George W. Bush now has his ace of spades, but what he still covets remains as elusive as ever: the joker in the axis of evil deck, wildcard Osama bin Laden.

During his televised address yesterday, the US President did not directly refer to bin Laden, whose defiance of a superpower's manhunt has elevated the terror mastermind to near mythical status in the Islamic world, beyond pledging that the US would press forward "capture by capture, cell by cell, and victory by victory".

But the architect of this 21st-century holy war between the West, and its allies, and Islamic fundamentalism casts a large and daunting shadow across the Bush presidency and the American psyche.

"The only thing that it would take to make Christmas better for the American soldier," said George Heath, a US army spokesman at Fort Campbell, after Hussein's humiliating demise "(is) if we could find Osama bin Laden. That would be a great Christmas present."

Former CIA counter-intelligence chief Vince Cannistraro said getting bin Laden was "absolutely imperative" for the US because of the inspiration, and direction, he provided al-Qa'ida and its numerous freelance off-shoots.

Mr Cannistraro and several other analysts agreed bin Laden was public enemy number one and of much more strategic importance to the US than Hussein.

The effect of Hussein's downfall seems largely symbolic as he appears to have had no operational role, seemingly having spent his time burrowing into holes to avoid capture, as opposed to bin Laden, who continues plotting worldwide terrorism cabals.

Joseph Cirincione, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, characterised the dictator's capture as "largely irrelevant in the larger war against terrorism".

"Saddam means nothing to al-Qa'ida and all the al-Qa'ida-like forces," he said.

It is bin Laden who singlehandedly "has bedeviled American efforts on the war against terrorism", Time magazine editor-at-large Michael Elliott wrote yesterday.

"The capture of Saddam helps, but so long as bin Laden remains at large, all the power and high-tech wizardry of the American armed forces are still losing the battle that is most important in the Islamic world - the struggle to convince ordinary Muslims that those who espouse terror and oppose liberal, modern social developments are bound, eventually, to lose."

For more than two years - since the September 11 attacks - the US, with all its considerable resources, has hunted the Saudi-born millionaire. To their eternal regret, the Americans had bin Laden cornered in the Tora Bora caves of Afghanistan in late 2001 but let him slip through their hands.

Realistically, Hussein was always going to be the easier prey. Consider that 130,000 US troops were virtually on top of the longtime Iraqi strongman.

US commanders were convinced - correctly, as it eventuated - that Hussein would return to his stronghold, the region around Tikrit, north of Baghdad, where an alliance of friends and relatives would help him avoid capture. Yet, despite the efforts of thousands of US soldiers on the ground each day and the lure of a $US25million ($34 million) bounty, it still took more than eight months to catch him.

Bin Laden, by contrast, is believed to be based somewhere in remote mountains along an inhospitable 2400km stretch of border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The region is under the control of tribal warlords whose customs dictate that guests, even if fugitives, be helped. Those who are not religious zealots - to whom betraying bin Laden would be akin to betraying Islam - have so far been unmotivated by the $US25 million reward.

While getting Hussein in the end was a military operation, James Dunnigan, the author of several books about the military, said the nature of bin Laden's situation meant catching him was "more of a CIA job". "Getting bin Laden consists largely of making deals with Pashtun and Baluchi tribal chiefs, not to mention various Pakistani army and Inter Services Intelligence agency people," he said.

Interestingly, the Pentagon said yesterday it would not rush back to Afghanistan the 600 specialised troops - from linguists to commandos and CIA paramilitary units - pulled from the hunt for bin Laden earlier this year and redirected to Iraq. That could be because the US expects Iraq, with or without Hussein's loyalist Baathists, to become perhaps the primary battleground in the war on terrorism.

They are not alone. Newsweek magazine reported last week that bin Laden had personally ordered that fighters and funds be diverted to Iraq from the Taliban resistance in Afghanistan. Evidence, if any was needed, that the joker remains wild.

Without the capacity to inspire terror tyrants fail. The pictures of an old, dishevelled Saddam Hussein the Iraqi people have now seen mean they will never fear him again. For dictators, image is everything.

From Hitler on, totalitarian rulers have obsessively managed the way they are presented on film and and in photographs. And when they lose power over the way they are presented to their subjects, they are doomed. The Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and his partner in tyranny, wife Elena, were captured on video before being executed in the popular uprising that destroyed their regime in 1989. They were elderly and unremarkable. The drug-running Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega looked nothing like those of an invincible leader after he was toppled by the United States. The people of Iraq have now seen Hussein stripped of his swagger. He has betrayed the image of his own invincibility, an image he killed hundreds of thousands to maintain.

