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The capture of a haggard Saddam Hussein, hiding in a farmyard cellar, came as great news to many:
--The millions of Iraqis brutally oppressed by the Iraqi dictator during his 35-year reign of terror;
--President Bush, whose troops finally hunted down the man his father had been unable to nab 12 years ago;
--Israel and neighboring Arab countries that no longer have to fear Hussein's bellicosity;
--And the 150,000 U.S. and other coalition troops hoping for a reduction, if not an outright end, to attacks by Husseins's supporters.
With his capture, "a symbol of the Iraqi resistance is gone," says Sandra Mackey, author of The Reckoning: Iraq and the Lesson of Saddam Hussein.
"I say symbolically because from the reports of the state he was in and how he'd been moving around, it's obvious there was no central control of the resistance. But obviously the idea that Saddam Hussein might come back was out there so it was important to capture him."
But Mackey and other expert warn that problems in Iraq are by no means over.
The country's economy, devastated by wars and sanctions, will take years to recover. Foreign terrorists as well as Iraqis opposed to the U.S. presence are apt to continue guerilla attacks, at least in the short term. And although Hussein's regime is gone, no one person or institution has yet emerged capable of holding together Iraq's many factions in a democratic manner.
The country's interim government, the Iraqi Goverining Council, was handpicked by the Americans and is largely made up of wealthy Iraqi exiles who lived comfortably abroad while their countrymen and women were suffering under Hussein's rule.
"We don't want a bunch of whiskey-drinkers running the country" is the way one Iraqi put it to me on my recent visit to the country. Instead, he and others favor a democratically elected president who has spent his entire life in Iraq and fully understands the trauma and terror of the Hussein years.
That's one reason Hussein is likely to be brought before a special war crimes tribunal in his own country instead of being tried in an international court elsewhere, as was the case with former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
"Iraq is a country in which you really need stability and for cultural reasons, part of that stability comes from seeking revenge and exacting revenge," Mackey says.
No matter where Hussein is tried, it should be in accord with the highest international standards of justice and fairness, says Phebe Marr, another Iraq expert. But one problem is that the sight of a former Arab leader on trial could stir Arab nationalism and inflame anti-Western sentiment.
"We shouldn't be under any illusion that people in the Arab world won't see this as a symbol of humiliation," she says. "The more publicity it gets, the more it will revive the old nationalistic juices we want to calm down."
Indeed, while many Iraqis rejoiced at the news of Hussein's capture, others were quiet and almost depressed.
This afternoon, I had an email from Brigadier Gen. Janis Karpinski, the only female U.S. commander in Iraq and the person in charge of the country's prison system.
Some Iraqis "are particularly angry because he gave up without any fight whatsoever," she wrote. "He has been telling Iraqis all along to fight until the bitter end, and he simply surrenders."