The World's Most Dangerous Man

The growing numbers of Soviet Jews emigrating to Israel and the continued violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and now in Israel itself, have inflamed the Arab world, and Hussein has suddenly returned to the conflict with Israel with a vengeance, hailed by his brethren as the only Arab leader willing to stand up to Israel.

A megalomaniac reminiscent of deposed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Hussein is no stranger to self-aggrandizement. Besides the ubiquitous posters of him around Baghdad, the city where Scheherazade once whiled away a thousand and one nights with her exotic tales, Hussein has taken to telling some tall tales of his own, styling himself in the image of the great Babylonian kings Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi. Like Ceausescu and Kim Il Sung, he also likes titles. Before becoming the "Sword of the Arabs," he was the "indispensable leader" and "historical leader."

And now he is equipped to be as good as his word. Hussein's nonstop shopping has bought him a fundamental change in the strategic balance of the Middle East. No longer can Israel readily consider a preventive strike, as it did in 1981, when its bombers destroyed the Iraqi nuclear plant at Osirak. And military analysts say that with its fleet of missiles constantly being improved, by the mid-1990s Iraq will be able to hit targets inside Israel without entering Israeli airspace. "Are we as a state and as a people ready for this challenge and able to deal with it?" Retired Maj. Gen. David Ivry, the director general of Israel's Ministry of Defense, asked recently. "In my opinion, No."

How Hussein has managed this transformation is as much a measure of his own ruthlessness as it is of the see-no-evil arms dealers around the globe, and of their respective governments that, almost every time the capacious pockets of Iraq opened up, offered a free and friendly hand to make sure deals got done.

With French assistance, Iraq has built an entire electronics complex and can now construct its own integrated electronic circuits for use in missile-guidance systems and other military applications.

In the U.S., as elsewhere, the motive for helping Iraq get weapons has been greed. When Iraq was at war with Iran, the official U.S. policy was to "tilt" toward Iraq. But that did not mean U.S. companies could sell weapons to Iraq, which was designated by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism. Unfortunately, the legal prohibitions never seemed to amount to much.

Sleeping policemen. In 1982, with an O.K. from the U.S. Commerce Department, Hughes Aircraft Company sold Iraq 60 small, bubble-topped helicopters for $25 million. The middleman was Iraq's most prolific arms broker, a genial Lebanese named Sarkis Soghanalian. In 1985, Soghanalian brokered another deal, this time for 26 McDonnell-Douglas-Hughes choppers worth $27.4 million, and former Atty. Gen. John Mitchell assisted with the transaction. Again, Commerce approved.

The holes in the U.S. net were everywhere. In 1985, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta (CDC) sent three shipments of something called West Nile Fever virus to Iraq. The virus causes wrenching nausea and mild fever, and it had infected two Israeli military installations. CDC officials note that it kills only 1 percent of those it afflicts, and they say they sent the virus to Iraq because they knew the doctor who requested it and believed it would be used for research. The CDC made no attempt to verify that, however, and congressional investigators inquired whether the virus might have been used in Iraq's biological-weapons program. In any event, the CDC has since re-examined its criteria for filling such requests, doctors there say.

Occasionally, but only with great effort, some of the holes in the U.S. net were plugged. In 1986, a Pentagon official named Stephen Bryen learned of a shipment of large analog computers to Iraq's Saad-16 missile-development complex. Commerce said the computers had no military use and approved the shipment. "We got hold of the advertising literature [for the computers]," Bryen says, "and it bragged about their military applications." It would take a year, but Bryen finally succeeded in blocking the shipment.