August marks the anniversary of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, an act of daring geopolitical cannibalism that shook the Arab world to its foundations and that will likely shape the politics of the Middle East for decades to come. The Iraqi leader played a giant game of chicken with the Western world, and lost. His miscalculations exposed the myth of "Arab brotherhood'' and brought down upon his country the war that has left his rich, modernized Mesopotamian civilization devastated—and yet Saddam Hussein remains in power.

Any man who can prevail as an autocrat for twenty-three years in the maelstrom of Iraqi politics, invite the wrath of thirty-four countries, endure more than 100,000 lethal missions by allied bombers, and walk away with four of his seven nuclear-weapon sites, a substantial portion of his chemical-warfare capability, and much of his Republican Guard still intact—leaving a genius-level American general to admit he was "suckered" at the peace table—is a force to be reckoned with. Today, the face of Saddam still leers down from giant, ubiquitous portraits on the street comers of Baghdad. And his larger-than-life resurrection speaks more loudly to his own people and to Arabs everywhere than do any facts about the allied military victory or the aggression that led to it.

The symbolism was most striking two months after the Gulf War ended. President Saddam Hussein burst onto the scene again, jubilantly shooting his pistol over his head before crowds in his Sunni heartland, while President George Bush lay in the hospital, unable to control a heartbeat gone astray. Casting himself as the aggrieved rather than the aggressor, Saddam was announcing to his people that he—and they—had defied the great United States and survived. Meanwhile, the man who had demonized the Iraqi leader, only to give up on removing him, faced the very prospect he had sworn to avoid at all costs: "being drawn into a Vietnam-style quagmire.''

It is important to try to comprehend the nature of the popular tyrant as he thrives in the Arab world. The longer Saddam hangs on, the more powerful his image will appear to regional players. In a hyperbolic prediction, a member of Jordan's royal political circle, Leila Sharaf, warned me, "Nasser was much easier to deal with than Saddam, and if you think Saddam was bad, he's a picnic compared to the new leader that is going to come to combat Israel."

In a world of violence, plots and counterplots, and repeated assassinations, Saddam has mastered the techniques of personal and political survival. While he has borrowed strategies from two models, Stalin and Hitler, he has raised the art of despotism to a new level. Even in the face of the impossible odds against him over the past six months, and after having made a series of grave mistakes, Saddam has coolly drawn from his bag of tricks three of his all-time favorite tactics, guaranteed to confuse the issues for the Arab masses while confounding the West.

Saddam's first and greatest attribute as a survivor is his nerve. Despite the colossal and fruitless losses of his eight-year war with Iran, he held on to power and the loyalty of his army. In the lead-up to the Gulf War, even in the face of George Bush's finest hour, last October, when deployment of the allies' first 200,000 fighting men and women was at full throttle, Saddam told Yevgeny Primakov, the veteran Soviet Arabist, "If the choice is to fight or surrender, I'll fight." The Soviet representative, sensing that the man's nerve superseded all rational calculations, told President Bush, "He'll never back down."

By March, Saddam's army had been literally decimated, his tanks and artillery were largely destroyed or disabled, and his whole repressive apparatus was vanishing before his very eyes. The secret police as well as the Baath Party leadership, knowing they would be first to be lynched in a popular uprising, began melting away. Rebellion burst open among Shiites in the South, followed a week later by the Kurdish revolt in the North and by a rash of death-defying demonstrations in a half-dozen Iraqi cities, including Baghdad. The most opportune moment for a popular overthrow of the despot was at hand. But Saddam Hussein didn't flee into exile; he didn't even appear to flinch.

And then George Bush saved him.

Twelve days before he called the cease-fire, President Bush had determined that Iraq was poised for a popular revolution. He was hoping for a "Ceausescu solution," and gave the signal with a statement on February 15 calling for "the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside." Several senior Iraqi-army officers heeded President Bush's public exhortation and made contact with both Sunni Arab dissidents and Kurdish rebels, according to on-site research by Peter Galbraith for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But by the time conditions were ripe for elements in the military to join the insurrection, Bush had backed down from his support for a popular uprising.

"It took only several days for these army officers to see the U.S. wasn't serious, and to flee back, seeing themselves as safer under Saddam," says senior Kurdish statesman Ibrahim Ahmed. Educated middle-class Iraqis have absorbed the lesson: the U.S., influenced by Saudi Arabia, decided that Saddam in power with an enfeebled military machine, frozen assets, and blocked exports was preferable to the alternatives they most feared—either the territorial breakup ("Lebanization") of the country or, worse, the rise of a militant Islamic republic in Iraq. Once again, Saddam had made himself too useful to exterminate. In the face of Washington's vacillation, he began to emerge as immovable.

"Saddam today is not afraid," asserts senior Egyptian diplomat Tahsin Bashir. "Thousands of Iraqi youth in Baghdad have guns. If they were so anti-Saddam, they could have killed him. But he didn't disarm the Iraqi people, which means he has a fantastic system of control." That control stems from the strict Stalinist organizational structure adopted by his Baath Party. Party cells are inserted at the center of every institution, especially the army. Every officer is a Baathist, and every Baathist is part of a cell and has a gun. One signal over radio or TV and they can be mobilized.

The tyrant's power rests on the perception of his inner circle that he will continue to hold power. Ordinarily, this perception can shift all at once if subordinates turn on the tyrant, as they did on Ceausescu in Romania, because there is no one to guard the guards. But Saddam has thought of that too.

Saddam's Republican Guards "walk like him, drink and eat like him, even sit just like him."

Saddam's steely nerve has been backed up by a highly effective military and security apparatus. And although allied bombs have destroyed much of the infrastructure of his country, he still lives behind a human wall like the Praetorian Guard of Rome's emperors. Several interlocking security forces—estimated to be as many as 60,000 men—remain intact and dedicated to only one cause: the preservation of Saddam Hussein.

Their fundamental loyalty in the face of disaster has been due primarily to the fact that they are commanded by Tikritis, and are therefore bound to their leader by the ties of kinship and tribalism. But further insights into how Saddam uses psychological manipulation to fine-tune his control of his military apparatus were provided to me by a man who has had extensive dealings with Saddam's Military Industry Organization, a man I shall call Samir Hazzah, who escaped from Iraq just before the invasion a year ago.

"In Iraq, if a young man wants insurance for his future, his best choice is to volunteer for the Republican Guards," emphasized Hazzah.