His capture is the best news the people of Iraq have had for 30 years. For as long as Hussein was free many Iraqis feared he might re-emerge when the allied occupation forces left. It was a fear with a frightening precedent. At the end of the first Gulf War, the Shi'ite Muslims in the south of Iraq and the Kurds in the north thought Hussein was defeated and rebelled against his regime. But the dictator was let off the hook when the allies liberated Kuwait only to leave his regime intact - and the rebels paid the price in the slaughter that followed as Hussein re-established his writ across Iraq. Now there is no doubt he is gone for good, and the jubilation of the Iraqi people since news of his capture demonstrates they know it. This is the end of as loathsome a regime as any of the past century. Through all his years in power, Hussein used violence not as a last resort but as his preferred political style. He waged war against all Iraqis who stood in his way, using chemical weapons against the Kurds in the country's north. In the south he killed up to 60,000 Shi'ites following the 1991 insurrection, and would have killed more but for the creation of a military exclusion zone enforced by the British and Americans. Hussein relocated hundreds of thousands of people by force and created more than 3 million refugees who fled Iraq under his rule. And even in Baghdad, where his writ was never challenged, he used execution as a routine measure of social control, with more than 60,000 political murders, according to the results of a survey published last week.

For close to a quarter of a century, Hussein enforced his rule through bribery and blackmail, building a vast police state, which operated on the Hitler principle - the only law was the leader's command. Iraq was as thoroughly a totalitarian state as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. The media and universities were controlled by the regime. There was neither freedom of assembly nor movement for all but Baath party loyalists, and Hussein and his cronies ran Iraq as a kleptocracy, beggaring the people of the oil-rich nation. There was never the possibility of a free election. And as with all dictators he took no advice except from sycophants. The result was a regime as incompetent as it was evil. Hussein's military adventurism beggared the country. The eight-year war he waged against Iran in the 1980s killed 375,000 Iraqi soldiers to no good effect. His invasion of Kuwait in 1990 led to a comprehensive defeat by the US-led coalition. And Hussein allowed his people to suffer under UN sanctions and, this year, invasion, because he refused to abandon his murderous fascination with weapons of mass destruction.

But Hussein's doom was assured from the moment he lost his malignant power to instil fear among ordinary Iraqis. And now he is gone the way of all dictators whose luck turns and who lack the luck or courage to die fighting. Hussein's capture will not mean the immediate end of the violence in Iraq. Terrorists from around the Muslim world have made it their country of choice to fight against democracy. There are 2million members of the Baath party who have lost their privileges and fear retribution from the Iraqis they persecuted. But for all but the most deluded or desperate it is now clear Hussein's dictatorship is consigned to the dustbin of history. Hussein's capture, rather than the toppling of his statue in Baghdad last April, signifies the real achievement of the US and its allies in the war to end his evil regime. One of the world's most brutal totalitarian governments is at an end, and the future belongs to all the people of Iraq rather than a dictator and his henchmen. The reconstruction of Iraq is far from complete, but with his capture Hussein is completely discredited for all Iraqis to see. The main objective of the coalition of the willing - to defeat a tyrant who was addicted to weapons of mass destruction whatever the cost to his own people - is accomplished

The United States achieved its most important military objective in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad when it captured Saddam Hussein. President Bush rightly claimed yesterday that it was a critical milestone toward the reconstruction of Iraq. The image of Mr. Hussein, bedraggled and bearded, being humbled before Iraqi leaders, some of whom had survived his torture chambers, was a tonic of relief. One indisputable fact in the bloody and divisive saga of Iraq is that this man ranked with the world's most vicious dictators. His crimes are monstrous. Hundreds of thousands of his people were murdered or tortured at his order and some may have been brutalized by his own hands.

We hope that his arrest will reduce organized violence against American troops, although Mr. Bush himself was careful to say yesterday that hostilities are not over. We do not know how involved Mr. Hussein was in these attacks against American and allied occupation forces, or against Iraqis who cooperated with them. But the dictator's capture should offer Iraqis some relief from the lingering fear that somehow he might return to power and exact revenge on those who cooperated with the United States.

Though the Hussein regime ended with the fall of Baghdad on April 9, many frustrating puzzles remain. These include the question of what happened to Iraq's unconventional weapons programs in recent years and what was going on in that shadowed regime in the last weeks before the war, when the Iraqi leader seemed reluctant to take steps that might have stayed the president's hand.

It would be good if some of those questions could now be resolved. And it is critical that the dictator be given a fair and open trial to exact justice for his crimes, to give some solace to the people he terrorized and to give pause to other despots. The trial must be above any suspicion that it is merely an exercise in retribution or propaganda. While every effort should be made to maximize Iraqi involvement, Iraq's judicial institutions are too weak to handle the case. Although last week's creation of an Iraqi war crimes tribunal was a promising step, we would suggest this trial be conducted in Iraq under United Nations auspices by international and Iraqi judges. A tribunal picked by Americans would lack legitimacy.

Mr. Hussein's capture leaves the United States facing the same profound questions about how best to create a stable and democratic government in Iraq. The capture does not diminish the need for Washington to find ways to broaden the international nature of the occupation, and to put the nation-building efforts under the United Nations. The ultimate measure of success will be an Iraq held together by consent, not force, with its resources dedicated to development, not weapons. Iraqis will then finally be free of the malign legacy of Saddam Hussein.