After decades of violence against his own people and neighbours, Saddam Hussein is finally in custody. Lara Marlowe, who reported the Iraq war from Baghdad, assesses the bloody career of the dictator and what role he might yet play.
Could it really be him? The dishevelled man on the television screen looked more like a homeless tramp than a fierce dictator.
The American medic picked over his scalp, searching for hair implants, not lice; part of the identification process. There was Saddam Hussein, the man who bullied and terrorised his people and the whole region for 3½ decades, having his teeth examined like a horse at a fair. Dental records, again for identification. Saliva for a DNA sample, to be matched with his sons' Uday and Qusay, killed by US forces on July 22nd.
Then his US captors shaved him. Before and after photos. There could be no doubt. The same broad nose and moustache, the dimple in the chin, the hooded, dark eyes. Furthermore, Gen Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US forces in Iraq, said: "We did get a positive identification from some of our other detainees."
The Americans didn't say where they held him, but Saddam Hussein was believed to be imprisoned at Baghdad airport. Imagine the reunion with Tariq Aziz and Taha Yassin Ramadan, Saddam's brothers in blood, who according to legend, joined him in the founding act of the regime, the firing squad execution of 60 Baath party officials in the basement of a conference hall in 1979.
Did Saddam's former top acolytes greet him with the words "Mr President"? Did the fallen Baathists embrace before their US jailers?
Tikrit was the only place he felt safe. He fled there once before, in 1959, after participating in a failed assassination attempt against Gen Abdel Karim Kassem. Tikrit, where he was beaten by his stepfather as a child, sold water melons at the train station and stoned stray dogs for fun. The roots of Saddam's cruelty no doubt lie in the 1940s, in the dusty streets where he wandered barefoot and later formed a gang that mixed petty crime with sedition.
But even Tikrit betrayed him in the end. Someone told the Americans where he was hiding. It took them 1½ hours to act on the tip-off. The farmhouse yielded nothing. Then the "raider brigade" spotted a hole, camouflaged with bricks and dirt. An Arab satellite station reported that Saddam was betrayed by the first of his two wives, his cousin Sajida.
Perhaps Sajida never got over Saddam's taking a second bride, Samira, who bore him his only surviving son, Ali. Perhaps she objected to the murder of her sons-in-law, Hussein and Saddam Kamel, who were married to her daughters Raghid and Rana. Maybe she blamed her husband for the terrible deaths of Uday and Qusay in Mosul last summer.
Asked whether Saddam Hussein's wife turned him in, Gen Sanchez merely said: "Rumours". His location was reportedly revealed by a family member.
Who will collect the $25 million reward promised by Washington? Under heavy guard last night, could Saddam have guessed that even Tikrit, the home town upon which he lavished money and government jobs, marked his capture with joy shooting and street celebrations?
Gen Sanchez described his prize as "talkative". The adjective was fascinating. About what? Will Saddam provide the US and British governments with the evidence they so badly need to prove they weren't lying? What will he say about links between Baathist insurgents and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda? If Saddam would tell interrogators where he hid those weapons of mass destruction, it would be the shiniest ornament on George Bush's Christmas tree.
In the dictator's hidey-hole, barely large enough to sleep in, there were no WMDs, just two AK-47 assault rifles, a pistol and $750,000 in used $100 bills.
So much for tales that Saddam escaped from Baghdad in the Russian ambassador's car. He had been rumoured to have fled to Minsk or Damascus. He would never allow himself to be taken alive, his official interpreter swore. And there he was, the man who compared himself to the Prophet Mohamed, Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin, a docile prisoner, opening his mouth for the medic, looking almost relieved to have been removed from his hole, captured without a single shot being fired.
This was the man who kept building palaces - 20 in all - during more than a decade of UN sanctions. And here he was, humiliated, filmed in violation of the Geneva Convention. In this case, the US perhaps had a valid argument: how many Iraqis would believe he had been captured if they didn't see the pictures? But the video served another purpose. America is all-powerful, it said.
Look, Osama and the Ayatollahs. Look, cheeky dictators everywhere. This is what happens to those who defy us.
Perhaps their "talkative" prisoner is now explaining to US officers what his role was in attacks against them. Commentators speculated that he was too busy hiding to have directed operations. His number two, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was mistakenly reported to have been captured near Kirkuk at the beginning of December. Mr al-Douri, like Taha Yassin Ramadan and Tariq Aziz, took part in Saddam's massacre of Baathist plotters back in 1979, and is now believed to be issuing orders to the insurgents.
It was not immediately clear whether Saddam lived in the hole all the time or moved around the Sunni Triangle in the white and orange taxi that was found in the farmyard. US forces had for several months said they were "acting on the assumption" that he was moving in the area of Ramadi and Tikrit, a hundred kilometres or so north-west of Baghdad.
The low technology used by the Baathists has worked to their advantage. Saddam so feared assassination by the Americans that he had not used a telephone since the 1991 Gulf War. It is possible, as separate sources told the AFP news agency and Le Monde newspaper, that he held a meeting in Ramadi on November 8th - the same day that the head of the US Central Command, Gen John Abizaid, met tribal leaders on a US base there.