Recruits must be tall, heavily built, and able to withstand beatings with rubber hoses and other extreme conditions to which they are exposed in the enlistment physical. If they pass training, they receive a car, land, and the money to build a house. But most desired is the power their position gives these teenagers over everyone, especially their parents, who fear them once they enlist.

"The guards are given a license for brutality," said Hazzah. To give an idea, he tells the story of a corpse that was found in the al-Taji area of Baghdad. When a car was stopped several days later, with bloodstains and bullet shells that were traced to the corpse, the new driver, a member of the Republican Guard, was taken in for questioning. He casually told police he had been in a hurry to meet his girlfriend and needed a car, so he'd shot the driver. Fellow Guard members turned up to insist that the authorities had no right to try the man, and walked off with him.

"All members of his personal security units, plus the Guard, have one thing in common," said Hazzah. "They are uneducated, total failures, school bullies. Their ambitions are power, money, and women, but the most important thing to all who surround Saddam is the women."

At eighteen, the age of enlistment, of course the troops are crazy about women, he observed, and to see Saddam strutting around with his beautiful blonde second wife, Samira Shahbandar, and his stunning Persian mistress, while he puffs on Cuban cigars and sports silk suits to which his Mercedes of the day is matched, is a great incentive to young Iraqis to join him. "They clone themselves to his character," said Hazzah. "They walk like him, drink and eat like him, even sit just like him— knees knocked together and feet apart."

Why is the Republican Guard so fanatically loyal to Saddam? I asked.

In his early days as vice president, in the 1970s, Hazzah explained, Saddam personally searched out orphans, bastard sons of prostitutes, minorities, and other outcasts to induct into the security apparatus he was creating ostensibly to bolster the Baathist regime. He brought them from their villages to a life of luxury in Baghdad, setting them up with apartments, cars, pretty women. In return, owing their entire identity to Saddam, they became loyal slaves. They would form the core of what became a special security unit of 750 men, the Wahdat al-Himaya al-Khassa, the personal guard of Saddam.

Hazzah told me that the members of this elite inner guard are led by one of Saddam's brothers-in-law. Every six months each is given a new Super Salon Toyota (worth $30,000), and each year a valuable piece of land, which he is free to sell. A subsection of this guard is called Protection for the Protectors—another way of saying guards for the guards. The overseer is one of Saddam's sons-in-law, Saddam Kamel.

An even more elite group of several hundred men, made up of relatives of Saddam, is his personal intelligence unit, al-Amn al-Khass. They report only to Saddam on those plotting against him. "All the big men in Iraq become bodyguards first," Hazzah told me. "The lowest-ranking member of these units can order around any high-ranked minister in the country and no one would dare to deny them what they wanted."

Once Saddam had become an absolute leader he used his thousands of clones to subvert the Baath Party, government institutions, and state treasury to the will and whim of one man.

Ever since, he has taken care of his security forces first. In the face of soaring prices brought on by the bombing and U.N. embargo, which have put many necessities out of reach of formerly comfortable middle-class Iraqis, he has granted pay raises to his military. He also runs his government in strictly tribal style, reportedly obliging each member of his closed circle to observe or participate in the shooting or torture of the president's enemies. Members of his Revolutionary Command Council have been called upon to execute colleagues who have fallen from favor. "All of them have blood on their hands," said Hazzah.

Given this structure, it would seem naïve to expect the military to overthrow Saddam without strong backing from the outside and guarantees of protection for those involved. And even if a military coup did remove Saddam, in the eyes of the Iraqi people not a single member of Saddam's Baathist ruling circle would be a nonkiller or a credible replacement.

Moreover, with a near-total absence of communications within the country, Saddam is able to silence the bitterness toward him while tapping a vein of recrimination against the U.S. to "prove" the conspiracy theory that was his rationale for occupying Kuwait in the first place. In the words of his information secretary, Naji al-Hadithi, the West, led by the U.S., is "seeking to extinguish civilization in the developing region."

No regime survives on terror alone. Saddam is a tyrant, to be sure, but in the past he has been a popular tyrant. 

"The Satan in him is very consistent, and his rationale for what he does, on the face of it, is very convincing to the Arab man in the street," observes Ambassador Tahsin Bashir.

Saddam's mission when he became president in 1979 was to take the Arab world back to the Arabian Nights era, to re-create an empire like the one ruled by the Abbasid dynasty, which at its peak stretched from Morocco to what is now Pakistan. In the ninth century, this vast imperial system was overseen by the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, who made Baghdad the center of military power, culture, and glory.

Beatings of ministers were not uncommon. "He tried in every way to humiliate them."

"This glorious monarch, al-Rashid, used to take bags of money around to the poor, and Saddam tried to re-enact his ways," recalls the Egyptian filmmaker Tawfik Saleh, who was drafted to make a vanity film about the Iraqi president's life. Taking a leaf from the Abbasids' book, Saddam used both fear and bribery at the same time as his strategy for dominating people. He began to drop in on poor sectors, surrounded by his brutish bodyguards. But after barging into homes to open the refrigerator, the great Saddam would suddenly show unexpected largess: "You have no meat. Why? Can't you afford it?" The next day the family would receive fifteen kilos of meat. Or, like Aladdin's genie, he'd ask a poor man for his wish. If the soul said he was in debt for a hundred dinars, Saddam would order his bodyguards to "give him a thousand."

"For two or three years a big portion of the Iraqi public lived on the welfare of Saddam Hussein," says Saleh. Not surprisingly, the middle class he had created became beholden to him.

The kinder, gentler face of Saddam is on display once again in postwar Iraq. Resuming his surprise drop-ins on the poor, he recently shared jokes and chocolates with the occupant of one shanty. According to The New York Times, he left the man—to whom he'd promised a house, job, and cash—professing adoration for "my father."

Together with his nerve, Saddam has a diabolical knack for knowing the right moment to apply terroristic pressure and the right moment to relax and appear generous. A classic display of the formula was evident in Saddam's political masterstroke in handling the Kurds.

Immediately after crushing the Kurdish insurrection, President Hussein secretly offered political reconciliation to the rebel leadership. It is no accident that he specifically asked that the negotiating delegation be headed by Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, whom he has often used and betrayed.

Saddam's words were sweet: apologies to the Kurdish people, implementation of his last (broken) agreement with the Kurds, guarantees of democracy, pluralism, and protection. Once Talabani was softened up, Saddam surfaced for a photographic coup.

