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Worthwhile article:

The ideology behind the thuggery by David Brooks

(excerpts from page 2)

That style of prose, with its abstract categories, oracular tone, and twisted logic, can be found in party documents from Stalin's Soviet Union to Mao's China. Nonetheless, Tariq Aziz is right. The Baath party is not quite like the Communist parties. It bears stronger resemblance to the Nazi party because it is based ultimately on a burning faith in racial superiority. The revolution, in Saddam's terms, is not just a political event, as the Russian or French revolution was a political event; it is a mystical, never-ending process of struggle, ascent, and salvation.
As you read through Saddam's speeches and declarations, it is impossible to miss the Aflaqian tones and messages. Saddam gets fevered whenever he discusses the subject of the Arab volk. For example, in a speech to the Iraqi people last year, Saddam declared, in a characteristic outburst, "You are the fountain of will power and the wellspring of life, the essence of earth, the sabers of demise, the pupil of the eye, the twitch of the eyelid. A people like you cannot but be, with God's help. So be as you are, and as we are determined to be. Let all cowards, piggish people, traitors, and betrayers be debased."
He has extremist expectations for the Arab nation because he believes it has been assigned by God an eschatological mission. "We can state without hesitation that our nation has a message," he told an interviewer. "That is why it can never be an average nation: Throughout our history our nation has either soared to the heights, or fallen into the abyss."
In this mystical form, Saddam's pan-Arab zeal has managed to survive the death of pan-Arabism as a practical political project. Saddam's historical frame of reference is much wider. He leaps back to ancient glories and imagines future supremacy 500 or 1,000 years away. He fills his speeches with references to Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin, and one always gets the sense that he doesn't see them as distant figures, but as living presences, revived in him for the purpose of carrying forward the Arab spirit.
The inferiority of other peoples is also a frequent refrain. In one interview Saddam said that Arabs should never be Communists because there is nothing they could profitably absorb from a European idea, though it is perfectly acceptable for Africans or other inferior races to adopt communism as their creed:
"What does an African in Rhodesia have to lose when he adopts Marxism, since he does not have the historical depth or the intellectual heritage of the Arab nation, a heritage which offers all the theories necessary for a life of change and progress. The Arab nation is the source of all prophets and the cradle of civilization."

(Nice dose of an islamofascist sense of superiority, but there's plenty more to digest there...)