A great piece by Fouad Ajami on the Arab world’s struggle to come to terms with the ignoble end of Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror: A Tigris Chronicle.

It should not be lost on the potential foot-soldiers of religious terror pondering a passage to Tikrit across Iraq’s borders that the man who had exalted “martyrdom” would not have it for himself. And it is not that hopeless a bet that after the crowds in Fallujah and Ramadi shout themselves hoarse in support of Saddam, they might come to a recognition that the cause is lost, and that the age of Sunni dominion has come to a close. In the same vein, the young Syrian ruler, Bashar Al-Assad, may insist that what happened in Iraq is no concern of his; but he knows better. The fate of Saddam is a crystal ball in which the rulers and the rogues in the region might glimpse the danger that attends them.

The capture of Saddam, like the war itself, is a foreigner’s gift. This is a truth that stalks our effort in Iraq, and our determination to fight a wider Arab battle on Iraqi soil. Saddam was an upstart, it is true. The squalor he was found amidst was not unlike his own wretched beginnings. His path to power was paved with the Arab world’s sins of omission and commission. He plucked potent weapons from within his culture’s deadly dreams: anti-Westernism, a virulent hatred of Persia and Persians, the scorching of Israel with chemical weapons, the promise of nuclear weapons that would avenge humiliations inflicted on the Arabs. All those had been Saddam’s arsenal. No one in the region had drawn limits for him. No “velvet revolution” within Iraq itself blew him out of power, no Arab cavalry had ridden to the rescue of Iraq’s population. An American war disposed of this man.

Saddam, it is true, was alone in that “spider-hole” amid the litter of a run-down farm house. But he had been a creature of the Arab order; as late as March 2002, his principal lieutenant, the barbarous Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri (still on the run, an illiterate former street-vendor of ice who came into great power in the rise of the Tikritis) had come to an Arab summit in Beirut. He had been embraced by the rulers assembled there, and reconciliation was in the air. The crimes of the Baathist regime were papered over. It is not so difficult to see that a different destiny could have been had by that stupefied man flushed out of his “rathole” by soldiers of Task Force 121. He had once been the “knight of Arabism” marked by destiny to crush the “fire-worshipping Persians,” and to lay to waste the Jewish state. The “knight” has stumbled, but those deadly dreams are not abandoned.