Their embrace, seen around the world, was not merely the customary air kiss of Arab leaders, meant to signify respect for their equal status. Smiling, warmly kneading their shoulders, Saddam slathered kisses again and again on both cheeks of four Kurdish leaders, including Talabani, a man whom only a few years ago he had promised to cut down with a sword. Even Masoud Barzani—son of Mustafa Barzani, Saddam's historical Kurdish enemy—would soon be seduced into negotiations, although "three of his brothers have been hanged, six of his uncles, and more than six thousand Barzanis have disappeared," by Talabani's account.

Saddam's technique is described by an Iraqi expression that uses two rhyming Arabic words: tarhib (terrorizing) and targhib (enticing). While Saddam displayed himself on Iraqi TV as a warm, responsive leader, ready to compromise, his actions in the field were simultaneously reminding people of his continuing power to annihilate. Of the two million Kurds in flight from the Iraqi army's devastation of their cities and plunder of their homes, two thousand were dying each day.

Kisses from one side of his face, genocide from the other. 

This heady potion of terror and enticement mixed together often disarms those who meet Saddam. Prominent Kurdish dissidents, even if disgusted, were caught in the web of that embrace and hotly debated it. "He actually kissed our people back—he was warm the way he used to be before he became president and a megalomaniac," I was told by Dr. Najmaldin Karim, a Washington neurosurgeon and a spokesman for the Kurds in North America. Then he caught himself. "I'm sure it's an act. He's a devil."

Further examples of Saddam's magic formula of intimidation-cum-seduction can be found in his body language when he greets other leaders—a most sensitive barometer of how weak or strong he feels his position to be. The diminutive Yasser Arafat, for instance, cannot reach the cheek of the tall Saddam unless the Iraqi leader leans over. One can tell when Saddam needs Arafat, because he bends down. But Saddam hates Arafat, and when he's on top he will permit the P.L.O. leader only to bump up against his breast pocket.

The Iraqi strongman makes his entire ruling circle, including his former foreign minister Tariq Aziz, kiss his shoulder "as if he were a holy man," says Ambassador Bashir. Indeed, most Iraqis call him Sidi, meaning saintly man or master.

A Jordanian official who has had dinner many times at Saddam's huge European-style palace in Baghdad describes the unsettling extremes of his behavior. One minute he would be charming, generous, even kind (gifts would be lavished on guests: a Mercedes for attendance at any summit meeting, etc.). Then suddenly he would become very agitated, and just as abruptly his speech would go rigid and halting until his guests could feel the brutality.

"Frankly, he is the only person I've ever talked to who makes you shiver," admits the Jordanian official. "He fixes his eyes on you, then his lids start flickering. You can't unlock your eyes from his gaze. That's not comfortable."

The rapid flickering of his eyes in tense situations is truly a disturbing phenomenon, as half a dozen witnesses have testified. It was the first thing I noticed about Saddam when he appeared on TV last August for the bizarre audience with his "guests" the British hostages.

"My father has met every leader in the Arab world, and he's never experienced the fear that he did with this man," says the daughter of a Jordanian diplomat. "In negotiating sessions Saddam would be talking to King Hussein but staring at my father, and blinking. I think it's a habit that reveals how far removed he is from the here and now— it's like he's in a trance."

This frantic twitching of his eyelids may reveal an instability in Saddam's nervous system beneath the cool façade. In any case, it is involuntary. But its effect on others is compelling. One of his former ministers, Dr. Salah Shaikhly, recalls with a shudder, "If he looks you straight in the eye, you've had it—it's the Godfather look."

The story of Saddam Hussein's manipulation of King Hussein of Jordan is a dazzling exhibition of the tarhib-and-targhib formula at work externally. Saddam first tried to dominate King Hussein by terror, sending Abu Nidal's Palestinian marauders to Jordan. When that only drove the king closer to Syria and Saddam's rival President Hafez alAssad, the Iraqi leader switched to enticement.

Saddam envied the king his education, his erudition, and most of all his honored name and spiritual claim to an ancient Hashemite ancestry. What's more, King Hussein had credibility in the West; he could be useful to Saddam as a screen for purchases of missile and nuclear technology from the United States or from European countries.

According to a longtime Jordanian deputy with family in Iraq, the two consummate survivors became extremely close during the 1980s through the arms trade. Jordan was the main transshipment point throughout the Iran-Iraq War for all sorts of agents of mass destruction intended for Iraq. Over the last five years, the White House allowed the sale of chemical-weapon precursors, biological agents, and missile technology to Jordan. And the shipment of engine components for armored vehicles, as well as electronic testing equipment, continued right up until just before the bombing of Baghdad began last January—in defiance of the U.N. embargo secured by Bush, and despite specific intelligence warnings to Bush's deputy national-security adviser, Robert Gates, that the kingdom was being used as an illegal conduit for arms into Iraq.

In recent years, King Hussein and Queen Noor traveled to Baghdad in their private jet to stay with Saddam and his wife, Sajida. Their Royal Highnesses sent their children to stay with Uncle Saddam and to ask for gifts and help for Jordanian projects, although the children confided to a source close to the king their utter shock at the slaughter that passes for recreation in Saddam's family. When Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, took their royal visitors out onto Habaniya Lake to fish, accompanied by a boatload of bodyguards, the Jordanians were stunned to see Uday pull out small chunks of plastique and throw them into the water—unusual even in a region where commercial fishermen often use dynamite. Then Saddam's boys jumped into the lake and began to gather up the floating fish, to loud applause from their bodyguards. Hunting ducks, they used machine guns.

Why would the proud king associate with this crude thug and his vulgar sons?

Their relationship is a symbiotic one. Saddam is tough, physically big, and staggeringly rich—all things the king is not. His Royal Highness was in awe of Saddam, suggested Ambassador Abdullah Salah, Jordan's envoy to the U.N. I asked if he meant awe in the sense of fear, or in the sense of respect. "Both," he replied.

Again, it was Saddam's nerve that provoked the awe. Salah pointed to the Iraqi leader's "strong personality—he held full command during the heavy bombardments of this war, and nobody dissented." Then the ambassador went on to more flowery speculations that the king ''found him charming, devoted, and sincere in his belief in the Arab cause."

The friendship between Amman and Baghdad was sealed in the early 1980s. "His Majesty found Saddam Hussein was the most prompt in paying up" is the bottom-line explanation of a Jordanian very close to the king. From 1985 to 1989, acting as the middleman for Iraqi arms purchases, King Hussein ran up the national debt of his country by billions of dollars. The national treasury was not fully repaid by Iraq, but by bloating the country's debt, Jordanian officials were in a position personally to take hundreds of millions of dollars from Saddam Hussein, according to informed sources.

