Mr Hussein's execution on Eid-al-Adha martyred a despot who brutalised his people, invaded Iran and Kuwait, and used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians. That he didn't bow his head and stood up to obscene taunting by a sectarian lynch mob bestows a halo upon his mystified image.

Mr Hussein's execution will further inflame West Asia's sectarian strife, deepen Iraq's ethnic divides, destroy the last vestiges of its government's legitimacy, and discredit the occupying powers.

The hanging was ordered by the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal (SICT), one of several legal arrangements, including a new constitution, imposed upon Iraq by its occupiers.

Mr Hussein deserved to be tried fairly, and punished. But his trial was a farce, which violated norms of fairness. Consider this:

The US rejected the reasonable demand for an international tribunal, similar to that which tried Milosevic. Washington knew the Iraqi legal system can't deliver justice. Recently, Iraqi judges have pronounced harsh verdicts after 15-minute trials. The New York Times reported: "Almost every aspect of the judicial system is lacking."

SICT was established by the occupying powers, which rigged its procedures. Most of its judges were imparted special "training" in Britain, an occupying power. SICT wasn't sovereign, impartial or legitimate, says the United Nations' Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, established by the UN Commission on Human Rights.

WGAD holds that "the deprivation of liberty of Saddam Hussein is arbitrary," in contravention of Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

The accused were denied the elementary right to defend themselves. Mr Hussein didn't have unimpeded access to his lawyers, nor adequate facilities to prepare his defence.

Two of Mr Hussein's lawyers were assassinated. This "seriously undermined his right to defend himself through counsel of his own choosing."

SICT's first chief judge resigned because of political pressure. Judge Abdel-Rahman, who delivered the final verdict, was shamelessly biased. He abruptly ended the trial in June. He made "statements incompatible with impartiality and the presumption of innocence."

Mr Hussein couldn't "obtain the attendance and examination of witnesses on his behalf under the same condition as witnesses against him" -- a right the ICCPR guarantees.

WGAD says it's impossible "to verify whether [the SICT] judges meet the requirements for judicial office, [and] whether their impartiality … is otherwise undermined." Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say the trial mocked at justice.

One of Mr Hussein's defence lawyers, former US Attorney-General Ramsey Clark, was ejected from court for saying the trial violated international standards.

Even before the trial ended, Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki demanded Mr Hussein's hanging. Then, he declared it would take place before the year ended, thus usurping the judiciary's prerogative. The final procedural clearances were obtained in unseemly haste.

President Bush welcomed the hanging as a "milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy." This will convince the world public -- not just Muslims -- that Washington was complicit in the processes that led to the execution.

Washington invaded and occupied Iraq by inventing lies about mass-destruction weapons. A University of Maryland poll says 78 percent of Iraqis believe US troops are "provoking," not preventing, more conflict; 71 percent want them out.

Sixty-one percent of Iraqis favour attacks on US troops. Under a flourishing insurgency, the average number of daily attacks have risen from 14 in 2003 to 185 now.

The Iraqi regime's writ doesn't run beyond the four-mile-square Green Zone. It's dependent for its survival on two Shia militias, controlled by the ruling coalition's two biggest parties.

The occupation has reduced Iraq's once-prosperous middle-level human development society to penury and disease. About 1.8 million people have fled Iraq (pop 17 million) and 1.6 million have been internally displaced. Over four-fifths of Iraqis say they're worse off now than under Mr Hussein.

This doesn't condone Mr Hussein's gross human rights violations or his perverse, deceptive nationalism. For all his anti-imperialist pretences, he long collaborated with the US, which encouraged him to invade Iran in 1980, and passed on military intelligence to him during that eight-year war.

The West supplied Mr Hussein with components of chemical weapons and looked the other way when he used them.

Mr Hussein was hanged for killing 148 people, but grotesquely, the occupying powers' leaders won't be tried for killing half-a-million Iraqi children through the post-1991 sanctions, nor for the death of 655,000 civilians since the 2003 invasion, estimated by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Nor will they be brought to justice for the supreme crime of aggression.

Three considerations seem to have motivated Washington to be complicit in Mr Hussein's elimination. The first was to prevent his possible emergence as a power-centre and consummate "regime change."

A second has to do with "exit" plans being discussed in Washington in the light of the Baker-Hamilton report. Iraq's partition along ethnic lines is no longer excluded. A deepening of the Shia-Sunni rift caused by Mr Hussein's hanging could promote this.

However, there was a third, even more pernicious, consideration: to humiliate America's enemies. When Henry Kissinger was asked why he supported the Iraq war, he replied: "Because Afghanistan wasn't enough." In the conflict with "radical Islam," precipitated by 9/11, he said, they want to humiliate us. "And we need to humiliate them."

Many American policymakers share this view. They wanted to create a "demonstration model" out of Mr Hussein to show that America will destroy anyone who flouts its authority.

The international community must strongly deplore these motives. It's not enough to express "disappointment" at Mr Hussein's hanging. The world must unequivocally condemn it, and demand the occupation's end.

Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian columnist.