No subject

were delivered anonymously to foreign media organisations in Baghdad. In
these he called for continuing resistance to the US, but he gave little
sign that he was organising guerrilla attacks himself. The CIA confirmed
the voice was probably his. They were probably right. Certainly he spoke
with same long-winded vagueness which made his speeches so tedious when he
was in power.

What was Saddam Hussein thinking about in his hide-outs in and around
Tikrit, the dusty city by the Tigris where he first began to make his mark
forty years ago? He cannot have been too surprised by his new life-style.
A remarkable aspect of Saddam's life when he was the supreme power in
Iraqis was that he always behaved like a criminal on the run expecting
arrest by the police. His guards were executed for giving a hint of his
whereabouts. Three exactly similar convoys would leave his presidential
palace at the same time to confuse assassins who would not know which
vehicle to shoot at.

Saddam will feel himself uniquely unlucky. He almost kept his grip on
power despite his disastrous invasion of two of his neighbors,Iran and
Kuwait. Three years ago there seemed to be no reason why he should not
rule in Iraq for as long as he wanted. But the attack on the World Trade
Centre in New York in 2001, with which there is no evidence that Saddam
was connected, increased the influence of the those US leaders who had
always wanted to get rid of him. There was not a lot he could do to stop
them.

Saddam Hussein always lived in something of a fantasy world. He believed
in his own star and divinely guided fate which had led him to rise from
being an orphan in an obscure village to supreme power in Iraq. Even in
defeat he remained an optimist always hoping that the political wind in
Iraq might change in his favour.

But he was also a fatalist. He once told King Hussein of Jordan that ever
since he had escaped after trying to assassinate a former Iraqi President
in 1959 he had treated every day as a gift from God. Over the next forty
years he escaped so many attempts to kill him that his belief grew in his
divine mission.

The Iraqi leader has always had a deep hunger for publicity and in
captivity he may seek to exploit this. He will feel humiliated by being
captured alive but if he is brought to trial - and it will be the trial of
the century - he will once again have a platform from which to speak to
the world. For him this may have advantages over the dark cellar in Tikrit
where he has been hiding. The capture of Saddam Hussein is the end of era
in Iraq but his capture may only expose further how difficult and
dangerous it is to govern Iraq. The glee in Washington today resembles
that felt by the US administration in April when Baghdad fell more easily
to American tanks than any of its critics had supposed.

This is not to say that the US will not be boosted by taking their main
enemy prisoner. There is not only the propaganda value abroad but it will
impress Iraqis in the street with the belief that the US does have a
measure of control. When the first audio tapes of Saddam Hussein speaking
were broadcast on television a few months ago I remember there was almost
a physical sense of apprehension in the streets of Baghdad.

Saddam Hussein himself probably had very littler control over the
guerrillas who have killed or wounded so many Americans and their allies
in the last two months. The resistance cells seem to be loosely organised
and mostly home grown in the towns and villages of central Iraq. There is
also the lesson of three wars - the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, the invasion of
Kuwait in 1990 and the war earlier this year - that Saddam Hussein had
peculiarly bad military judgment.

His capture does have one benefit for the US and its allies. It is the
first real success they have had since the fall of Baghdad and it will
puncture the atmosphere that the US administration in Baghdad was a sort
of Inspector Clouseau figure, making mistake after mistake while
confidently claiming victory at every turn.

But the imprisonment of the former Iraqi leader does not solve the most
serious US problems in Iraq which is that it does not have local allies
with sufficient strength to run the country. It is this which has
sabotaged the US efforts to pacify the country.

The only powerful allies of the US in Iraq are the Kurds. They are the
smallest of country's three dominant communities - the other two are the
Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims - and they are not strong enough for the US to
rely on in future.

The US has had great difficulty in escaping the consequences of its
initial mistakes in Baghdad. It failed to stop the looting though this was
predictable. The Pentagon's main priority seems to have been to make sure
that the, whatever else happened, the influence of the US State Department
was kept as small as possible.

