The death of Saddam Hussein is nothing special. In itself, it is almost a non-event. Given the enormity of the crimes of which he was accused, it was virtually inevitable following his capture: it was prepared for, expected–even planned, in a manner of speaking. If Iraq had been particularly merciful and strongly opposed to capital punishment, the best one could have hoped for was life imprisonment without parole. But this was far from the case in view of the resentment held against him by the majority of the population after his disastrous half-century in power.

In fact his execution, symbolically on the eve of Eid ul-Adha and the end-of-year festivities, was more the end of a chapter where Iraq turned a page in its history before returning its heart to its people and turning to more urgent current problems. There was no family to take the body away, and for good reason: his sons had been killed, he had had his sons-in-law executed back in 1995 and his wives and daughters were in exile. Saddam Hussein was largely a relic of the past, almost an anachronism: a man who believed he could still play on East-West confrontation in 1991, he was a vestige of the power of an ageing Ba’ath party better known for its internecine quarrels than for its success on a pan-Arab level. He was one of the last Cold War dictators, incapable of seeing the world changing, yet who lost his power partly because he was capable of anything, even the worst–and it was at the worst that he excelled. A loose cannon in international politics, rather than an aimed shot, he was toppled for trying to outsmart stronger forces.

Even so, there was something new about this execution: it was the first time that a dictator in Iraq, and more generally in the Middle East, had been tried, condemned and executed following a more or less fair legal procedure. It could be said that, like the trials in Nuremberg, The Hague and Arusha, Saddam Hussein’s trial reflected the justice of the victors but, despite all the criticism that could be levelled at it, this trial, for all its faults, was not the parody of justice that some might have feared. This is no mean feat for a country where coups d’état, often accompanied by massacres of the vanquished, have been the norm for changes of regime since 1958, and where there has never been a leader with truly popular support, as distinct from being popular by default.