By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published December 15, 2003
Other than Santa delivering all 538 electoral college votes, the Bush administration could not have gotten a better Christmas gift than the capture of Saddam Hussein.
And it marks a new beginning for Iraq's 25-million people, finally free of the man who had suppressed them for decades and turned one of the world's richest countries into an impoverished backwater.
"It's the symbolic end of the regime and it reduces the fear of his return," said Phebe Marr, an expert on Iraq. "The humiliating picture of him with the tongue depressor in his mouth shows this is the end of an era."
But make no mistake - Hussein's capture doesn't mean Iraq will emerge any time soon as a peaceful, prosperous, democratic nation.
Although Hussein's arrest may weaken resistance by his supporters, Iraqis opposed to foreign occupation are likely to continue attacks against the U.S.-led coalition. And if Iraq wasn't a magnet for anti-Western Islamic extremists before last spring's invasion, it almost certainly has become a center of terrorism since then.
The fall of Hussein and his Baath Party also leaves a power vacuum in a country whose many factions had long been held together by brute force. While the jockeying for leadership has been peaceful so far, no one has yet emerged as a candidate acceptable to a broad spectrum of Iraqis.
"All the problems are going to remain - the insurgency problem, the reconstruction problem, the transition problem," says Marr, a former instructor at the National Defense University. "It's gotten much bigger than Saddam - we shouldn't be under any illusions that now that we've got him, it's over."
An immediate issue is how to try and punish Hussein, one of the worst tyrants in modern history. During his 35 years in power, he executed hundreds of thousands of political opponents; gassed thousands of Iraqi Kurds; and launched disastrous wars against Iran and Kuwait.
The Iraqi Governing Council - the interim government appointed by the Americans - wants to bring Hussein before a special tribunal created just last week. That means he would be tried in Iraq by a court operating under at least parts of Iraq's criminal code, perhaps including the death penalty.
Human rights groups, though, argue against death and in favor of an international tribunal, such as that convened for former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
"Because its personnel would be selected by the United Nations rather than by Washington's surrogates, an internationally led tribunal is more likely to be seen as legitimate," Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch told the BBC.
Sandra Mackey, author of a bestselling book on Hussein, thinks Iraqis should try him as way of stabilizing a country where "seeking revenge and exacting revenge" are important parts of the culture.
"But the question is, who among the Iraqis should hold the trial?" she asks. "On the one hand, I think speed is of the essence; on the other hand it probably needs to wait for some group that is seen by Iraqis as having been chosen by them" and not the Americans.
However Hussein is tried, the sight of a former Arab leader in court may well arouse Arab nationalism and inflame anti-American sentiment.
"We shouldn't be under any illusion that people in the Arab world won't see this as a symbol of humiliation," Marr says. "The more publicity this gets, the more it revives old nationalistic juices we want to calm down."
Indeed, joy at Hussein's capture was by no means universal.
Some Iraqis "are particularly angry because he gave up without any fight whatsoever," Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, in charge of Iraq's prison system, said in an e-mail to the Times on Sunday. "He has been telling Iraqis all along to fight until the bitter end, and he simply surrenders."
Hussein's apparent willingness to cooperate could give the coalition valuable intelligence on who is behind the current attacks in Iraq and the source of money to finance them. But the fact he was found in such a bedraggled state suggests that he has not had much direct control over the insurgents recently.
Still on the loose is the No. 2 man in the regime, Izzat Ibrahim, thought to be the mastermind behind some of the recent violence against the coalition and Iraqis working with it. Even as Hussein's arrest was being announced, at least 17 people were killed Sunday when a car bomb exploded at an Iraqi police station.
"To say the insurgency is just going to fall apart isn't true," Mackey says. "In fact, opposition may increase in that there was a rationale to have the Americans there to be sure Saddam didn't come back to power. But now that he's gone, the people who are very sensitive to foreign occupation are not going to give up."
Hussein's capture also does little to ease the challenge of establishing a democratic government in Iraq. The Bush administration had hoped leaders would emerge from the governing council, many of whose members are former Iraqi exiles. But most Iraqis dislike the exiles, who lived comfortably abroad while they were suffering under Hussein's rule.
"We don't want these whiskey drinkers running the country," is the way Dakhel Ali, 60, of Baghdad put it.
But it will also be hard for Iraqis to settle on homegrown leaders in a nation riven by tensions among Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. Marr says it is important that any permanent government include Sunnis, who dominated Hussein's regime but now feel they are being shut out by Iraq's Shiite majority.
"I think it behooves the (coalition) and the governing council to try to give some of those Sunnis a stake in the new regime," Marr said. "Get rid of the diehards ... but try to hold out a carrot to those who are sitting on the fence and don't think their future lies in the new Iraq. That will help draw the sting out of this insurgency."
With Hussein's capture, America landed one big fish while another remains at large - Osama bin Laden. Underscoring the threat that al-Qaida and Islamic extremism still pose to global security, a bomb went off Sunday near the motorcade of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, one of America's closest allies in the war on terror.
"I'm increasingly convinced from what I see that Iraq has swept time, money and resources away from al-Qaida, and that al-Qaida is not gone," Marr says. "There are terrorist threats everywhere - East Asia, possibly the U.S. - and this is something we need to put a lot of intelligence efforts into."
