Among many Arabs, the tame surrender produced disdain: the man who pretended to be this epoch's greatest Arab warrior turned out a little coward. For Iraqis who suffered his tyranny, it was a cause for jubilation.

The way Mr Hussein was "discovered" raises questions. His hideout was outside a dilapidated hut without even a latrine. His "spider-hole" was tiny like a coffin, camouflaged with bricks. He couldn't have come out of it without outside help.

Mr Hussein was carrying no communication device, although he had $750,000. Two unidentified men were detained with him.

All this suggests that he wasn't so much in hiding as a prisoner, probably taken by his own guards. An Arab newspaper has identified his betrayer as General Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al-Muslit, a relative.

Mr Hussein was so isolated that he could not have directed the resistance to Iraq's occupation. This should warn us against the euphoria that's being drummed up.

Not many will mourn the arrest of the deposed dictator. But the US and its allies didn't go to war to capture Mr Hussein. Rather, they wanted to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. But none has been found.

The capture doesn't alter the character of the war/occupation. It raises three issues: What lies ahead for Iraq? For the larger world? What should happen to Mr Hussein?

The capture won't greatly affect the insurgency. Since the event, the violence remains unabated. Baathist loyalists are only one group in the resistance. Other groups reportedly number between 12 and 30. They include both political-nationalist organisations like the Unification Front for the Liberation of Iraq, and religious guerrillas like the Shia-Islamists and Wahhabi Sunnis. The Baathists play only a minor role compared to theirs.

What might change temporarily now is the balance between the secular and Islamist elements in the resistance. But more important is the growing alienation of moderate Shias from the US-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Shias form 60 percent of Iraq's population.

Their highest leader, Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, is bitter that the Americans want to create the proposed constituent assembly by nomination, instead of elections.

Will the capture help Mr George Bush mend damaged relations with his Western allies? Leaders like Mr Jacques Chirac and Mr Gerhard Schroeder should have questioned the US's claim to being Iraq's gendarme. Instead, they welcomed it.

But they are deeply embittered at Pentagon cronies grabbing Iraq's $18.6 billion reconstruction contracts. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Joseph Biden says this is like "stick[ing] a finger in the eye of those whose help we have been seeking." Disclosures about Halliburton's petrol-deal rip-off will further alienate US allies.

Mr Hussein's arrest won't silence President Bush's domestic critics. It might temporarily boost his approval ratings. But that might not help him in next November's Presidential elections. Eleven months is a long, long time in politics. Besides, there's rising popular disappointment at US casualties in Iraq, now over 450 dead.

What about Mr Hussein? A number of leaders, including Mr Bush, have pledged to put him on trial. Some Iraqi leaders favour virtual "mob justice"--even torture or summary trial leading to execution. Some insist he be tried in Iraq. Others want an international tribunal.

The US seems inclined to a trial within Iraq. It certainly does not want the trial to go into issues other than Mr Hussein's culpability for killing and brutalising Iraqis.

The limited-trial idea is seriously wrong. Occupied Iraq is not a sovereign state. Its legal system, badly corrupted under Mr Hussein, cannot immediately deliver justice.

Under international law, Mr Hussein is prima facie guilty of invading Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. But he was arrested by the occupation powers, which themselves invaded Iraq in violation of international law. A trial ordered by them will lack legitimacy, even legality.

A tribunal nominated by the CPA or the Iraqi Governing Council will be a kangaroo court. The IGC lacks even a semblance of representative status. A kangaroo court, in which the US is the judge, jury and executioner, will only compound injustice.

The only way to do justice is to publicly try Mr Hussein in a United Nations-sponsored international tribunal with a multilateral bench of credible, impartial judges. During the trial, Mr Hussein must be treated in conformity with the Geneva Conventions.

He must not be humiliated, as he was during his television appearance.

Most important, the trial must not be allowed to obscure the circumstances pertaining to Iraq's invasion of Iran, and Mr Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Iranians and the Kurds.

This will legally establish what has long been known: Washington's encouragement of Mr Hussein throughout the Iran war. It have him vital intelligence about Iranian forces' location, heavy weaponry, and above all, biological agents.

These included the anthrax bacillus, a source of the potentially fatal botulinum toxin, and three strains of the Clostridium bacteria--which cause systemic illness, and diseases attacking lungs, brain, spinal cord and heart.

Mr Hussein was a US protégé from the mid-1970s. He received generous support, especially after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, after which Washington blindly adopted its notorious "my enemy's enemy" posture.

The international tribunal should go into the cruel economic sanctions imposed upon Iraq, and prolonged by the Western powers. These caused one million deaths, half of them of children.

Justice in the Saddam Hussein trial cannot be separated from responsibility for equipping and encouraging him to do harm. Nor can it be divorced from fixing culpability for the death of nearly 8,000 civilians since the war began.

Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian columnist.