From accounts of what relatives of his hundreds of thousands of victims wished to do to him, the tyrant Saddam Hussein got off lightly by being hanged at dawn yesterday. He was dispatched expeditiously by a professional executioner. The mind reels at what the hundreds of Iraqis who last week volunteered their services would have made of this grim task.

Many relatives of Saddam’s victims thought that hanging was too good for him. In Dujail, where in 1982 Saddam ordered the massacre of 148 Shi’ites and deported a further 1,500 people to Abu Ghraib jail and remote desert camps to be killed or tortured, relatives of the victims said they would chop him into pieces or drink his blood.

This is not surprising given that one survivor of such a camp witnessed her pregnant daughter die by having her legs bound together as she went into labour, while others found their way into meat grinders.

Inevitably Saddam’s trial and execution have been denounced as an example of “victors’ justice” by the usual apologists for Middle Eastern despots or contrarian patricians eager to confound what they regard as the vulgar vendettas of the mob.

Such insinuations of impropriety cropped up at Nuremberg and have been repeated more recently against the International Criminal Court which is dealing with the genocidal atrocities that were committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Among supporters of Saddam’s trial the hope was that the capture and indictment of the toppled despot would severely undermine the predominantly Sunni insurgency by removing its alleged symbolic focus and demythologising the dictator through overexposure in the dock.

There he was, suddenly no longer huge in mural or statue but reduced to human scale, whether dazed and dishevelled after being dragged from his farmyard bolt hole, or cocky and querulous in court.

In fact, as more car bombs devastate Shi’ite areas this weekend, the continuing insurgency seems detached from the fate of even this appalling individual, whose last-minute bravado I care rather less about than the television networks since the spiral of violence in parts of Iraq seems to have acquired a momentum of its own.

Many commentators are uneasy about procedural aspects of the trial. Invariably hearings in countries where anarchy and lawlessness are rife do not proceed at the stately pace, and with the overrated wit, of our learned friends at the Old Bailey. Watching a nascent sovereign Iraq — and that is the essence of the matter, for it is their court and their law — is like witnessing a caged bird learning to fly.

The Baghdad court sometimes degenerated into a shambles, with the chief judge resigning halfway through because of alleged political pressures and three defence lawyers assassinated. Saddam and his co-accused also acted up for Arab television audiences, whether through their harangues, their traditional dress, their brandishing the Koran and holy incantations, or their defiant hand gestures.

One wonders how Saddam’s cynical bids for pan-Arab leadership played in neighbouring Kuwait, where after his invasion people were killed by being thrown into vats of boiling water, or how his belated piety went down in Saudi Arabia, which narrowly missed invasion as well.

While some have been shocked by procedural irregularities, others are appalled by the death sentence. It has been condemned by western European leaders, including the British prime minister, who expressed his opposition to the penalty during his monthly press conference in November.

The American government was desperate to see Saddam hanged in order to provide a brief bounce in the negative polls about Iraq, presumably to coincide with the imminent announcement of a substantial increase in the number of troops to be deployed in and around Baghdad.