NEWS ANALYSIS : Iraqi’s Bid to Be a Model Arab Sours : Mideast: Even before seizure of nuclear triggers, the image of a progressive state was fading. Now Hussein has reverted to belligerence.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, hungering for an image as a model Arab statesman, has reverted to characteristic belligerence as his autocratic regime has been caught in a maelstrom of international controversies.

“Aggressions . . . conspiracies,” he labeled this week’s accusations that Iraqi agents were foiled in an attempt to smuggle U.S.-made nuclear-detonator devices to Baghdad.

“Lowly interference in our internal affairs,” his government declared two weeks ago of Britain’s sharp denunciation of the Iraqi execution of a British reporter accused of spying.

Hussein successfully rallied Arab support in rejecting Western outrage over the execution of Farzad Bazoft, a correspondent for the newspaper, The Observer, who was accused of trying to gather military intelligence for Britain and Israel. But the evidence was lost in a post-execution propaganda offensive designed to paint Britain as an oppressor of the Arab people.

“The conviction is growing daily in the Arab world and internationally that Britain’s rabid anti-Iraqi campaign is merely a new link in the chain of media and psychological pressure being exerted by Zionist circles and their followers to slander Iraq, its historic victory and its scientific advancement,” said Al-Thawra, the newspaper of Hussein’s ruling Baath Party.

The “historic victory,” Iraq’s forced truce with non-Arab Iran in 1988 after eight years of warfare, is the cloak that Hussein has worn for the past two years as he reaches for respectability. Under the mantle of victor, he received a state visit from Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, an uneasy ally in the war. He then presided over the formation of the Arab Cooperation Council, an economic union joining Iraq with Egypt, Jordan and Yemen, taking his place with moderate Arab leaders.

At home, he poured borrowed billions into postwar reconstruction and put out bids to European governments and investors to help develop a modern economy. The Persian Gulf states and their Western supporters acknowledged, with some trepidation, that Iraq was the new kingpin of the oil-rich region.

Portraits of Hussein wearing Arab dress replaced the military images displayed during the Persian Gulf War. Genealogies surfaced in Iraq tracing the president’s lineage back to the kings of Babylon, and even to Mohammed himself. On this historical footing, Hussein would be the man to make Iraq the epitome of a progressive Arab state.

But even before the nuclear devices and Bazoft cases, the image began to go awry. The investments did not roll in. Iraq insisted on favorable terms and easy credits, while the Europeans--including France, its major wartime supplier--wanted some structure for paying off Iraq’s massive foreign debts.

Politically, the Arab Cooperation Council, which Hussein wanted as a vehicle for prominence, has become an organization of little action, and what profile it provides has been assumed by Hosni Mubarak, president of a resurgent Egypt, who did nothing for Hussein’s esteem when Cairo resumed ties with Syria, Baghdad’s longtime rival.

Iraq’s deep military relationship with the Soviet Union has been shaken by the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, and Hussein backed the losing horse in Lebanon, supporting Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun, the renegade Christian leader, who has now lost control over his own enclave.

Hazem Saghiyeh, an Arab analyst writing in the London-based Lebanese daily Al-Hayat, wrote recently that the Iraqi leader had abandoned his ostensibly progressive view on women’s rights and other social issues and turned back toward a repressive approach that had marked his police-state rule.

As an example, Saghiyeh noted a recent dictate of Iraq’s ruling Revolutionary Command Council saying Iraqi men would no longer face jail for killing close women relatives, or their lovers, for committing adultery. The ruling was portrayed, he noted, as a way of maintaining “moral standards,” but one that might have been expected from Iran, the fundamentalist society over which Hussein claimed his “historic victory.”