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