MEGALOMANIAC

What tickles me is that presumably he is still alive and able to read and hear about his exorcism from the lives of all Iraqis.

When Iraqi children return to school this Saturday, they will no longer see Saddam Hussein's portrait in the classroom or start the day chanting of his heroic struggle against the snakehead of the devil that is America. But Mr. Hussein has still not quite been expelled.

New Saddam-free textbooks are being printed, but they are not expected to be available until November. So students will open their books and face a variation of that old test question: identify the object that does not belong with the rest. The correct answers will require tearing out full-page pictures of Mr. Hussein and drawing lines through the paragraphs about the Baath Party's Great March.

"We want the exercise to teach students and teachers that the days of fear are finished," said Fuad Hussein, an adviser to the Ministry of Education, who has been supervising the de-Baathication of every textbook, from first-grade readers to high-school physics texts.

The first-grade equivalents of Dick and Jane are Hassan and Amal, shown in one reader happily holding a portrait of Mr. Hussein. Their dialogue begins with Amal saying, "Come, Hassan, let us chant for the homeland and use our pens to write, `Our beloved Saddam.' "

Hassan replies: "I came, Amal. I came in a hurry to chant, `Oh, Saddam, our courageous president, we are all soldiers defending the borders for you, carrying weapons and marching to success.' "

Duly inspired, Amal exclaims, "Let us start our work without delay."

A third-grade reader features a photograph of Mr. Hussein stroking the cheek of an apparently terrified boy at a school that had been hit by a missile during the war with Iran. In the text, a father tells him the school was deliberately attacked by Iran's leader: "My son, Khomeini hates the children of Iraq because they will become men in the future and will defend the homeland."

Saddam Hussein's touch was heaviest in history (students learn that Iraq's wars were all just and ended victoriously) and in a class called Patriotic Education, which has been eliminated.

But nothing escaped his influence. The educator, Dr. Hussein, said the Iraqis who reviewed the 560 textbooks recommended changes in every single one.

The de-Baathicized books, prepared by United Nations agencies using American funds, will include nothing new in substance and simply leave blank pages where material was cut.

In the old books, geography is taught with maps showing an Arab homeland with no trace of Israel. An English textbook includes an essay by an Arab mother whose family is terrorized by "Zionist" soldiers.

Science books include Mr. Hussein's pronouncements mixed among the laws of nature.

Even mathematics had its political side.

Students learned arithmetic by adding 4 + 28 because April 28 is Mr. Hussein's birthday (an occasion once celebrated with cakes and dancing during four-hour-long parties at schools). They learned their multiplication tables by computing the casualty count of shooting down four American planes with three crew members each.

"We had to include him in every lesson plan or we'd be in trouble with the Baath Party," said Nada al- Jalili, an elementaryschool teacher at the Tigris School for Girls in Baghdad. "When we taught about bacteria in biology class, we explained that Saddam brought antibacterial soap and drugs into Iraq. Whenever his name was mentioned, it had be followed with `God protect him and keep him our president.' "