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Americans love to hate a good bad guy.
Our greatest wars of the past century of course featured the greatest bad guys: Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, Yamamoto, the Kaiser. For Americans, these faces were the enemy; we fought to defeat them personally. We scrawled their names on our bombs, and we put their caricatures on our war posters. Maybe it's no coincidence that two of our less popular wars, Korea and Vietnam, involved frustratingly faceless opposition.
Our penchant for assigning a human face to evil has sometimes led the U.S. to overinflate the petty opponent of the moment. Some of our previous Public Enemy Number Ones now seem ridiculously puny. Manuel Noriega, anyone? Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas? Even the bloodstained Moammar Gadhafi proved over time to be more of a strutting flake than a bad guy of true, operatic proportion.
As for Osama bin Laden, it's true that he did serious damage to the U.S. in 2001, both physically and psychologically. And he still rates high on our bad-guy scale.
But any fair post-mortem shows that Osama was lucky, and he benefited plenty from our own lapses and indifference toward our national security. If circumstances had been slightly otherwise, today he would be just another crazy guy spouting off anti-U.S. rhetoric in a cave somewhere.
You bet, it would be satisfying to catch him - but it would be a lot more satisfying to see Osama's grandchildren voting in democratic elections and preaching human rights.
Which brings us to the significance of Saddam Hussein.
As long as the U.S. was going to find a bad guy to fight - a decision that remains a sore point for a sizable minority of Americans - Saddam certainly was the most deserving and the most dangerous. He was a tyrant and murderer of his own people, and he was a permanently destabilizing force in the Middle East.
Even if he didn't leave behind neat stacks of nerve gas with a note saying, "Dear W., here's the good stuff," he had used that sort of weapon against his own people in the past and was capable of doing it again.
One might complain that by invading Iraq, the U.S. trampled on world opinion, sowed new generations of hatred and now allows Bush-friendly corporations to profiteer. So Sunday's events were a welcome reminder of the upside. The reaction that unfolded upon Saddam's capture clearly conveyed the feeling that something fundamental had changed in Iraq and the Mideast - something bigger, even, than his mere physical expulsion from power earlier this year, or the deaths of his odious sons.
Lots of people in Iraq and elsewhere seemed to say, all right, now we can breathe a sigh of relief. Now it's really over, and we can celebrate. Hence the demonstrations in the streets of Baghdad, the spontaneous cheers erupting at Iraqi news conferences, the messages of congratulations coming in from around the world.
If the skeptics among us have used street images and world criticism to argue that the U.S. mission has been a failure, what should be concluded from Sunday? There was a nice moment at one of the Iraqi news conferences where a speaker shrugged and said, "It's a free country." Which was the whole point, after all.
Saddam himself did not look especially impressive. They caught him hiding in a dirt hole on a farm, his beard gray and straggly. One of the CNN anchors joked that it's hard to look imposing while being inspected for lice. It was quite a comedown for a man who fancied himself the descendant of the great kings of Babylon, ruler of the birthplace of human civilization, which one day would rise again ascendant. It would be a sweet irony if a free Iraq fulfilled Saddam's ambitions, after all.
President Bush struck the right note in his brief remarks, telling the people of Iraq it was the beginning of their freedom, then warning Americans that our work is hardly finished. He did not overly gloat at the capture of the individual, and he shouldn't have. That's another risk of overly focusing on a single bad guy - forgetting other important stuff. How we treat Saddam from here will be important, but not nearly as important to our future in the world as how we treat everybody else.