Suddenly, Saddam Again

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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.