There will be few, beyond the Ba’athist terrorists in Iraq, who will mourn Saddam’s death. If ever a man deserved to hang, it was Saddam, brutal dictator and mass murderer. In the West debate will rage about the rights and wrongs of capital punishment in the abstract, but it was always likely the Iraqi government and the majority of the population would demand the death sentence.

It is said by some that, in death, Saddam’s “martyrdom” will spur on the insurgents with renewed vigour. Others say that, on the contrary, had he remained alive but in prison he would have acted as a rallying point for opponents of democracy in Iraq. These arguments are beside the point. Saddam’s life or death is a sideshow to the chaos and violence in Iraq today, itself a by-product of his murderous regime. He sowed the dragon’s teeth of hatred between Sunni and Shi’ite. Innocent Iraqis today are reaping it. The mistakes made by the Americans after the invasion and the historic dispute between the two branches of Islam have compounded the violence, but it should not be forgotten at the moment of his death that not the least of Saddam’s crimes was his moral responsibility for this sectarian war. The massacres of Shi’ite and Kurd, and the evisceration of freedoms have left an appalling legacy. People forget too readily that Iraq was not a hell hole before the Ba’athists got their hands on it. It could have prospered. It is a sad fact that when people are horribly wronged they will often thirst for revenge. In fact, the Kurdish leadership has shown exemplary restraint so far. The Shi’ite leaders need to follow suit for there to be hope.

Yesterday’s hanging, however, has much wider implications. The man responsible for the death of up to 1m Iraqis was not summarily shot by his conquerors, as has so often happened when a butcher has been toppled. Rather, he was put on trial in courts, which however flawed, were set up as part of a new constitution, alongside a democratically elected government.

To take a positive lesson from all this, perhaps the link between Saddam’s criminality and his subsequent execution will help establish the principle that tyranny will be punished rather than appeased. When foreign policy messages are mixed, it results in dangerous unpredictability. Had April Glaspie, the catastrophically inept US ambassador to Iraq, not told Saddam that “we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait”, Saddam might well have stepped back from the invasion of Kuwait. Firm, clear messages are not always successful but they are a prerequisite of success.

Saddam’s deposition can thus be seen as part of the intended message underlying US foreign policy: that enemies of freedom need to be deterred by seeing clearly the consequences of their behaviour. That policy is controversial. If, however, his fate acts in any way as a deterrent, then it would have a positive effect. Saddam, however, was too stupid even to understand the limits of his power in a wider world. Hafez Assad, the Syrian dictator — responsible, too, for massacres of his countrymen — handed over his tyrannical rule in a smooth transition to his son. The reason why Assad died peacefully in his bed and Saddam died at the hangman’s noose is that Assad knew how to read the West and always kept one step inside the border of realpolitik acceptability; Saddam did not.

Saddam saw himself as a latterday Gamal Abdel Nasser: the man to unite the Arab nations. But his chosen instrument was fear and military might. In the end, as Fouad Ajami points out in News Review, his legacy is the precise opposite of his intentions. Saddam’s behaviour led not only to a western military presence in Arabia, it also turned Iraq, the supposed centre of the new Arab power, into the fulcrum of the struggle between the United States and its allies and Iran, Saddam’s greatest enemy. That is the ultimate condemnation of Saddam, from any perspective.