For Bush, outcome is a victory at a heavy cost

President Bush condemned Saddam Hussein long before any tribunal. "If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning," he once said of Hussein's regime.

He repeatedly depicted Hussein as a supporter of terrorists, a bomb-maker, a tyrant, and said, shortly before invading Iraq, "You don't contain Saddam Hussein. You don't hope that therapy will somehow change his evil mind."

Bush also hinted that his anger was personal. Hussein was the man who "tried to kill my dad," the president declared in 2002.

The execution of Hussein is a triumph for Bush on his own terms: He brought Hussein to justice, convicted by an Iraqi court of murdering his own people and executed at dawn today in Baghdad.

But it was not the triumph that Bush had hoped for -- coming, as it does, with a majority of Americans believing the Iraq war was a mistake, and much of the world condemning the US invasion as illegal.

In the nearly four years since the invasion, a bitter insurgency and rising sectarian violence have bloodied Iraq's citizens as much as at any time during Hussein's regime.

And Bush's manhunt has come to be seen in many parts of the world as an example of a leadership style that is too personal, too theological -- with its emphasis on good and evil -- and too single-minded, neglecting to consider the risks of ripping a scab off a wounded Iraq.

"It's a Pyrrhic victory," Michael Hudson, professor of international relations at Georgetown University and former head of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, said of Hussein's execution.

"Saddam Hussein heads the list as the most brutal of a lot of tyrants and authoritarian leaders" in the Arab world, Hudson added. "But getting rid of him and spending this huge amount of treasure -- human treasure, monetary treasure, the cost in US credibility around the world -- will be seen as a huge expenditure with very little yield."

Indeed, by the end of his life, Hussein had ceased to matter much in Iraq and the Middle East. Fellow Middle Eastern leaders were happy to have him gone, but with a few exceptions not happy enough to feel grateful toward the United States. The insurgency against US troops has attracted many of Hussein's Sunni allies, but it has been clear for a long time that they are fighting on their own behalf, not for Hussein.

The former dictator's capture in December 2003 did little to quell the insurgency. And his death, far from ending it, could provide useful propaganda for insurgents.

"One never thought someone as brutal as Saddam Hussein could be viewed as a martyr and a fallen hero," Hudson said. "But because of the way things have gone, the [insurgents] will see the execution as a plus -- it will help them make their case that a foreign imperial power is coming in and putting a nationalistic ruler to death."

Hussein is not the leader of the insurgency. Nor is he responsible for the rising sectarian violence that has riven Iraq. But each is a vehicle for his revenge against the invading US forces: If the "shock and awe" bombing campaign was Bush's message to Hussein, the insurgency and looming civil war are Hussein's responses to Bush.

The sectarian violence also provides an implicit excuse for his brutality -- the argument that only a strongman could contain such furies.

Meanwhile, the insurgents' attacks on US troops give him a measure of vengeance, a conflagration built on anger toward American invaders.

Hussein's identification with the insurgency became clear in July, in a letter he wrote to the American people. In it, he contended that a US general had offered him his life if he signed a statement to the Iraqi people.

"That stupid announcement called on the people of Iraq and the courageous resistance to lay down arms," he wrote. "They said that if I refused, my fate would be that I would be shot like Mussolini."

In the end, he was hanged like an outlaw on the prairie. He will not be mourned any more than Mussolini or Hitler, and few will assert that his conviction was unjust.

Bush, meanwhile, is suffering the shock of an unpopular war: the resentment of a large part of the country and a loss of faith even among his supporters. Iraq has come to define all aspects of his foreign policy -- his defense of unilateral actions, his focus on democracy, his refusal to negotiate with rogue regimes.

It's hard to know how much of his unbending approach can be traced to his true beliefs and how much stems from his desperate effort to provide overarching justifications for removing Hussein.

As the years have passed, Bush's insistence that he would do the same thing again -- even knowing that no weapons of mass destruction would be found, and that an insurgency would result -- has strained his credibility. His perceived stubbornness on Iraq cost his party seats in the November election.

And like others whose lust for their prey became a consuming passion, Bush will be remembered for the relentlessness of his hunting. And he will often be asked whether he wasn't just a little too eager to bring this particular murderer to justice.