The second great error was to dissolve the Iraqi army and security
services - together with their families perhaps two or three million
people - without working out how these people would survive in a country
where the unemployment rate is about 70 per cent. The US then began to
target members of the Baath party without distinguishing between those
were leadership positions and those who had been compelled to join the
party because they held minor government jobs as doctors or teachers.

Sometimes the US has tried to reverse these mistakes, but the American
administration in Baghdad is a strange lumbering beast which usually only
reacts very slowly to events around it. For instance a centre piece of
present US policy is to create a new Iraqi army and police force loyal to
the new regime. It is then quite extraordinary that somebody decided to
pay the soldiers $70 a month for an exceptionally dangerous job.

Indeed the headquarters of Paul Bremmer, the head of the Coalition
Provisional Authority in Baghdad, is one of the more bizarre institutions
ever seen in the Middle East. It is wholly divorced from the world around
it. The last time I was there I was stopped by a friendly Gurkha soldier
who was happy to talk about Katmandu but otherwise was determined to let
nobody into the building. Then a security officer from Texas, so far as I
could tell from the accent, stopped me belligerently saying: "Journalists
are always assassinating people. We are not letting you in."

The US troops and commanders scattered around Iraqi provincial cities and
towns seem to have a much better idea of what is happening in the country.
They have told anybody who was listening for months that the Iraqi
resistance was locally organised and not controlled from the top, either
by Saddam Hussein or his aging acolyte Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri.

In theory the US should be winning this war. Its weakness - and this will
continue despite the capture of Saddam Hussein - is that they do not quite
understand the nature of the war they are fighting. The guerrillas are not
very strong. But they can inflict immense political pain in Washington
with very limited means and they know it.

One of the curiosities about US and British attitudes to political events
in Iraq is that it is often based on the belief that ordinary Iraqis do
not know what is happening. In fact they are politically very
sophisticated. For over a decade many of them have had nothing to do but
listen to foreign radio broadcasts in Arabic from the BBC,Monte Carlo and
Voice of America. The quality of news they listen to is probably higher
than that viewed or heard by most people in Europe or the US.

Iraqis learned from an early stage after the fall of Baghdad that the only
thing that had an impact on policy makers in Washington was physical
violence. This does not mean that they all favoured or would take part in
guerrilla war. Very few regretted the departure of Saddam Hussein. But
they knew that moderate opposition to US policy would get nowhere. This is
an important point. Many Iraqis were rather in the position of Roman
Catholics in Northern Ireland in the 1970s who strongly disliked the IRA,
but had also noted that Westminster only listened to the grievances of
their community when it was accompanied by violence.

The problem for the US is that it has always made concessions too late.
"They were drunk with victory," said one Iraqi leader closely allied to
the US. It conceded power to the interim Governing Council only when the
guerrilla war had got underway. As it has intensified Washington has
agreed to a provisional government by the middle of next year.

But it is still unclear who this provisional government will represent.
The indirect elections by local caucuses would be open to fraud in any
country in the world but particularly in Iraq. For instance tribal leaders
would play a role. But nobody knows who is the leader of many of the
tribes because the sheikhs were often chosen by Saddam Hussein.

It would be much better from the US and British point of view if regular
elections were held using a franchise based on the lists for food
rationing. This is not perfect but it is less flawed than anything else.

An election under such rules would probably produce an administration
dominated by members of the Shi'ite community answering their religious
leader Ali Sistani. The US will not like this. It will not be a regime
friendly to the long term presence of the US and Britain in Iraq. But at
least it will be a government can claim to have mass support and has
legitimacy -- something which neither Saddam Hussein or the present
occupation has ever possessed.

If the US and Britain react, as Tony Blair seemed to do yesterday, by
exaggerating the impact of the capture of Saddam Hussein then none of
these fundamental problems in ruling Iraq will be solved and the guerrilla
war will only escalate.

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