For months, coalition forces have searched for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Yesterday they found him.
The capture of Saddam Hussein is fabulous news for Iraq, for the region, and for the world. We celebrate with Iraqi people, who are understandably elated at the capture of the tyrant who continued to destabilize their nation, even from the "spider hole" he was discovered cowering in.
We do not know, of course, to what degree Saddam himself pulled the strings behind those killing American forces, and the Iraqis and international contingents who are helping Iraq launch its new future.
Saddam may well have been personally orchestrating the attacks against the US and its allies. But even if he was not, the fact that he was at large provided a sliver of hope to the shards of his regime that they could drive America out and return to terrorize the Iraqi people.
Two things are striking: how a single man can have such a grip on a nation, and how large is the debt of gratitude the world owes the United States.
Even in Afghanistan, Saddam's capture was seen to have a direct impact. As Afghan Interior Minister Ali Ahmed Jalali told the Associated Press, "Since the war in Iraq, the terrorist organizations have tried to open a new front in Afghanistan, so any failure of terrorism in Iraq is going to affect the situation in Afghanistan."
We often speak of the differences between democracies and tyrannies, but it seems that those who live in the former rarely grasp what it means to live in the grip of a single man. We tend to discount the idea that democracy lives up to its name, the rule of the people, as if this is a sentimental notion.
The power of Saddam's mere shadow shows how stark the difference between dictatorship and democracy really is. And it should teach us powerful lessons for the future.
His capture will show, as more regime remnants begin to talk, how Saddam was fully integrated into the terror network and flesh out his race to hoard and develop weapons of mass destruction.
Just before Saddam's capture, the Sunday Telegraph reported that officials in Iraq's provisional government have documents proving that Muhammad Atta, the leader of the September 11 terrorists, trained for his mission in Baghdad with the support of the Iraqi intelligence service. As Dr. Ayad Allawi, a member of Iraq's Governing Council states, "We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam's involvement with al-Qaida... he had contact with those responsible for the September 11 attacks." The flow of this sort of evidence will increase, as will information concerning Saddam's allies in Damascus, and perhaps even in Teheran. So will details of Saddam's WMD programs.
But Saddam's capture highlights the fact that it was not primarily his weaponry that made him a threat that could no longer be tolerated. It was Saddam himself. The US has tens of thousands of nuclear weapons but is a threat to no peace-loving nation. Saddam, by contrast, wiped out Kuwait with conventional weapons alone, and the 9/11 terrorists were equipped only with box cutters and civilian aircraft.
This lesson should not be lost on our own situation. If anyone doubted the grip that Yasser Arafat has on Palestinians and Israelis, Saddam's rule should be food for thought.
Like Saddam on the run, Arafat has such powers that even in exile he would retain sufficient power to torpedo any initiative he might oppose. Unlike Saddam, the US and Israel, not to mention Europe, are acting as if it is possible to progress toward peace with Arafat in full control of the Palestinian Authority.
The current discussion of unilateral measures, which no one suggests will bring an end to the conflict, has arisen as a substitute for the only real hope, which remains regime change on the Palestinian side. This essential insight of President George W. Bush was first put on hold by the run-up to the Iraq war and since then by that war's aftermath. Like the Afghans, we hope that Saddam's capture will reverberate against the terror network everywhere, and help end the Palestinian jihad against us as well.
