NEWS ANALYSIS : Hussein Down but Not Out as He Rebuilds Iraq Regime

BAGHDAD, Iraq — He’s still here, the man with the broom mustache and the black beret, Saddam Hussein hanging onto power amid the rubble of a ruined country.

While the Iraqi president will never say it, some top Baghdad officials admit privately that the invasion of Kuwait was a colossal mistake. Almost no leader elsewhere in the world could survive a disaster of this magnitude. But Hussein has.

The U.S.-led victory in the Persian Gulf War cut him down to size and contained his ambitions in the Middle East. But Hussein is still the man in Iraq.

And week by week, he is putting his regime back together, getting the security network out on the streets, publicly chastising Arab Baath Socialist Party governors and mayors for losing control of the Iraqi people in the twin insurgencies that gave the 54-year-old strongman his first real threat to staying in office.

Despite political and economic pressure from the West, there seems little chance that Hussein will not survive as the ultimate power within his country, if not beyond its borders.

“The people are tired, they’ve had it, they throw up their hands,” said a Baghdad-based diplomat, one of the few still here. “But what can they do? I find it hard to believe there could be another uprising in this country. The people suffer, not the army, not the Baath Party. They still have their stocks, their Black Label Scotch, their Rothman cigarettes, their free cars and homes and special shops.

“The U.S. government,” he said, “is wrong to hope for a military coup.”

Nor, he added, is there any likelihood that Hussein would step behind the throne in favor of one of the relatives he has gathered around him at the pinnacle of power. In Iraq, the diplomat pointed out, “sons, half-brothers, cousins and brothers-in-law do not succeed.”

When a leader falls, those around him go, too.

“There’s always the possibility there might be a Brutus out there,” the diplomat said, citing what he sees as the only possibility that Hussein might not maintain his hold in Iraq. (Over the centuries, the end has come violently for all but a handful of rulers in Baghdad. A typically gruesome example was Nuri Said, who in 1958 was tied to a car bumper and dragged through the city’s streets until only a hand was left at the rope’s end.)

Hussein and his men, if humbled and frustrated before by the effect of international economic sanctions, have begun to speak out again. Their talk is defiant.

“The isolation of Iraq is a fact,” Abdul Razzak Hashemi, minister of higher education, told reporters in his new offices here. “But how much of this isolation is related to the U.N. resolutions? How much is related to the blackmail of Mr. Bush and Mr. Major?”

When, he demanded, will President Bush and British Prime Minister John Major--who have insisted that Hussein must fall before the crippling sanctions are lifted--realize “that Iraq is not the Island of Seychelles or the Ivory Coast?”

“Who gave you the right to say what (political) system is good for Iraq?” asked Hashemi, Iraq’s chief European spokesman during the Gulf crisis, when he was ambassador to Paris. “The Iraqi government wants to deal with the international community, based on international law. If you want to put on conditions that affect my integrity, my future, I will wait. Are we going to be able to last? We are a surviving nation. We are going to last.”

Hashemi and other officials in Baghdad have conceded to the cease-fire demands of the U.S.-led coalition that crushed the Iraqi army. They grudgingly have acknowledged the allied havens in the Kurdish north. But they have insisted in the weeks since the war that Iraq deserves a clean slate, a status quo ante Aug. 2, 1990 (a return to the situation that existed before Iraq invaded Kuwait.)

Iraq, Hashemi said, wants “to open a new page in international relations.”

Hussein, officials in Baghdad note, has promised political reforms, pluralistic politics, free elections and a free press. Baghdad is dealing now with the Kurds on a broad autonomy plan. But, officials say, reforms will take time; the ruling Baathists are developing formulas for a new constitution, maybe next year.

Diplomats and other analysts who long have scrutinized Hussein say his Cabinet reshuffles and promised reforms are illusory. There have been parliamentary and Kurdish elections under Hussein. But no candidate went on the ballot without Baghdad’s approval, leading to the epithet “tame Kurds,” applied to those who administer the autonomous zone.

All power also remains in the hands of the Baathists, a party ostensibly dedicated to pan-Arabism, socialism and secularism. But on its bottom line, it is a revolutionary party that is also determined not to slip. Its chances aren’t bad, diplomats say.

“Saddam is quite strong,” said an envoy with special insight to the leadership. “He controls the situation. The army is with him. There may be some discontent and opposition, but everyone knows very well the regime’s methods in dealing with opposition. The security apparatus is completely intact. It did not have to go to the front. The party, the eyes and ears of the government in the provinces, is in good shape.”

The only acknowledged time bomb is the economy. Under the economic sanctions, Iraq cannot sell its oil, and there is no other revenue to rebuild the country. Inflation is soaring in Baghdad. The rich and the connected can hold out. But the poor are living hand-to-mouth.

A well-placed Iraqi source accused Washington of using the sanctions and the Kurds as tools to destabilize the Hussein regime. A deal with the Kurds, he predicted, will lead to similar demands for reforms from other sectors.

The insurgencies of the Kurds in the north and, particularly, the Shiite Muslims in the south were frightening to the Sunni Muslim heartland, where Hussein has his base of power, another analyst said. Neither the Sunnis nor the Kurds want an ascendancy of the Shiites and their fundamentalist brand of Islam, which might be the result of free elections, since they are estimated to be 60% of the country’s 18 million people. (They do lack the Kurds’ clearer political leadership.)

“The Iraqis are so used to a strongly controlled system, people shocked by the rebellion in the south fell back on it,” the analyst said. “They were frightened and don’t see an alternative. They don’t know how to take initiative.” In the top-down rule of Hussein’s Iraq, decisions at the lower levels are frozen. A mistaken judgment can jeopardize an administrator’s privileged position.

In Baghdad, a city that worked just 10 months ago, opinions about the war and the president are mixed. An office manager on Sadoun Street, the main commercial thoroughfare, said, “Kuwait was a mistake, a big mistake.”

But, he added, “Do you know an Arab leader who left office after a mistake?”

He estimated that 70% to 80% of the Baghdadis still back Hussein, telling a reporter: “You don’t realize the changes he made here. Iraq was not a developed country when he came to power. He built the roads, he fixed the phone system.”

But now the phones have been broken again, this time by allied bombing. The roads are checkered with fallen bridges. How does Hussein answer for this?

“Well, we’re waiting,” the office manager said. “Bush has the magic stick,” the power to lift the sanctions. “When do you think he’ll do it?” the man said, echoing a question foreign reporters hear often in Iraq.

Few Iraqis wanted to speculate on how their president might be relieved of power. But some complained that the United States had let them down. The U.S. forces “should have come to Baghdad and finished the job,” one said.

Another typified the Iraqi majority. As related by a diplomat, an old woman at a prewar dinner party listened to speculation that Iraqis would be reduced to riding donkeys because the American planes would knock out the refineries.

And where would they find enough donkeys? someone asked. “We are the donkeys,” the woman said.

“I thought about it,” the diplomat said, “and then it came to me. The donkey is the only animal that takes abuse without striking back.”