Adolf Hitler committed suicide before he could be captured in 1945, and Pol Pot, who was responsible for the deaths of over two million Cambodians, died in the jungle before he could be handed over to an international court.

Liberia's Charles Taylor is awaiting trial for war crimes in neighbouring Sierra Leone, while Panama's Manual Noriega is serving 40 years in a Miami prison for racketeering, drug-trafficking and money-laundering.

Clutching his copy of the Koran and refusing to wear a hood, Saddam Hussein went to the gallows in Baghdad before sunrise yesterday for crimes against humanity . . . specifically the killing of 148 Shi'ite men and boys in Dujail after a 1982 assassination attempt.

The man pictured on television and today in newspapers worldwide was very different to the swaggering defiant dictator who boasted of being the "builder of modern Iraq". Yesterday he appeared confused as he shuffled, shackled, to the hangman's noose.

There was no statement of remorse and no apparent regret for the lives squandered and spent on his orders.

In the western world there is little sympathy for him. There was rejoicing in the streets among Shi'ite communities in Iraq and lament in Sunni-dominated regions. In Tikrit, once Saddam's power base, they called him a martyr and in Libya Colonel Gaddafi ordered a period of mourning.

It all began so differently over 30 years ago.

When Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party took over in Iraq, they envisioned a country ruled by Arab socialism. Saddam headed an economic planning council that oversaw the creation of vast industrial plants, eight-lane highways, housing projects, airports, universities and communications systems. The country's earnings from oil reserves . . . the second-largest in the world after Saudi Arabia . . . paid the bills and the future looked bright.

Millions of Iraqis began to taste the high life, with expensive foreign holidays, designer clothes and imported cars, all subsidised by the government. Baghdad became a hub for writers and artists and tens of thousands of young men and women were sent to western universities on scholarships.

However, the price of power was high.

Support of the one-party state was paramount, and under Saddam, imprisonment or summary execution of political foes was common. But before Saddam invaded Iran in 1980, and Kuwait in 1990, Iraq was the envy of the Arab world.

As Robert Fisk has pointed out, we in the west bear responsibility here. Who encouraged the invasion of Iran? Who supplied Saddam with the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? And who ensured that the charges he faced in his trial forbade any mention of this so as not to expose the west's culpability?

Perhaps it is fitting that US president George Bush went to bed early in Texas on Friday night, with explicit directions that he was not to be disturbed and leaving a preprepared statement on Saddam's execution. The west helped create this monster, yet as justice was finally seen to be done, Bush pulled the covers over his head. Meanwhile, British prime minister Tony Blair is on holiday at a pop star's beach resort.

There is no doubt that the execution of Saddam Hussein marks the end of a dark period of Iraqi history. But a dark period of Iraqi reality is continuing. Saddam left misery and destruction in his wake in Iraq but the Americans and the British are continuing to add to this terrible toll. And while Saddam has lost, and paid the ultimate price with his life, his captors have certainly not won.