"They got Saddam, they got Saddam!" was the chant that rang across Baghdad yesterday, from buildings and buses and through dancing crowds, as celebratory gunfire cracked the sky, and festive music wailed from loudspeakers, and cars honked their horns. The press conference to announce the capture dissolved into screams of rejoicing from Iraqi journalists, and their own merry shouts of, "Death to Saddam!" Blessings were almost everywhere being showered upon American soldiers.

Pulled from his spider-hole near al-Dawr, on a farm in the outskirts of his native Tikrit, this monster with the blood of over a million human beings on his hands, went quietly. The circumstances of his fall brought to mind the taunting-song against the ancient Babylonian tyrant (probably Nebuchadnezzar), which is recorded in our Bibles in Isaiah XIV:

"Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms?"

Brought low, and gone into history with the rest. Even across the Arab world, outside Iraq and Kuwait, where for his murderous challenge to the West, Saddam was still hailed as a great hero, his capture was grieved with an admixture of mockery. Yet another of the heroes of the "Arab Street" had failed them. Grim silence gripped the West Bank and Gaza, where there had been jubilation over 9/11, as there had been when the Iraqi Scuds descended upon Israel in 1991. Saddam was especially THEIR saviour.

The capture of Saddam was the climax of three huge events in Iraq, within the space of little more than a week. Unfortunately, our liberal media did not deign to report the first two. National protests against Saddamite and Islamist terrorism had already brought countless thousands into the streets of Iraq's cities, including more than 20,000 in Baghdad defying the terrorist threat. (This was noted, if at all, on inside pages, and the wire services quoted a deflated estimate of the crowds from Al-Jazeera, the viciously anti-American pan-Arab TV network.)

Then, the news broke, or rather did not break very widely, of the discovery that Mohammad Atta, the late Al Qaeda "mastermind", had spent part of the summer of 2001 in Baghdad. Western intelligence is now working on this direct link between Saddam Hussein and the attacks Atta led on 9/11/01 -- after years of trying to ignore it. Atta was trained near Baghdad by the organization of Abu Nidal (who later died himself under very suspicious circumstances).

Atta was almost certainly shown through the ropes at the Iraqi regime's Salman Pak terrorist camp -- where a passenger airplane fuselage was kept to rehearse hijacking techniques. This was mere months before he piloted a hijacked aircraft into New York's WTC; he would seem to have remained in contact with Iraqi agents in the interim. A clinching document supporting this has been found in the hand of Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, Saddam's intelligence chief, addressed to Saddam himself. This was revealed last week in Britain's Daily Telegraph; and I believe more evidence is on the way, about activities in this and at least two other camps in which the Saddam regime trained terrorists for, among others, Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Kurdistan Worker's party, Mujahedin-e-Khalq, and the Palestinian Liberation Front.

Such details are characteristically omitted from most of our news media, not because the facts aren't newsworthy, but because they contradict, indeed completely destroy, the case said media were previously making. For in order to undermine the Bush administration's justifications for invading Iraq, those media have repeated over and over that "no links have been found between Saddam and international terrorism".

With Saddam's live capture, that game should be up. While the procedure for Saddam's "trial" (such a criminal can never be tried under normal rules in a conventional court) has not yet been decided, or at least not announced, it offers the Bush administration a huge opportunity to end-run its media enemies. For Saddam's visage makes irresistible journalistic imagery: it will hold an audience even better than Michael Jackson's. If the trial is sufficiently publicized, the general audience will learn of numerous journalistic impostures. Alternatively, the liberal media will go one step further, and embargo news of the trial; in which case the reading public will turn increasingly to blogs and Internet to find out what is really happening.

The effect of a public trial on Iraq and the Arab world may be still more electrifying. Iraq and Kuwait are already beyond the propaganda reach of the Arab media. Their peoples have too much direct human experience to believe the garbage that is pumped into homes across the Arab and Muslim world by the Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya satellite networks, and by state-controlled media in each country.

For the Iraqis especially, there is the emotional release from decades of tyranny and fear, and the consolidation of hope in the future. The capture of Saddam is already a clanging of the bell of liberty -- a summons to hunt down and kill what remains of the terrorist insurgency, and to build on the ruins. So long as he remained at large, the gnawing thought remained, that somehow Saddam might find his way back to power.

But for the Arab and Muslim world at large, including many who have lived under tyrannies by no means as painful as Saddam's, the news will be assimilated quite differently. Saddam's fall does not necessarily imply, for them, the fall of Saddam's cause.

Our great mistake in the West is to assume that, because we don't believe there is a "clash of civilizations" between East and West, the East doesn't believe it either. But on balance, the Muslim worldview has always assumed such a "jihad", or civilizational struggle. Saddam, for them, is the last Arab leader who tried to use Western methods against the Western enemy -- who advanced his power through a Western-style army and weapons, and totalitarian methods learned from Stalin and Hitler (secular creatures of the West to this Eastern worldview). That path -- on which Egypt's Nasser and many other nationalists trod -- is now closed, definitively.

Two possible lessons can be derived from the closing of that path. One is that it is time to surrender entirely to the "Western way of life", for it cannot be resisted. The other is that resistance must increasingly reach within Islam's own traditions, for a final solution without compromise.

The siren call of Osama bin Laden appeals to the latter party -- what we might call, the "Party of Armageddon". Both it, and the "Party of Surrender", have been strengthened by the humiliation of Saddam Hussein. It is thus a great day for BOTH Bush AND Al Qaeda.