Saddam asked, "Why should Jordan take only five million from the C.I.A.? That is not enough." A banker close to the royal family who operated in Jordan recalls seeing checks from the princely families of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as well, but the sums were paltry compared with the generous stream that began to flow from Saddam. On the occasion of a wedding or birthday or other royal affairs, Saddam didn't send flowers. He often sent gifts of anywhere from $5 to $30 million, depending on the personage. One of the king's relatives told the banker about visiting Baghdad in late 1989. When the Jordanian mentioned having financial troubles, Saddam directed that he be given an attache case, but told him not to open it until he was on the plane. It contained a million dollars.

In turn, according to the London Observer, Jordan has been trading goods and technology to Saddam since the end of the war, in direct violation of the U.N. embargo. The minutes of an IraqiJordanian Joint Committee meeting show the two countries trying to reach $900 million in trade by next spring.

A highly placed official in Jordan recalls watching in disgust while Saddam pirated the spiritual heritage of King Hussein. "He came up from nothing and became head of state because he was desperate for legitimacy. The fantasy of being a descendant of the Prophet would give him legitimacy, both historically and politically."

Saddam's first such claims, notes Middle East expert Efraim Karsh, were trotted out in 1979 in order to co-opt a growing domestic Shiite opposition. Later, Saddam began pressuring an expert Jordanian genealogist until he agreed to draw up a family tree that gave the Iraqi a Hashemite background relating him to Muhammad. At home he began to excavate the Hashemite tombs.

"There's no doubt that Saddam subscribed to the notion that he is the direct descendant of the Prophet—he really believed it!" snickers an upper-class woman who knows the king's family well. "Saddam mentioned to the king quite a few times, 'We are of the same Hashemite family.' The king couldn't stomach it, but, after all, he's a politician." The Iraqi leader even proposed that his son Uday be married to a princess of the king's family, according to Jordanian diplomats. Although King Hussein reportedly declined, he played to Saddam's desperate need for respect by referring to him as "cousin."

Saddam seems to take a perverse pleasure in his son's transgressions, seeing himself mirrored in the boy.

But who was using whom? The most popular scenario in Egyptian ruling circles is that the two Husseins had cooked up a plan to regain Saudi Arabia as a Hashemite kingdom. By this theory, King Hussein would reclaim the throne of his great-grandfather the Sharif of the Hejaz, who lost his half of Arabia to the house of Saud in the 1920s. And Saddam Hussein could re-create the Hashemite throne of Iraq, casting himself as a king. In a telling moment last summer, King Hussein ordered guests at a reception, "Don't call me 'Your Majesty,' call me 'Sharif Hussein'!"

Through the smoke and din of a crowded restaurant in Amman, I listened to another highly speculative conspiracy theory of the sort that flourishes in the Middle East, an unlikely story of double-dealing that reflects the constantly shifting loyalties of the region. The source was a well-placed politico who has represented the Jordanian people in Parliament and held a top post in the government. "Saddam bought the Jordanian government—100 percent," he told me. "But always King Hussein was out to destroy Iraq."

This man believed that King Hussein and Saudi Arabia's King Fahd had worked together on a plan to inflate Saddam's ego and stuff Iraq with weapons in order to incite him to perpetual wars. "I know my man— I've watched him up close since he became king," he said. "King Hussein encouraged Saddam to do the invasion of Kuwait. But he was under the impression he could convince him to withdraw—and look like the ultimate hero."

The wild card, this man concluded, was that Saddam "is not normal. You can't bet on him. He spoiled the whole plan."

Saddam has learned the techniques of despotism over the course of a lifetime rooted in violence. His character was shaped for survival.

A boy of dubious birth, Saddam was violently rejected even before he emerged into the world. His mother tried to abort him. He would never know his father. He was born into a people devoid of any patriotic idea, a region severed from its own history, and a town fallen into low repute—Tikrit, a village of a few thousand inhabitants without electricity or running water or law and order.

"Saddam himself is in doubt about who his father is," speculates Amatzia Baram, the leading Israeli scholar on Iraq and author of Culture, History & Ideology in the Formation of Ba'thist Iraq, 1968-89. The official line is that Hussein Majid al-Tikrit died shortly before Saddam was born, but how and where, and what his life had been before that, no one could say. Three sources from Tikrit told me that he simply abandoned his wife for another woman. Hussein Majid actually lived for another several years after Saddam's birth, they say, but relations between the two sides of the family were poisonous.

Saddam's mother was a tall, outspoken woman by the name of Sabha Tulfah. A clairvoyant, she had an air of mystery, recalls a former resident of Tikrit. Always wearing wide black dresses, her deep pockets filled with seashells to use in prophecies, she amused herself by going among the mud huts of the town and asking the inhabitants, "Do you want to know your future?" But in 1937, Sabha was cast into despair when she foresaw a terrible fate for herself and the child she was carrying.

Already past her thirtieth year, alone, and seven and a half months pregnant, she had only one other offspring, a son of fifteen, and he was dying of cancer. In her desperation she turned to Salim Zilkha, a prosperous merchant who had a business partnership with her brother Khairallah Tulfah, and with the man who would later become Saddam's stepfather, Ibrahim Hassan. Zilkha belonged to one of the two Jewish families in Tikrit at that time, but was also part of a large and prominent banking family, the Arab equivalent of the Rothschilds. The Jew and the two Tikriti Arabs contracted to supply food to the British army in Iraq.

So it was that Salim Zilkha came to the aid of the distraught sister of his business partner. Borrowing the only car in the village, he drove her a hundred miles to Baghdad, where he arranged an operation for her son at al-Majidiah hospital. Each night, after visiting Sabha and her son in the hospital, Zilkha stayed at his sister-in-law's Baghdad home and told the tale of this poor peasant woman who was sinking into despond.

Zilkha's sister-in-law Nazima, today a seventy-three-year-old woman whose family fled Iraq for Israel in 1950, remembers vividly what she saw and heard, and how she wept for Sabha. I found Nazima outside Tel Aviv, in Ramat Hasharon, an affluent suburb not far from where the first Scud missile landed in Israel, ironically in the middle of an Iraqi neighborhood. She limped out of her simple bungalow, but signaled in every other way—by her bombast, the gold rings on her freckled fingers, and her arrogant bearing—that she had once been part of the bekawat of Baghdad, the powerful elite.

