Peter Arnett, the CNN International Correspondent who has spent as much time in Iraq as any foreign journalist, in a recent dispatch tried to analyze the motives of Saddam Hussein.

He of course is not alone, the State Department and Foreign Offices around the world have all tried to come up with explanations for Saddam's so-called irrational behavior.

Questions are obvious, the answers have been tentative at best. Is he mad, a megalomaniac, completely out of touch with the "real world"? Why is he spending billions on lavish palaces, whilst his people starve? The experts come up with very non satisfying answers. One actually went so far as to make the following statement.

"He has believed for many years that he belongs up there in the pantheon of great socialist leaders: Mao Tse-tung, Castro, Tito. But until the Gulf crisis, he had been overlooked."

Where do they get this stuff?

The fact is that Saddam above all is a student of history, particularly Babylonian and Assyrian history. He sees himself as the inheritor of a great tradition and his obligation to carry on where the greatest of his ancestors left off.

Above all he models himself on one of the greatest, Nebuchadnezzar II and all his actions confirm that analysis.

Nebuchadnezzar II (Nebuchadrezzar II 604-562 BC) you will recall is the great Babylonian King who destroyed Solomon's Temple and took the remnants of the Children of Israel who had not already been exiled by the Assyrians, back to Babylon. Thus we see the first reason for Saddam's obsession with Israel which has nothing to do with either Islam, nor his State's proximity to the Jewish State. Saddam after all began his career as a secular socialist, a member of the Ba'ath Party which at the most paid lip-service to Islam.

Let us look further into the life of King Nebuchadnezzar who is described in the following way by "The Cambridge Ancient History", vol. III page 212.

".......(he) was a vigorous and brilliant commander, and physically as well as mentally a strong man, fully worthy of succeeding his father. He was to become the greatest man of his time in the Near East, as a soldier, statesman and AN ARCHITECT (emphasis mine)."

Much has been said about Saddam's lack of knowledge of the world. However it is often forgotten that he obtained his law degree at the University of Cairo and his rise up the ranks of the military, considering he was just a country boy from the provinces ( he was born in Tikrit in 1937) was not due solely to his ruthless style.

It is somewhat ironic that much of what we know about Nebuchadnezzar comes from the Bible. The King was one of the great builders of history but his own inscriptions are somewhat sparse. Jeremiah was to prophesy about this King:

"All the nations shall serve him, and his son and his son's son, until the time of his own land shall come." Jeremiah 27:7.

We will spend some time in later lectures discussing the Babylonian exile and its ramifications, suffice it to say that the exploits of Nebuchadnezzar had and have a profound effect on how Saddam views the world in general and Israel in particular. Ancient Iraq eventually conquered Egypt, and all of the Near East was in the control of the Great King by the time he was an old man.

Unlike many of Kings in the ancient world, Nebuchadnezzar was not one to keep extensive archives nor to boast of his exploits in great inscriptions, instead he was the pre-eminent architect and builder of history. He built many magnificent palaces and temples. His reconstruction of Babylon was extolled far and wide and his magnificent Hanging Gardens were regarded as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. His temples built mainly for the god Marduk were spread around the country. In Borsippa, Sippar, Larsa, Ur, Dilbat, Baz and Uruk he built the most magnificent of edifices and on each brick he had his name inscribed.

It is no wonder that Saddam has also undertaken a massive building programme unsurpassed since the time of the great King. He too has his name inscribed on the bricks and tiles and marbles that he uses to adorn his palaces. This is not a man building magnificent homes, this is a man obsessed with emulating his ancestor.

A few quotes from the great historian Rogers will round out the profile of the King:

• "A man of blood and iron."
• "His punishment of Zedekiah is to be placed with the very worst instances of savagery in all that history."
• "He was, however, careful to pay homage to gods many and lords many in different cities of his empire, and to these, as we have seen, he likewise dedicated temples."
• "His building operations were so extensive that in this particular he outranks all who preceded him, whether in Assyria or Babylonia."
• "For the most part these works were beneficent, though the execution of them must have cost much human life and terrible suffering of fatigue and oppression."