Suddenly, Saddam Again

By RICHARD CORLISS

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur finds his path blocked by the Black Knight, a belligerent fellow who happens to be no good at fighting. The Knight loses an arm, then another, then both legs to Arthur's superior swordsmanship. He is left in pieces on the ground, screaming to the departing King, "You yellow bastard, come back here and take what's coming to you!"

That was the image of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, bloodied but unbowed -- and unenlightened -- after his humiliation in the 1991 Gulf War, when a U.N. mission led by the U.S. drove his troops out of Kuwait and kindled a holocaust of as many as 100,000 Iraqis. Last week Saddam gave hints he wanted a rematch, massing 64,000 troops, including two Republican Guard units, on the Kuwaiti border. "It's pretty much the same scenario that unfolded two weeks before he invaded Kuwait," noted a senior Clinton Administration official. "It's unlikely they could reach Kuwait City, but they could certainly get across the border."

The U.S. is determined to keep that from happening. The Pentagon, in its sternest tones, announced that 4,000 U.S. troops would immediately be dispatched to Kuwait to beef up forces already in the area. The carrier U.S.S. George Washington and a clutch of cruise missile-carrying warships were moved into the Persian Gulf. Secretary of State Warren Christopher added a Kuwait stop to his Middle East tour this week to reaffirm U.S. support for the beleaguered emirate. And to avoid the sort of misunderstandings that may have led to the Gulf War, Bill Clinton issued a clear warning to Saddam: "It would be a grave error for Iraq to repeat the mistakes of the past or to misjudge either American will or American power."

Saddam, alas, is a slow learner who rarely gets the point of any lesson. Apparently his main intent in moving the troops was to pressure the U.N. into lifting its draconian sanctions on Iraq in a forthcoming vote. And he might have achieved this if he had just kept quiet. The U.S. and Britain were the only two permanent members of the Security Council bound to vote to sustain the sanctions. Russia wants Iraq to repay $6 billion in prewar military debts; France seeks to resume lucrative commercial ties with Baghdad; China has weapons to sell to Iraq. "You think they'd be on their best behavior when the U.N. has their fate in their hands," a Navy officer said, "but no, the Iraqis do just the opposite." The feisty speech given at the U.N. by Saddam's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz seemed to cinch the vote against the Iraqis. A U.N. official commented, "The Americans could not have had a better stroke of luck than Tariq Aziz's speech."

If the U.S. luck and the U.N. embargo hold, the pain in Iraq will continue, as will the internal pressure on Saddam. The country is crippled. Such basic goods as medicine and farm supplies cannot come in, and an annual $15 billion worth of oil cannot go out. Malnutrition is rampant; last month the government cut food rations in half. "The people of Iraq are being destroyed by the sanctions," says an Iraqi now living in the U.S. "The social fabric is being torn apart. Iraq has been wounded for four years, and nobody cares."

To stifle the discontent, Saddam has become more brutal. In June his secular regime applied Islamic punishments to lawbreakers: amputating a thief's right hand for a first offense, a foot for a second offense. In August it was decreed that an army deserter or anyone sheltering him would lose an ear.

A desperate citizenry might rebel; a demoralized army could conceivably fold. "Nobody wants to fight for Saddam anymore," says the expatriate Iraqi. "Four thousand Americans could march in and take Baghdad." But the deprivations may also have sapped any stirrings of revolt. "There is no energy to fight the regime," says Soli Ozel, an assistant professor of Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins. "People are just scrambling to find food. Saddam is more powerful than ever."

And as the U.S. tries to stare down Saddam, Saddam keeps an eye on U.S. foreign policy and draws encouraging conclusions. "He saw what the North Koreans got after creating a crisis," says a high-ranking Israeli military official. "He saw what the dictator in Haiti managed to get from Clinton. All Saddam wants to do is repeat the recipe." And to stay in power, unlike those who defeated him. As the Israeli notes, "The fact that Bush, Thatcher, Shamir and Gorbachev are all gone, while Saddam is in office, is evidence to him that he was right and they were wrong."

The U.S. hopes that tough talk and troop deployment will be enough. "Saddam needs to know he's going to get himself bloodied if he does something stupid," a top Central Command officer said. "And what he's doing now is looking increasingly stupid." But the man's stubbornness has been underestimated before. During the Gulf War, Colin Powell said of the Iraqi army: "First we are going to cut it off, and then we are going to kill it." But like the Black Knight, Saddam keeps on fighting. You can cut him up but you can't shut him up.

With reporting by Nina Burleigh and Mark Thompson/Washington, with other bureaus