Nazima brought out a photo of her husband with Sabha's brother Khairallah and their troop of Boy Scouts at what was then the only school in Tikrit. Her husband and Khairallah remained friends, and many of the boys in the photo went on to become ministers in Saddam's government, she said.

After four days in the hospital, Nazima remembers, Sabha's son died. In despair, staggering from the hospital on Zilkha's arm, Sabha suddenly broke away and tried to throw herself under a passing bus. Having failed to kill herself, that night she took a kitchen knife and tried to abort her unborn child. Zilkha attempted to restrain the hysterical woman. "After losing my husband and my child, what good can this baby do for me?" she wailed.

"Pity the child," the avuncular man urged her, and warned that she was doing something forbidden. But upon her return to Tikrit, Sabha continued to do violence to her body. Zilkha's daughter Rayah remembers being frightened by the woman who came to stay with her family for the remainder of her pregnancy. Sabha beat on her belly, tore out clumps of her hair, and threw herself against the wall. Rayah's story, perhaps apocryphal, is that shortly before Sabha gave birth she blurted out a shocking prophecy: "In my belly I'm carrying a Satan!"

King Hussein's children confided their shock at the slaughter that passes for recreation in Saddam's family.

Arab proverbs say that if a man is born to a good family its tradition will govern his behavior, while if a man is brought up in a bad family, even if he later earns a doctorate or becomes rich, he will always be ruled by that dark tradition. Saddam spent his childhood being shunted back and forth between two households, but to construe either as "good" would be stretching the definition. His two role models were his uncle, often called "Khairallah the Vulgarian," and his stepfather, known as "Hassan the Liar."

Saddam's birth took place in Khairallah's house. Sabha continued to be suicidally depressed and left the infant under his uncle's protection. A primary-school teacher, Khairallah was seen in Tikrit as a man of some knowledge. But in 1941 he became caught up in a failed pro-Axis uprising against the British-backed monarchy in Iraq and was sent away to prison for five years.

So, at age four, Saddam lost the closest thing he had to a father, and was forced to go to live with his mother and the brutal man she had married in the interim. If one looks at the situation through a child's eyes, it is possible to empathize with his early sense of betrayal and mistrust. In an official biography, Saddam recalls begging again and again to know "Where is my uncle? Why doesn't he come to see us?" His mother gave him only the cursory reply "Uncle Khairallah is in jail."

His mother had married Ibrahim Hassan, her errant husband's brother. Though an illiterate sheepherder, Hassan the Liar was not the poverty-stricken peasant of Saddam's propaganda. His thievery had brought him some land of his own, and his business with Zilkha allowed him to buy agricultural equipment. "How can you be partners with such a bad man?" Nazima's father used to nag Salim Zilkha. "He's not a bad man, he's hazaq [powerful]," Zilkha would protest.

Saddam's hatred for his stepfather knew no bounds. Hassan pushed the boy out into the fields at the age of four, dismissing any thought of sending him to school. Later, he dispatched Saddam to steal for him. As reported by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi in their recent book, Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography, the stepfather waited for the boy to come back at night so that he could amuse himself before sitting down to supper by humiliating the outcast— striking at Saddam's arms and legs with an asphalt-coated stick while the child did a crazy jig to dodge the blows. Then, laughing, Hassan would curse the child to the boy's mother: "He is a son of a cur— give him away." Saddam's mother tolerated Hassan's cruelty to the child.

From his stepfather Saddam learned the survival tactics of a brigand. Watchmen for other people's herds, these rough brigands were expected to compensate for whatever was stolen, which they did by stealing from other watchers. Shoot-outs were commonplace.

"They'd steal and divide the spoils the same night," I was told by a former Iraqi minister. "Saddam's mother used to preside over the division of the loot— wheat or rye, sheep, maybe a few pieces of gold and silver."

Small boys often carried guns, since they were supposed to defend the herds from other thieves. Killing animals was an initiation rite into manhood. But even then Saddam went about things differently from the others. When he was caught stealing, he never gave his booty back. Instead, he would cut out the entrails of a goat or poison a sheep. He is said to have relished heating an iron bar to a molten red on the open fire, then plunging it into the belly of a passing animal and splitting its stomach in two.

It would become a lifelong pattern: whatever he couldn't get or keep, Saddam had to destroy.

In 1947, Saddam knew a moment of happiness when he heard of his uncle's return from prison. Sneaking away from his stepfather's house in the dead of night, the ten-year-old boy turned up with his pistol in Tikrit to throw in his lot with his Uncle Khairallah.

Khairallah was by all accounts an extraordinarily corrupt and vulgar man. A small-time smuggler, he ran a fleet of buses and trucks to Jordan and Saudi Arabia, according to a source in Amman who knew him. His uncle enrolled Saddam in primary school, but at home he taught the boy more vivid lessons—how to use a gun or money to get what he wanted. Saddam was already a loner. His violent tendencies were encouraged and rewarded by his uncle, who taught him the values of Bedouin manhood.

Honor in the Bedouin sense meant / cannot allow anyone to tread upon my dignity, and I cannot let any crime go unpunished. One man's stealing a goat from another would be viewed as a crime not just against the individual but against the whole group. In little villages like Tikrit, if one forgave or ignored an insult or attack of any kind, even once, it meant one's tribe could be harmed without penalty, and that would render the group vulnerable. Tribal law made revenge and punishment an obligation.

In the rural society of Saddam's youth, without any overarching authority to establish law and order, the normal state of relations was rivalry between tribes and clans. The code is embodied in a common saying: "I and my brother against my cousin; my cousin and I against the outsider." In other words, conflict is inherent even within the family.

Born into this violent culture, Saddam has cultivated his image as a killer with sadistic fervor. He boasts in his biography that he was carrying a gun by the age of ten, and stories abound from former Iraqi and Jordanian officials about a murder he is supposed to have committed at the tender age of eleven or twelve.

Though there is no hard evidence of such a killing, one story had grown from a local tale to a legend by the time Saddam came to full power. It holds that as a teenager Saddam was sent with a pistol by his Uncle Khairallah to kill a kinsman. Returning home, he went to his room. In less than an hour, police turned up to see Saddam. When the family and authorities looked into his room, they found the boy deep in untroubled sleep, his gun still warm.

