But now at least four of the huge, walled, luxurious palace complexes of Saddam Hussein have been broken wide open to the world's gaze by the war, and what they reveal stands in stark contrast to the reality outside.

Journalists and soldiers, dusty and unwashed after weeks on the battlefield, have been gob-smacked as they entered the opulent properties.

Pushing past oversized doors inside the buildings, marble staircases join floors of vast rooms decorated with intricate stained glass ceilings and woodwork.

Conference salons give on to ballrooms, and on to other rooms, many with big television sets. Bathrooms have gold fittings. Bay windows give wide river views.

Vaulted ceilings dwarf the ordinary mortals now tramping around under them in their sweaty clothes, while portraits of the Iraqi president look on.

There is little furniture, but what pieces remain are baroque tributes to an elegant, aristocratic age that Iraq has not known in a long, long time.

The US defence department said Monday that its 3rd Infantry Division had entered two of Saddam's palaces in Baghdad, while US Lieutenant Colonel Peter Bayer said a third, near Baghdad's airport, had been secured.

There are believed to be more than 30 palaces in the capital, some of which were used as residences for Saddam and his family.

A British reporter embedded with British troops in Iraq's main southern city of Basra, Sky Television's David Bowden, said another palace there had also been stormed.

"There is not a stitch of furniture in this whole house -- nobody has lived here for a very long time," he said as he wandered along huge hallways with his camera crew, their footsteps echoing on the marble floors.

Outside, ornamental lakes inhabited by ducks and containing empty rowboats had a mirage-like quality that was only enhanced by the lush rose gardens and the statues that sit around them.

Another Sky Television reporter, Colin Brazier, followed US troops into a palace complex in Baghdad.

"It's an extraordinarily decadent structure," he said. "Some of the ornamentation we have seen is straight out of 'Doctor Strangelove'."

Another British reporter, Tim Butcher of the Daily Telegraph newspaper, described the decoration as "dictator kitsch" and said there were no personal items left in one of the capital's palaces.

US and British officials have long voiced suspicion that the palaces have been used to hide Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, but rudimentary searches of the few in coalition hands have so far turned up nothing.

What the properties do highlight, though, is the glaring contrast between the lavish lifestyle enjoyed by Saddam and his entourage, and the hand-to-mouth existence of most of Iraq's 26 million people.

Captain Oliver Lee, operations officer with British Royal Marines in Basra, said: "It's fairly striking -- the rich-poor divide -- particularly having just driven through the outskirts of Basra and seeing the extraordinary poverty there."

That gap prompted many Iraqis to gather around the gates of the palaces, trying to get in to continue the limited looting that briefly followed their capture by US and British troops.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard on Tuesday called for the coalition forces to spare the presidential palaces so they could serve as a "reminder" of Saddam's tyranny.

"To see that kind of opulence from this character and the sort of treatment meted out to a lot of his own people, I think it does drive home to a lot of the public who may have had some doubts we weren't dealing with a regime here of ordinary brutality," he said in a radio interview in Australia.

"They shouldn't destroy those palaces, they should be preserved and people should be reminded of what the people of Iraq have been freed from," he said.

SPACE.WIRE