Death of a fantasy: everything Saddam Hussein built up, in utter collapse.

THE capture of Saddam Hussein draws a line under Operation Free Iraq. It is now possible to concentrate on the task of building the country's future, and discovering whether democracy will take hold in the Arab Middle East, and if so, how and in what form.

More than a distraction, as long as Saddam was at liberty he represented the alternative of absolute power, as well as a symbol of defiance. Here was a figurehead around whom those Muslims who hate the United States and its allies could rally. Islamists, Iraqi nationalists, and their supporters on the international left ardently believed that while he was in hiding he was also directing a glorious resistance movement. Swirling around him was the glamour of the outlaw.

An attractive quality of Arabs is their admiration of courage. If one day professional rather than politicized officers were to lead them, they would prove formidable soldiers. Suicide bombers are widely admired because they seem to exemplify courage in some superhuman sphere beyond the limit that rational people can understand. Saddam played with virtuosity on this cultural trait, magnifying the bravery and heroic status of all Iraqis, himself above all. He threatened to wage the Mother of All Battles, and promised to die fighting at the head of his troops. Never, he said, would he be a deserter.

Dictators create the fantasy world in which they force everyone to live. Hitler fantasized about race, and Stalin about class. Saddam learned from them both--in method, especially--but essentially his was a fantasy about absolute power. Iraq could and should have been a mediumrank nation, with resources enough to guarantee peace and prosperity for all its inhabitants. Saddam instead imagined himself the heir of Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, the hero who had only to conquer Iran and Kuwait and Israel, and beyond that unify the entire Arab world under him. Like all such fantasies, its strength lay in its untruthfulness, its one-dimensional simplicity. Fascinatingly, he had writers publish novels in his name, in which absolute power was presented as the solution to all ills.

Reality-enforcement comes as something of an anti-climax in contrast to the vivid fantasy it explodes. Saddam, who smoked the best Havana cigars in the faces of colleagues he was condemning to summary execution, and who ordered silk suits by the score from his Armenian tailor, was discovered by American soldiers in a ramshackle hole dug under a mud outbuilding on a farm not far from his birthplace. Although he had a revolver with him, he emerged with his hands up, looking like a hobo but nonetheless boasting to his captors that he was the President of Iraq. He did not match the resolution of his two sons, who fought to the end, nor did he spare himself the indignity of capture by putting a bullet in his head. Hitler in his own bunker had at least made that final statement.

Like everybody else, the Arab and Muslim world has watched those clips of film showing a Coalition medico examining his beard for lice, and probing into his mouth, perhaps in search of a cyanide capsule, perhaps to take a DNA swab. The disgrace of it could hardly be more complete. In Muslim society, a beard signifies piety; and a stranger who so much as touches another man's beard insults him. For a long time to come, the Arab and Muslim world will be coming to terms with the searing memory of that examination, every detail of which goes against its core values.

In common with other dictators, Saddam did everything to ensure that he would be taken at his word, and that people would come to accept his fantasy as reality. His many palaces and gigantic monuments to himself, the mass graves and hundreds of thousands of victims, were expressions of his absolute power. The values of that society, as he well understood, conflated honor and power. People of course knew that he was cruel and unjust, the latest in the run of dictators under whom they have suffered during so much of their history, but they also perceived that he was doing deeds of which they themselves were incapable. Seemingly he was defying the West, that is to say the Christians and the Jews, and so standing up for Muslims. The honor he acquired was therefore a complex blend of admiration, resentment, and fear; he was both monster and champion, in any case altogether larger than life. The term these admirers used to describe him was fahl, which carries meanings denoting potency, or as the dictionary puts it: "male (of large animals), stallion; outstanding personality, luminary, star, master."

Twenty-four hours after his capture, a delegation of four members of the Iraqi Governing Council spent half an hour with him. Only Shakespeare could do justice to this confrontation. To a question about the mass graves of his victims, he replied, "Ask these people's families, they were thieves and traitors." One victim was the distinguished Shia ayatollah Sadeq al-Sadr, murdered in 1999 for his opposition to Saddam, and whose name in Arabic sounds like the word for chest. Another of the delegation's questions concerned the ayatollah's fate. "You're asking me about the chest, why not ask me about the legs, too?" Saddam's retort is all of a piece with the scenes of profoundly sinister comedy in Macbeth. One member of the delegation was Ahmad Chalabi, and afterward he applied the telling word "narcissist" to Saddam, and summed up the crux of the matter: "To the Americans he was completely deferential. He didn't refer to them in disrespectful terms. He was a very evil man drained of his honor."

Arab newspapers and television channels echo this pithy observation. Opinion then divides on what follows from it. Some are unable to relinquish the fantasy of absolute power and its supporting values. "A New Indignity for the Arabs" is the heading that Abdelbari Atwan, an extreme nationalist, gives to his editorial in Al-Quds al-Arabi (which translates as Arab Jerusalem, although published in London). "It would have been far better if he had fought to the end and died a martyr," Atwan states, to conclude, "Anything would have been more honorable than ignominious surrender." In their current enthusiasm for suicide bombers, men on the Palestinian street seem to agree that Saddam has betrayed them by surrendering so docilely. The fact that he subsidized the intifada with a reputed $35 million apparently makes it hard for all such to distinguish between true friends and enemies.

The widespread conclusion among Arabs and Muslims is that Saddam has proved a coward and a fraud. Ambiguity nevertheless remains. Iraqis themselves were evidently unable to overthrow their tyrant; Americans had to do it for them. Of course most Arabs recognize freedom when they see it, and rejoice at the turn of events. But the knowledge that somebody else has had to do what you could not do for yourself is disturbing. The impotence, the helplessness, the sight of American soldiers going about their successful business, also induces fear. Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, admitted as much (as well he might) when he declared that, as Operation Free Iraq unfolded, "I felt afraid." In Syria, President Bashar Assad similarly has to decide whether his own people or the United States is the greatest challenge to his absolute power. The Iranian regime is also torn between joy at Saddam's arrest and dismay at the evidence of American might. Uncomfortably, the sense of dishonor springs out of emotional and cultural tangles of this kind.

A trial in Baghdad with Iraqi judges will reveal the reality of Saddam's crimes, and so deflate the fantasies of fahl and honor that derive from absolute power while at the same time encouraging it. A trial is unlikely to shift ingrained social values very far, but it can mark the birth of independence, and therefore a proper pride and self-respect. And who can guess where that will stop in the Arab and Muslim Middle East? The replacement of dictatorship with the rule of law in any case needs no further justification.

Mr. Pryce-Jones is an NR senior editor. His book The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs was recently reissued.