Saddam's adolescence was that of a school failure and petty thug desperately looking for identity and importance—the same desires that motivate boys recruited into his Republican Guard today. He had just turned twenty-one in 1958 when he reportedly murdered his brother-in-law Saadoun al-Alousi on Khairallah's orders. As in the "kill and sleep" legend, the young Tikriti demonstrated no feeling after the crime. Although it landed him and his uncle in prison for a brief time, it was also the audition that admitted him into the ranks of assassins. He became a member of the outlawed Baath Party and took part in an abortive attempt to shoot President Abd al-Karim Qassim. Fleeing to Egypt, he was inspired and protected by Nasser while he worked doggedly to build his reputation. Saddam Hussein was determined to make powerful men take him seriously as a true professional in the killing game.

Saddam's role models were his uncle, "Khairallah the Vulgarian," and his stepfather, "Hassan the Liar."

What are we to make, psychologically, of such a horrendous history? Journalists and academics attempting to analyze this enigmatic man have come up with theories that range from ''malignant narcissist" to "shrewd realist" to "a perfectly rational political decision-maker, despite any personality twists." Indeed, respected retired Middle East diplomats such as Hermann Eilts assured us, "Saddam Hussein is very impressive. . . . You come away from a meeting with him thinking, This is an earnest guy—and when he says something, you can count on it."

We are all hampered in doing the usual research by the impossibility of freely questioning relatives, friends, and neighbors in the village where Saddam Hussein grew up. The same limitations hold true for investigators into the personalities of Hitler and Stalin. Yet aspects of Stalin's nature have been convincingly highlighted, by historians such as Robert Conquest, by focusing on the man's characteristic actions.

"Saddam's killing had origins long before the revolution," says Nazima, Salim Zilkha's sister-in-law. "He saw others... who were much cleverer than he, and he couldn't stand rivals." The same engine of extreme vindictiveness drove many of the homicidal acts of his later life. One finds a haunting similarity in the personalities of Stalin and Saddam in this trait. As observed by his contemporary Bukharin, Stalin "cannot help taking revenge for [his own misfortunes of birth] on others, but especially those who are in some way better or more gifted than he is. "

Saddam's most consistent lifelong habit of action has been to steal what belongs to others and, when caught, to destroy it rather than give it back. This obsessive envy is another trait he shares with the Soviet tyrant. Bukharin wrote, "Stalin cannot live unless he has what someone else has."

The psychological wellspring for Saddam's lifetime of destructiveness is the need to strike back, to take revenge for the way he was brutalized when still young and helpless. "He always liked torturing people—this was in his nature right from the beginning," observes Hani al-Fekaiki, a former member of the Revolutionary Command Council who supervised the young Saddam's party cell. "He went too far, which raises the question if he is a psychopath. The other possibility is that, having killed other people since he was a teenager, killing and torturing people became a habit, and an acceptable habit."

Saddam was blighted at the first level of human development, unable to develop basic trust in others. So, like an infant, he has no conscience. He is unwilling to take, or incapable of taking, responsibility for his own actions, instead finding scapegoats or outside parties to blame for everything that goes wrong for him or his country. At the end of the Gulf War, for instance, he ordered the jailing or execution of many officers who had fought for him in Kuwait. And recently he accused the head of Iraqi military intelligence of conspiring against him.

Furthermore, from the very earliest age he must have associated love with pain. They were interchangeable. His mother savagely rejected him, then accepted him; his stepfather paid him attention only by beating him; Khairallah, perhaps the only adult who cared for him, schooled him in violence. Later, Saddam would take pleasure in seeing other people suffer as he had suffered, especially people whose motives, real or imagined, were to betray him. In that way, he re-creates the whole childhood situation, but now he can play the part of the cruel and arbitrary adult.

Saddam refined his childhood traumas into a diabolically effective terror apparatus, where every button is pushed by one man. Just as he had never known consistent trust or affection from the authority figures in his boyhood, he would take pleasure as an adult in turning violently on those who believed they were his friends.

"Saddam and his son Uday always turn on their friends and business associates," Samir Hazzah recounted. He told of another Iraqi who had been "friends" with Uday since childhood. They were in business together, importing Mercedeses at the official dollar exchange and selling them at the blackmarket rate. Days after the invasion of Kuwait, Uday found out his associate was also acting as a middleman for an arch-rival; he had the man arrested and brought to a prison under one of the palaces in Baghdad. He personally tortured him, removing his fingernails, then called on others to beat him in his presence. The young man was dropped off with his family for a few hours to display his condition, and then was returned to the dungeon, where he remains today. "It's possible after six months or a year, [Uday] will bring the boy back as a 'friend' again," said Hazzah. "That's how they operate: everyone must always live in fear."

Having grown up without learning the modulation of affection or even simple human contact, Saddam polarizes the world between Me and Not Me, Mine and the Other's—"Other" referring to a rival, another clan, another country, the whole hostile world. His inner world is a distorted replica of the tribal code—I and my brother against my cousin—taken to a sociopathic extreme. With this black-and-white thinking, and the fact that his emotions had to be cauterized to accommodate the Bedouin ideal of manhood, he can see only two positions for himself: Either I am on top or I will be destroyed.

Given his extraordinary aggressive drive and cunning as a survivor, Saddam was made-to-order for Iraqi politics. The use of systematic terror for political ends is a tradition that precedes the coup that brought the Baath Party to power in 1968. But even the organization that welcomed the talents of this young thug was unprepared for his rapid and ruthless ascent.

"Every group within the party from '64 on—he was using them all—believed he was creating a vast police network to help get rid of their enemies for them," explains former Iraqi foreign minister Talib el-Shibib. No one in the party was sophisticated enough psychologically to know what Saddam was. "The party simply knew he'd kill if he was asked. Nobody even imagined Saddam would gain power and rise up to be this tyrant.

"He'd take this side against that side, then pre-emptively switch sides," continues el-Shibib. "Eventually, he organized the killings of all people who were senior to him"—or disposed of them in other ways. This absolute need to rid himself of anyone with authority over him is a hallmark of Saddam's lifelong behavior, according to the scholar Amatzia Baram.

Saddam ingratiated himself with older men who could pave his way to power. His Uncle Khairallah introduced the young man to the future president Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, who was a cousin from the same tribe (the Albu Nasir). But neither al-Bakr nor the party's spiritual leader, Michel Aflaq, was a mentor in the true sense; only a normal aspirant to power dares to become dependent on an older teacher at an early stage. Saddam merely allowed these men to believe they exercised a hold over him.

"Saddam's mother presided over the division of the loot—wheat or rye, sheep, maybe a few pieces of gold and silver."

