An unusual end: Saddam Hussein is tried and executed.

SADDAM HUSSEIN was a ruler in the mold familiar for centuries in the Arab and Muslim world, disposing of life and death as he saw fit. About the only thing to be said in favor of absolute rule of this kind is that it makes life broadly predictable. Such a ruler rewards family and tribal and sectarian loyalty, and punishes all conceivable disloyalty: Everyone can take intelligent or at least self-serving precautions. Saddam cannot have expected to go to the gallows for ordering the killing of the villagers of Dujail, but after his genocidal brutalities neither can he have expected to die in his bed.

Caliphs, sultans, and emirs--and, in the modern age, Middle Eastern kings, presidents, and prominent personalities--have all died violent deaths, so many victims of the culture in which they were operating. In all probability Saddam would have continued in power until such time as one of his sons shot him, or the Iranians clandestinely backed some cleric or general to mount a successful coup and suspend his corpse from the gateway of one of his palaces.

It is a vital interest of the United States that absolute rulers of Saddam's kind do not ravage the whole Middle East. Saddam evidently miscalculated American resolve to stop him from doing his worst, and to impose a Pax Americana. In one sense, the hanging of Saddam is only what victors do to losers, and therefore no shock to anyone on the street. But in another sense, the whole process of bringing an absolute ruler to account for his crimes in a courtroom cuts right across the culture. Reaction to this novelty remains uncertain because nobody quite knows what to make of Pax Americana as it unfolds. Throughout history, whoever broke the old absolutism put in place his own version of it. Pax Americana in stark contrast aims to set up power-sharing arrangements of which there has hitherto been no trace. How are Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish inhabitants of the country to meet on these new terms? Ultimately, who will be the winners, who the losers? American military intervention has made the future unpredictable, not to say unfathomable, and therefore ominous.

Had Saddam not been executed, certain of his fellow Sunnis would have tried every legal and violent maneuver, however desperate, to free him and restore him to power. Miscalculating right up to his death, Saddam himself evidently believed that he would be reprieved in order to lead the Sunnis once again, helping the Americans with their new order. Saddam then handled himself with courage and dignity, a very different figure from the disheveled fugitive not long ago pulled out of a hiding-hole. Some guards filmed Saddam on the scaffold. Every media outlet in the world has shown this film, expressing various degrees of outrage, but like the film of his sons, Uday and Qusay, it serves the important purpose of providing irrefutable evidence that the tyrant really is dead. Guards also taunted him by shouting the name of Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose power-mania and bloodlust is driving him and his so-called Mahdi militia back towards absolute rule in defiance of Pax Americana.

Ugly and primitive as it may be, Shiite triumphalism of the sort is an inherent aspect of the culture, inspired by centuries of oppression at the hands of the Sunnis, and it is merely Eurocentric to deplore it, as so many non-Muslims are doing. In any case, in the exactly chosen words of an Iraqi-American commentator, Nibras Kazimi, "there is something wrong with your inner core of decency if you are not moved by the sight of a horrible tyrant meeting a just end."

Iran is today driving Shiite triumphalism, and its leaders naturally sounded even more confident and smug than usual as they celebrated Saddam's execution. He had waged a costly war for eight years against Iran, severely setting back the ambition of the ayatollahs to be the undisputed regional power in the Gulf. Saddam had also attacked and devastated Kuwait, and there too spokesmen welcomed his execution as a "gift to humanity." The Middle East, according to a Kuwaiti intellectual quoted in the West, "is coming to a conclusion and learning from the Saddam lesson."

From the Sunnis in general, however, the response has been thin and ragged, far from militant. In what seems like a distraction, spokesmen in Sunni-majority countries, even in Syria, tried to make political capital out of the fact that Saddam was hanged on a major Muslim holiday. In Iraq itself, a sheikh from a mosque named after Saddam was found to utter the customary overblown wish-fulfillments: "Saddam Hussein is a martyr and God will put him along with other martyrs. Do not be sad nor complain, because he has died the death of a holy warrior." In exile in Amman, Rana, one of Saddam's daughters and a widow since her father had her husband killed, gives weepy interviews. Here and there in Sunni towns, dejected handfuls of demonstrators did gather, only to go home soon.

An adviser of the Iraqi prime minister appears to have started the rumor that among Saddam's last words were "Palestine is Arab"--the video of his execution at least does not substantiate it. Even this was not enough to activate a mob. Palestinians in Bethlehem opened a "house of condolence" where a few men gathered and drank coffee. In Jenin, also on the West Bank, some hundreds held a mock funeral and there was a small parade in Saddam's honor in Gaza. They were mourning in him a sponsor who paid up to $25,000 for acts of terror and suicide bombings.

Libya, it is true, decreed three days of official mourning, most probably because its absolute ruler, Moammar Qaddafi, is aware that like Saddam he may well not die in his bed. Egyptian journalists are among the last to cherish the flame of Arab nationalism, and their professional guild held a mourning session for a Saddam still perceived as a nationalist hero. In November, President Hosni Mubarak took a position against executing Saddam, and he is now deploring every aspect of what happened. One of the leading Cairo papers, regime-controlled of course, echoed him by speaking all in its own heroic idiom of "a crime whose perpetrators will be pursued by history with rage and shame." From the Arab League with headquarters in Cairo, and supposedly the umbrella organization of Arab states, however, not a word.

Al-Jazeera television has a crafty way of bringing together Arabs and Western fellow-travelers in defense of tyranny. Its website has declared: "The late Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, has become an Arab icon and a Muslim martyr after his execution by the US-backed government. Rallies in his honour were organised in Jordan, Yemen, Palestine, Sudan, Egypt, and in Iraq." The language insinuates that the Iraqi government has no standing or credibility, and more falsely still that the Arab world is exploding with anger over the execution. On that same website is a plethora of supporting commentary by Muslims (Pakistani, to judge by their names), as well as Westerners, under headings such as "When Justice becomes personal revenge," "Saddam's execution is inhuman," and "Reflections on US crimes in Iraq."

Abdul Bari Atwan is editor of a Saudi-owned newspaper in London. An enthusiastic apologist for Saddam and Osama bin Laden, he is a regular commentator on the BBC, a network whose outlook is hard to distinguish from al-Jazeera's. But the best that even he could do was to deplore the "silence and indifference" of Arab leaders to Saddam's fate.

Why this silence, this indifference, this failure of all efforts to incite? In part, it is because would-be apologists for Saddam necessarily have to put themselves in the position of defending tyranny, obliged to turn a blind eye to its reality of violence and backwardness.

Another motive may be in play. I am not privy to the circles where Sunni leaders meet and confer, in capitals such as Riyadh and Cairo and Amman, but I suspect they leave apologies to their servants on the understanding that Saddam has become yesterday's man, and not to be regretted, because he has made such a mess for them to clear up. Thanks to him and his miscalculations, the regional balance of power has swung away from the Arab Sunnis towards the Iranian Shiites. Palpably, Shiite triumphalism is only another variant of absolute rule. In addition to the prospect of Shiite supremacy in Iraq, there are Shiite minorities in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and elsewhere, with powerful potential to disrupt.

Week after week, the Shiite triumphalists in Tehran boast about their military capacity; they test weaponry and utter threats to ravage all points of the compass. Nobody and nothing is apparently going to interrupt their nuclear program. Surely, Sunni leaders must be speculating to one another, a nuclear Iran would be a travesty of any Pax Americana, and the Americans would never stand for it. Their silence and indifference may look like evidence of helplessness, but it also masks subterranean expectations that the Americans are bound to rescue them quite soon from the Shiites. In which case, the world might become predictable again to them.