The US, which put its forces on high alert in Baghdad and central Iraq yesterday, hoped that if immediate riots and violence could be quelled, then the inflammatory effect of the execution would be minimal — or even helpful.

That is wishful thinking. The execution may have some small stabilising effect in showing that justice can be done. But that will be outweighed by well-founded distress about the partiality of the trial.

The result is likely both to inflame the insurgency and to convince the Sunni middle class — if the past ten months have not done so — that it cannot trust a Shia-led government and had better build its future outside Iraq.

The difference that Saddam’s death makes to the country cannot be dismissed. While he was alive, there was always the hope (for some Sunnis) and the fear (for many Shias) that he would somehow come back. Shias remember that the US did not intervene after the first Gulf War when he killed thousands of them who had risen up against him. For the 14 months of his trial, his image, in immaculate suit, appeared on Iraqis’ televisions; he looked far from dead.

But it is facile to talk of this bringing “closure” to the country, however much satisfaction it gives to those he oppressed (and to the US). The narrowness of the charges on which he was convicted prevented the recording or analysis of much worse atrocities that he is said to have committed. That would have been of enormous value to Iraq in establishing the brutality of his regime beyond contest. It would have made clearer the chains of responsibility, and settled one of the questions that has plagued the US: how culpable were ordinary members of the Baath party?

His execution does nothing to settle questions about Iraq’s future. The US has hoped that it would weaken the insurgency, but it is hard to see why. Nothing else has done so in nearly four years.

More likely, it will be seen by Sunnis, a fifth of the population, as more evidence of Shia persecution. But they may feel that they need no more evidence than the ten months of sectarian killings since the bombing of a Shia shrine.

That ferocious sectarianism is Iraq’s greatest problem, not whether Saddam is alive. Many interpret the Government’s failure to rein-in Shia militias as endorsement of them, even though it says the opposite; if that is right, then hopes for a stable Iraq are dead.

It is not possible to run a democracy unless all factions are convinced that they can prosper even if the other side is in power. Iraq does not begin to reach that standard. Yet the Sunni minority is too big to be dispatched by a few years of Shia threats; that is a formula for a long, bloody, civil war.

Germany and South Africa, countries that wrestled to put an ugly history behind them, embarked on a long, formal procedure of examining their past. But it is not possible to pursue truth or reconciliation if the crimes of the new government begin to echo those of the old, the threat that looms over Iraq today.

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