Hitchens on Saddams capture and the repercussions:

Throwing off all secular disguise, they have adopted the rhetoric and method of jihad and this will be their selling point for some time.

However, they have lost their rallying point. And a number of Iraqis who have been hesitant and fearful until now can be expected to straighten up and look people in the eye.

In Baghdad and Basra in the summer, I met several people who could not be convinced Saddam wasn't coming back. It was the same in Ceausescu's Romania, where it took a while before citizens would believe the local Dracula was really dead. A diet of fear is bad for the system and has pernicious long-term effects.

An Iraqi religious leader allowed to see Saddam after his capture found the tyrant defiant and unrepentant. Those cheering his fall were "mobs" and those who were found in mass graves were "thieves".

I can't wait to see him repeat this in the dock. Meanwhile, the whole enterprise of re-making Iraq is greatly clarified by the certain knowledge that there's no going back.

I can't wait to see Saddam, on trial, in front of his victims and the world.