Man who took Saddam phone video arrested

After Saddam recited prayers, the guards shouted praise for Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric.

"Is this how you show your bravery as men?" Saddam asked.

"Straight to hell," someone shouted back at him.

"Is this the bravery of Arabs?" Saddam responded.

A sole voice was heard trying to silence the insults.

"Please, I am begging you not to," the unknown man said. "The man is being executed."

THE execution on Saturday of Saddam Hussein may have marked the passing of one of the vilest tyrants of the late 20th century. But the way in which the Baghdad hangmen turned it into a public lynching will have profound consequences for Iraq, for the Middle East and for those powers that so recklessly meddle in its politics.

While President George Bush may hail the dictator?s demise as another ?milestone? on Iraq?s path to democracy, it looks just as likely it will turn out to be another paving stone on the road to the sectarian hell into which Iraq is descending.

With this squalid act, the Shiite-dominated government led by Nuri al-Maliki has for all practical purposes abandoned any pretence that it aims to govern on behalf of all Iraqis.

At one level, the new, ostensibly democratic administration showed it was no different from its predecessors in needing to dramatise regime change with violent or gory images of dead and defeated leaders.

At another, this was conceived as an act of vengeance and designed to exemplify Shiite hegemony.

Among the jeers and taunts hurled at Saddam as he waited for the trapdoor to open, was the name of Moqtada al-Sadr, the young radical who heads the Mahdi army, the largest Shiite militia and the biggest single winner of the 2005 elections. His bloc had demanded the dictator?s head as its price for rejoining the Maliki coalition.

Maliki gave it to him on Eid al-Adha, or feast of the sacrifice, the holiest Muslim feast day, in the most virulent insult to Sunnis in Iraq and throughout the Islamic world.

Politically, it looks as if the Maliki government no longer intends seriously to pursue the two paths that offered a glimmer of eventual stability: internal reconciliation, above all between Shiite and Sunni, and external co-operation, above all with Sunni neighbours such as Saudi Arabia.

The manner of Saddam?s execution was a clear message to Sunnis in and outside Iraq: that the ruling bloc?s primordial goal is to consolidate the empowerment of the Shiite triggered so carelessly by the Anglo-American invasion in 2003.