He kept a low profile during the early years of the Baath regime in order to lull President al-Bakr into complacency, but in the mid-seventies he began building his own propaganda machine behind the scenes. A gift for self-promotion is another of Saddam's survival skills. A brilliant impostor who borrows and discards identities from the historical closet like so many changes of clothes, he would be poised to project himself as a larger-than-life figure as soon as he assumed the presidency.

Within three months the Baath Party made up for the initial bloodlessness of its coup. The regime claimed to have uncovered a major pro-Israeli spy network. Saddam had his agents deliver faked incriminating letters to the homes of those to be purged, and ordered a clansman, Salah Omar Ali of Tikrit, to carry out an investigation. Fourteen "spies" were condemned to be hanged in public on January 27, 1969, ten of them Jews, the rest Muslims and Christians.

Gibbets were erected in "Liberation Square," and the Iraqi public was given a holiday to watch the hangings on TV or in person, while picnicking. Saddam Hussein arrived in an open car, seated next to President al-Bakr—thereby announcing himself as a power in the land—and the two circled the square accepting the plaudits of the crowd. The sacrificial victims were hanged, one by one, slowly, over the space of the next twenty-four hours.

The spectacle came as a shock to those who had believed that Saddam bore no animosity toward Jews and that Tikrit was notably free of anti-Semitism. But Saddam Hussein's killings were rarely motivated by ideology; more often they were the killings of pure, cool political calculation and made no religious distinctions. "We hanged them to teach the people a lesson," he said after the public orgy of death. Thus was launched Saddam Hussein's twenty-three-year reign of terror.

But if much of Saddam's violence was politically motivated, there are many stories that suggest another side to his preoccupation with torture and terror. One woman told me that when she was in prison in the early seventies for political activity every night before Saddam retired he would come down to the cells. The prisoners dreaded the sound of his heavy boots striking the stones of the corridor. He kicked pregnant women in the stomach and burned others all over their bodies with hot irons. They would dance the jig of torture, just as he had done at the hands of his stepfather. Thereafter, with his food taster supervising, the women prisoners would be made to prepare his meal and serve it to him. Only then would Saddam eat and go to sleep.

Another element of Saddam's personality that has helped him to survive is his extreme paranoia. Indeed, the design of his regime is a projection of his highly suspicious personality. While he was keeping a low profile behind President al-Bakr in the mid-seventies, Saddam surrounded himself with dazzling experts from Egypt, along with Iraqis educated in the West. "He listened closely to his educated advisers in those days and perceived ideas quickly,'' says Dr. Salah Shaikhly, who taught at the London School of Economics before becoming Saddam's deputy planning minister.

But after he seized power openly in 1979 and began throwing his weight around the Middle East, his paranoia took a quantum leap. President al-Bakr had consulted a seer, Rafa the Blind, and Saddam had the fortune-teller moved into the palace so nobody else could have access to her prophecies, says an Iraqi exile who lived in Baghdad at the time. Perhaps she reminded Saddam of his mother, this woman who could supposedly foretell the propitious times for bloodletting or for feats surpassing those of other great leaders.

He saw enemies everywhere—under his nose in his own family and, eventually, in the "conspiracy'' of the U.S., Israel, and Iran to destroy him and emasculate Iraq. There was enough truth to both suspicions for a paranoid to feed upon, particularly when his fears were supplemented by the tidbits his courtiers would serve up day to day to satisfy his appetite for intrigue.

"The turning point came ten days after he became president,'' observes Shaikhly, when Saddam had decided to remove all remaining potential sources of opposition. In a now legendary performance before hundreds of senior Baathists, he announced that a plot had been hatched against him by certain members of the Revolutionary Command Council. Sucking on a cigar and leering at his audience, Saddam held them all terror-stricken as he slowly, seemingly arbitrarily, selected twenty-two of his closest comrades to be taken outside and executed.

"Saddam allowed no one around him to have human dignity. His ministers, Tariq Aziz, senior members of the party—everyone had to show they were completely inferior to him, to his bodyguards and his family," recalls a former member of the Baath elite, Dr. Tahsin al-Muallah. And his inner circle has heard him explain why the Mercedeses he gives away to his ministers are always white: "Like throwing a bone to a dog."

According to a well-connected Iraqi businessman, Saddam's Uncle Khairallah stunned ministers of the Jordanian government when he made his first visit to Amman as the Iraqi leader's representative. In front of forty people at a reception in the Presidential Suite of the Intercontinental Hotel, Khairallah bragged that, "in Iraq, you know, before we make a man a minister, we sodomize him."

It is hard to believe that this was literally the case, but certainly those around Saddam who refused utter self-abnegation were punished. Former minister Shaikhly says that beatings of ministers were not uncommon. "He tried in every way to humiliate them."

Even amorous adventures became a tool for humiliation. "His valet was his pimp. The women had to be tall, blonde, thirty-six or -seven, even thirty-nine, and preferably married," Samir Hazzah told me. True to character, he enjoyed most taking what belonged to others. The woman would be plucked from her home while her husband was out, brought to a special house in the Mansur section used by Saddam for his assignations, and returned home the same night.

Yet the more Saddam terrorized his intimates, the more vigilant and nomadic he had to become to ensure his own survival. He moved from palace to palace all over the country, spending only a few days at each; within a thirty-one-mile radius in the North around Sarsanq, Kurdish residents report, there are no fewer than fifteen of Saddam's palaces, some with their own orchard and vegetable gardens for a protected food supply.

One particularly dazzling family feud was sparked by Saddam's desire for a "trophy wife."

Saddam reshuffles the power structure constantly, making sure that no single man will have the opportunity to challenge him. Uncle Khairallah, whose daughter, Sajida, had been married off to Saddam in 1963, was the theoretician behind the insistence on the rule of family, according to Shaikhly. "Look around you in the Gulf, Saddam," he advised his nephew. "King Hussein's family, the al-Sabah, the House of Saud —the only thing that can give you loyalty forever is family." Shaikhly contends that "this is why we saw power shift, first from party to clan—Tikritis—and after '79, as Saddam became more and more paranoid, from clan to immediate family."

"Saddam's mind is in another century," says former foreign minister el-Shibib. "If you apply modem thought processes to him, you will be confounded at figuring him out. But if you look at Byzantine politics—with its palace intrigues, poisonings, food tasters, marriages arranged to benefit the ruler, constant plots and counterplots—it's that kind of atmosphere in Saddam's Baghdad."

