start showing up at Iraqi exile gatherings to read poetry. He and the guys who came out with him are people who are intending to go back to Baghdad as winners.”

Times staff writers William Tuohy in London and Robin Wright in Jerusalem contributed to this report.