In an interview published on December 8th, a man describing himself as "one of Saddam Hussein's followers, the leader of a tribe involved in the guerrilla war", told AFP that the August 19th bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was carried out by Baathists.
Twenty-two people died in that attack. "Saddam Hussein gives instructions and those who carry them out choose their targets," the source told AFP. "Those who attacked the UN were thinking about 13 years of suffering by Iraqis, created by international sanctions." Since October 9th, an Internet site called al-Moharrer ("the Liberator") has published weekly tallies of "resistance" attacks against occupation forces.
"Directed by the Baath party and its secretary general, President Saddam Hussein, this national liberation movement is going to throw occupation forces out of Iraq, the united fatherland of all Iraqis," the site says.
It claimed responsibility for the October 27th bombing of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Baghdad, which killed 12 Iraqis including 10 passers-by, and the November 12th attack against Italian forces in Nassirya.
US officials have long believed that former Baathists carry out most of the attacks in Iraq. French military intelligence sources, quoted by Le Monde's defence correspondent, Jacques Isnard, attribute 80 per cent of attacks to Baathists and 20 per cent to Islamist and nationalist groups, some of whom are loosely affiliated with al-Qaeda. If this is true, Saddam's arrest should mean less violence against US forces. Conversely, it could inspire Saddam's followers to stage dramatic attacks, to show that they will continue without their leader.
At the end of November, Gen Abizaid estimated the number of former Baathists fighting against the occupation at 5,000. Mr Michael O'Hanlon, a defence expert at the Brookings Institute in Washington, has suggested they may number up to 15,000, composed mainly of former Fedayeen Saddam, the militia founded by Uday Saddam Hussein, and the special Republican Guard.
But analysts also believe that many former Baathists were disillusioned with Saddam and in any case did not envisage his return to power. Their chief motivation is fear of what they see as a US-Shia and US-Kurd alliance against Iraqi Sunnis.
At the end of the holy month of Ramadan, Saddam Hussein made his last tape recording, exhorting his followers to strike "even before the Americans, the agents who work for them".
As US forces became more inaccessible, the insurgents have turned against the Iraqi police force which the US is training and members of the Governing Council. Like a blow from Saddam's prison cell, a bomb outside a police station at Khaldiya, outside Baghdad, killed 17 policemen yesterday.
"We believe attacks will continue for some time," said Gen Sanchez yesterday, adding that Iraq would nonetheless be a "much safer and more secure environment".
In recent months, some Iraqis predicted that Saddam's arrest would actually strengthen the "resistance", because Islamists and nationalists who hated the dictator were reluctant to join in a war that held the slightest chance of bringing him back to power.
The non-Baathist "resistance" uses names such as "The Army of Mohamed" and "The Iraqi National Liberation Front". In interviews, members of these groups have acknowledged receiving assistance from the few hundred Arabs fighters who stayed on in Iraq after Saddam's fall, from the Lebanese Hizbullah and the militia loyal to the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
The Baathists seem to have attacked more indiscriminately than the non-Baathists, in the belief that by creating chaos and driving foreigners out, they can make Iraq ungovernable. Those calling themselves "the true resistance, who attack the Americans", appear to have a wider following. They have condemned attacks that kill Iraqi civilians.
Washington is aware of the danger that a non-Baathist "resistance" could flourish now that Saddam is in prison, consolidating an underground political structure and gaining in popularity.
Much will depend on the way Saddam's trial is conducted. Only last week, the Governing Council announced it had established a tribunal to try him and leading members of his regime for crimes against humanity and crimes against the Iraqi people.
Iraq's history is one of political violence and the US was wise to capture Saddam alive. If it had killed him like his sons in July, it risked making a martyr of him. Had the US allowed him to be torn apart by the mob as previous rulers were, they would have doomed any possibility of creating due process of law.
But Iraq remains a place of great uncertainty. Saddam Hussein might attempt suicide in captivity. There is no doubt that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, perhaps millions, would like to see him dead. Merely transporting him to a courthouse means a risk of assassination. And following the murder of a judge in Najaf and a member of the Governing Council, it may be difficult to find lawyers and judges eager to participate in his prosecution.
Gen Sanchez said Saddam's arrest represented "a defining moment in the new Iraq, the beginning of the reconciliation of the people of Iraq, closure . . . We now have final resolution. The chapter of Saddam's reign of terror has closed forever." The British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, said democracy was sure to follow.
The capture of Saddam is surely a turning point in the occupation of Iraq. Eight months after he was overthrown, the US has been given a symbolic new start, an opportunity to demonstrate that it is a liberator rather than occupier.
In an interview with the New York Times last week, the commander of Iraq-bound US marines based at Camp Pendleton in California said he had learned from others' experience: his men would not use the Israeli-like tactics of encircling Iraqi villages with barbed wire and destroying buildings believed to be used by the "resistance".
Perhaps US forces will take more care not to kill Iraqi civilians.
Perhaps they will concentrate on restoring law and order, water and electricity supplies, getting the petroleum industry going. The promise of elections next June doesn't seem so far away now; maybe Iraq really will have a sovereign government. If not, the burst of optimism inspired by Saddam's extraction from that hole near Tikrit could be short-lived.