Indeed, no sooner had Saddam granted primacy to his family members than he began to use byzantine strategies to pit them against one another. One particularly dazzling family feud was sparked by Saddam's desire for a "trophy wife." From among the socially prominent women selected for him by his valet, Jajou, he secretly took Samira Shahbandar, a tall, blonde beauty from an important Iraqi family, as his second wife. Samira's husband was instructed to divorce her, and was rewarded with the chairmanship of Iraqi Airways.

When Sajida, the mother of Saddam's five children, learned of this secret marriage, she went wild. In the past, she had been quite successful in disposing of rivals, simply calling on Saddam's powerful half-brother Barzan, then chief of the intelligence service. She had persuaded Barzan to arrest an earlier mistress, force her husband to divorce her, and expel the woman to Turkey. But Barzan had been sent abroad, so Sajida turned to her older son.

With her jealousy driving her to a nervous breakdown, the story goes, Sajida wailed to Uday that their inheritance was threatened. Uday chose to rebuke his father by going to the quarters of Saddam's valet, next door to a party for Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's wife, and bludgeoning the man to death. A furious Saddam appeared on TV, ordering that his son stand trial for murder.

Iraqis were hard-pressed to explain this sudden sensitivity to human liquidation. Perhaps Jajou's master was simply incensed at the loss of a servant who'd done him twenty years of sordid favors. But several sources suggested that Saddam had had an intimate relationship with the valet. When Saddam brought Jajou into his personal retinue in the early 1970s, it raised eyebrows, since the man was neither a Muslim nor a Tikriti. "By the time Uday killed Jajou, they'd had almost a twenty-year relationship. Saddam may even have loved him," claims an Iraqi banker.

Following the valet's murder, Uday was sent to Switzerland; soon after, Saddam stopped accepting food from Sajida's table. After some months in disgrace, Uday was permitted to return home. Saddam, says a former official, seems in the end to take a perverse pleasure in his son's transgressions, seeing himself mirrored in his eldest child. He rehabilitated Uday by having him "unanimously re-elected" president of the Iraqi Olympic Committee.

"Uday is a carbon copy of his father," says the official. "He is rude and shows no respect for his father." Uday and his cousin Luay, the younger son of Khairallah, says former minister el-Shibib, had "the run of nightlife in Baghdad and Geneva." Night after night the boys roamed the discos, sitting with their coterie, encircled by empty tables, then by a ring of bodyguards. When feeling joyous, Uday would pull out his gun and shoot at random into the air— just like his father. When he wanted a degree, without the trouble of attending classes or taking exams, he simply appeared before the professor with his armed bodyguards—just like his father. (Uday graduated with a 99.5 average.) And when Uday merely pointed at a woman, she was forced to succumb to him—just as with his father.

One girl made the mistake of running out of a disco to escape Uday's clutches. An Iraqi exile watched as Uday jumped into his car and ran over the fleeing girl. Up until a few weeks before the war, Uday, who now holds a high post in Iraqi foreign intelligence and edits a newspaper called Babil ("Babylon"), was seen strutting around Yemen in a full-length ermine coat, a hooker on each arm.

Cementing a dynasty through family and intermarriage is a clear intent of President Hussein and his Tikriti clansmen. But Uday's claim to succession is in jeopardy, and not by accident. In 1983, a bitter quarrel erupted over the distribution of family power when Saddam's daughter Raghad asked for permission to marry a man named Hussein Kamel, who had enjoyed a meteoric rise, becoming chief of the president's personal security forces in only a few years. "Hussein Kamel was a nobody in the mid-seventies, a mere sergeant," says Dr. Shaikhly. But he was a cousin to Saddam on his stepfather's side and, as Samir Hazzah noted, "all those who are important begin as Saddam's bodyguards." The fanatically ambitious Kamel worked on Saddam's suspicions that his half-brother Barzan was becoming too powerful within Iraq and could not be trusted. Barzan fought back, insisting that Raghad's hand be given to his son.

"Saddam today is not afraid. He didn't disarm the Iraqi people, which means he has a fantastic system of control."

Saddam's wife sided with Barzan. "She didn't want her daughter to be given to someone completely dependent on Saddam," explains Tawfik Saleh. But Hussein Kamel won the day.

Saddam had successfully created a blood feud, ensuring he could play off the two branches of the family against each other. He relieved Barzan of his post as chief of intelligence, eventually sending him to Geneva, where he serves as ambassador to the U.N. His real role is to preside, from a family fortress called La Belle Fontaine, over Saddam's vast clandestine financial empire.

Hussein Kamel became minister of military industry and minister of oil, and was put in charge of defense procurement. Now minister of defense, and in control of the main income and commissions streams, he has become the second-most-powerful man in Iraq—and the biggest threat to Uday's ambitions. But Uday has his father's nerve. According to el-Shibib, he recently threatened on Iraqi TV that if anything happened to his father he would bum the whole country.

By the time he invaded Kuwait, Saddam had reached the breaking point that comes to all tyrants, when they have been so successful at eliminating people of substance from their entourage that there is no longer anyone with the capacity or inclination to tell them the truth they need to hear.

So, when Saddam announced his army's withdrawal from Kuwait on February 26, he had succeeded in making his most grotesque delusions of persecution a reality. And when he couldn't keep the country he stole, rather than give it back, he did everything in his power to destroy it.

What, then, has the West gained from its splendid show of military prowess? The liberation of Kuwait, but not likely that of Iraq, nor the leashing of Saddam. Few of the members of the Iraqi opposition with whom I spoke expected Saddam to fall. "I think another two years and you will see Saddam just as threatening as he was last summer," predicts the U.S. spokesman for the Kurds, Dr. Najmaldin Karim.

The wounded despot is very much alive and engaged in the repair of his killing machine. A defecting Iraqi scientist warns that Saddam could have a single nuclear bomb this year. And with both the Soviets and Western commercial concerns interested in helping to rebuild a formerly lucrative arms customer, it is unrealistic to think that he will not find willing trade partners. Saddam's political dexterity is evident in the maneuvering by Salah Omar Ali, the man the Saudis were backing to take his place. Ali, the same Tikriti who arranged the first public hangings when the Baath Party came to power, is suspected by savvy Iraqi exiles and intelligence sources of being a double agent—still loyal to the ruling circle around the dictator.

Even Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, who believes Saddam cannot long survive the challenge to his authority, has little hope for his country. "He will have to go eventually, but the disaster he can cause before he goes is monstrous." If Saddam Hussein can't have Iraq, he will destroy it.