Saddam Hussein--’a Real Villain’ Troops Can Focus Their Hatred On : Military: Not since Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini in World War II has there been such an identifiable loathsome emblem.

EASTERN SAUDI ARABIA —  During World War II, American soldiers used to throw darts at boards bearing the faces of Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini. The German, Japanese and Italian strongmen were the embodiment of evil and the symbol of what the allies had set out to destroy.

American soldiers in Korea and Vietnam found no such symbols against which to vent their hostility, and that made their ultimate mission murkier. If World War II was, in Studs Terkel’s words, “the good war,” Korea and Vietnam were the wars in which there was an erosion of American public support. For soldiers and the public, both wars lacked a clear identifiable loathsome emblem.

“In Korea, Premier Kim Il Sung was a pretty anonymous character; most of us didn’t even know who he was,” said Leon Daniel, UPI’s chief of correspondents who fought in Korea and covered Vietnam and is covering Operation Desert Storm as a journalist.

Said Maj. Mike Healey, an F/A-18 Hornet pilot: “Ho Chi Minh was kind of a folk hero. The nice thing this time is we’ve got a real villain.”

Healey’s words are echoed by other military men and women throughout Saudi Arabia. To hear them talk, one would think the allied forces had gone to war against not a nation or an army but a single man, Saddam Hussein. Over and over again the GIs use Hussein’s name as the focus of what this war is all about.

“My own feeling is that this is a war of us against him, Saddam Hussein, rather than a war of us against them, the Iraqis,” said Marine Col. Jay Vesely. “Saddam has led his own nation to destruction.”

Said Capt. Aidis Zunde of the 82nd Airborne Division: “It helps to have a focus. It makes the mission clearer, the reason for being here clearer. And Saddam Hussein has become the focus.”

“I wouldn’t mind crawling across the border and doing open heart surgery on Saddam Hussein without anesthetic,” said Lt. Cmdr. Mike Mozzetti, a physician.

James F. Dunnigan writes in his book “How to Make War” that when a soldier believes he should be fighting, he has conviction. That conviction, combined with “super motivation, leadership and training have constantly proved the formula that produces victories.”

Hussein appears at least partly responsible for providing the allied soldiers with that conviction. “Damn, I hate that man Saddam for his leading his country to death,” said Cpl. Lee Welverton.

Indeed, Hussein has proved to be one of the allies’ greatest assets. His reputation is so sullied that even the anti-war movements in Europe and the United States are having a hard time overcoming the vileness that he represents.

“The big difference between this anti-war movement and the Vietnam one is the presense of a big, strong negative symbol in Saddam Hussein,” Robert Loevy, a Colorado College political scientist, told the Wall Street Journal. “It was possible to portray Ho Chi Minh as a native revolutionary working for independence. Saddam Hussein is armed with biological and chemical weapons and (is) very effectively presenting himself as a very bad guy.”

President Bush has worked hard--and effectively--at nurturing that image in the public’s mind. On numerous occasions he has held Hussein, not Iraq itself, responsible for the Gulf War, and he has described the war in the starkest of black-and-white terms, focusing on Hussein even when not mentioning him by name.

“The war,” Bush said recently, “has nothing to do with religion per se. It has on the other hand everything to do with what religion embodies: good versus evil, right versus wrong.”

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Bush’s top military commander in the Gulf region, carries the assessment a step further, delivering the ultimate insult one military man can make about another. Saddam Hussein, Schwarzkopf says, isn’t a military man; he is simply a terrorist.

Hussein’s record is difficult to defend, even for Arabs who admire his boldness in standing up to the West. Among the accusations:

He has had many of his closest advisers executed, used gas on his Kurdish minority, fired Scud missiles at civilian centers in Saudi Arabia and Israel, brutalized Kuwait with a vengeance not seen since the Pol Pot era in Cambodia, sacrificed half a million of his countrymen in a senseless eight-year war against Iran and left his army to defend itself--and die in large numbers--in the desert in order to satisfy his own need to achieve some sort of personal victory from Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

“This Saddam Hussein’s insane,” said Sgt. Steve Tafoya. “That’s what we call the guy around here--Saddam Insane.”

This article was written in part from correspondent pool reports cleared by the U.S. military.