By RALPH PETERS

December 15, 2003 -- 'LADIES and gentlemen, we got him!" Those words may go down as the most memorable line of Iraq's liberation. The outburst of cheers and applause that followed Paul Bremer's remarks echoed around the world.

And a myth as old as humankind collapsed.

Despite the intense media coverage of Saddam's capture that greeted us as we woke on Sunday morning, Americans can't quite grasp the psychological power this event holds for Iraq, for the Middle East - and for the world. We take our freedom for granted.

Much of the world has had to take oppression for granted. For thousands of years. Now America and her allies have changed the rules.

Even after Saddam's statues tumbled, even after his monstrous sons were killed, and despite the presence of Coalition troops in their midst, fear lurked in the mind of every Iraqi: Like a creature of legend impossible to slay, the tyrant who had ravaged their lives for decades might return.

The myth of Saddam wasn't only about the strength of one man. He drew his power not only from the gun and the noose, but from the long tradition of cruel sultans and dictators, of rulers so strong that common men and women could do nothing. Defeatism and apathy have haunted the Middle East for countless centuries.

Now, with the capture of an unwashed old man in a hole in a shabby farmyard, the myth of the mortal god on a throne that prevailed since the days of Nebuchadnezzar has been revealed as a lie no one need believe.

Saddam, who admired Stalin and emulated Hitler, did not go down in a violent blaze of glory. He didn't fire the pistol he carried or even make a fist. He cowered below the earth until our soldiers dragged him out.

Even as dismayed pundits struggled to find a dark lining in this enormous silver cloud, the people of Iraq erupted in cheers. To the horror of their European colleagues, Arab journalists could not stop shouting, "Death to Saddam!" as the monitors in Baghdad showed a broken prisoner having his scalp inspected for lice.

The capture of Saddam marks the real birth of the new Iraq. But thousands of miles from Baghdad, hundreds of millions of other human beings instinctively understood the importance of the event, even if they could not articulate all they felt. The myth of the invincible dictator ended in a farmyard.

Bashir Assad, Kim Jong-Il, Robert Mugabe, the old mullahs in Teheran, the Saudi royal family, the already cowering Moammar Khadafy - and that would-be caliph of all Muslims, Osama bin Laden . . . all of the dictators, authoritarian rulers and terrorists-who-would-be-king saw their own faces in the place of Saddam's.

We put fear into the hearts of the men who thrived by striking fear into helpless millions.

Media coverage will focus on short-term events. If there is a spurt of attacks on Coalition forces as psychologically castrated hardliners struggle to prove that they remain capable and determined, we'll hear no end of analysis suggesting that Saddam's capture, while dramatic, wasn't so important, after all.

But it was important. Vitally important, in ways too great to quantify or fully describe. The effects will reverberate for decades, if not far longer.

Stand back and consider anew the greatness of what America and her partners have done. For the first time, the forces of freedom refused to wait for a dictator to strike again, whether against us or against his own people. Defying former allies comfortable with the old pattern of embracing cooperative tyrants, we changed the global rules.

And freedom won.

Yet even this huge milestone is only a beginning. The hardest of the hard-core militants, the Ba'athist thugs who've lost everything, will continue to annoy us for months to come - although their strength will dwindle. Terrorists will continue to try to turn back the clock.

But the people of Iraq now know that they truly are free, that their future is theirs to decide. And other degraded populations in the Middle East now see that they, too, can be free.

As the image of a humbled Saddam flashed on millions of screens, thousands of years of the armed few tyrannizing the suffering masses came to a symbolic end. And America stood taller than it has since the spring of 1945.

Now we must go forward without hesitating.

President Bush's historic speech of Nov. 6 acknowledged that, in the distorted strategic environment of the Cold War, the United States made grave errors by supporting dictators and authoritarian regimes, imagining that such men and their acolytes guaranteed stability. Instead, the strongmen brought only misery to their people and crises to the rest of us.

One dictator who received a measure of American support was Saddam. Our president faced up to that responsibility, and now we have paid our debt to the people of Iraq. But in the months to come, we'll face another challenge as the Iraqi people bring Saddam to trial.

We need to live up to our president's own words, to show the world further proof that America has forever moved beyond her brief tolerance for tyrants, that our actions in Iraq were neither selfish nor an exception. When Saddam raises - as he will - the support Americans once provided to him, we should go him one better and make every record available to the court.

We Americans must always have the courage to stand up and admit it when we've made mistakes. We must resist the temptation to classify the details of this long-ago visit by special envoy X or that covert aid during the Iran-Iraq War. Just tell the truth. The short-term discomfort will be minor compared to the enduring force of our example.

Let those Europeans who assured Saddam that they'd save him stand beside him in the court of world opinion. Let every detail come out. Hide nothing. Create such shame that even the French will think twice before coddling another dictator.

The capture of Saddam was a far greater matter than any image can capture or any words can suggest. This was a turning point in human history.

Ralph Peters is a retired Army intel officer and the author of "Beyond Baghdad."