Analysis: The biggest surprise of all would be if the execution of Saddam Hussein actually lessened the butchery into which Iraq has descended, writes Lara Marlowe.
Saddam Hussein listened to the verdict with the concentrated look of a stage actor waiting to deliver his lines. The words "death by hanging" were the cue for his well-rehearsed outburst: "Long live the people! Long live the nation! Down with the traitors! Down with the invaders! God is great!"
Since the former US administrator Paul Bremer announced on December 14th, 2003, "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!" there was a certain inevitability to yesterday's sentencing in Baghdad.
When Saddam was captured, President George Bush said he should be executed. In the first week of its existence, the interim Iraqi government created by the US at the end of June 2004 restored capital punishment and arraigned Saddam Hussein.
US and Iraqi determination to hang Saddam was one reason the trial could not be turned over to a more orderly international forum. When Saddam's trial finally started in October 2005, the Iraqi president Jalal Talabani said Saddam "deserves to be executed 20 times a day for his crimes".
In retrospect, Saddam's declaration in his first court appearance 28 months ago that "This is all theatre" was surprisingly apt. So was a December 2005 outburst by his half-brother Barzan, also sentenced to hang yesterday. "Why don't you just execute us and get this over with?" Barzan challenged the court.
Despite the predictability of yesterday's death sentence, Iraq has a way of surprising us, invariably for the worse. Saddam Hussein is the world's best-guarded prisoner, but he could die in his cell like Slobodan Milosevic.
His supporters might attempt a spectacular, suicidal jail break. Most likely, we'll wake up one morning to hear he was hanged at dawn.
The biggest surprise of all would be if the execution of Saddam Hussein actually lessened the butchery into which Iraq has descended. The scale of the killing defies the imagination: on Friday, 56 headless cadavers were discovered. How do you decapitate 56 people? With guillotines? With axemen? We heard predictions of improvement when Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay were killed by US Marines, and again when Saddam was arrested, and again when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was killed. No one ventured such a prediction yesterday.
There was a brief temptation to think Saddam's execution would at last put an end to fantasies among Sunni Muslims that he might one day return to power. But despite their nostalgia for Saddam, the Sunnis long ago realised he would not return to power. They are fighting for other things now. A few dream of the "radical Islamic empire that stretches from Spain to Indonesia" described by Mr Bush. Some hate the Shia Muslims they consider to be Iranian proxies and heretics. Many simply want foreign forces out of their country.
If there is a political fantasy among Iraqis and occupiers alike, it is for the advent of a new "strong man". The Americans tried once, with the appointment of former Baathist and long-time CIA and MI6 agent Ayad Allawi as prime minister in 2004. Allawi was known as "little Saddam" but scored poorly in subsequent elections.
The installation of a "strong man" who could control Iraq is reportedly one option considered by the former US secretary of state James Baker, who will report to the Bush administration in January.
For Iraqis, the fate of Saddam was long ago overshadowed by their own desperate struggle to survive. In Baghdad, when Saddam was arraigned, and again when his trial opened, it was hard to escape the impression that western media were far more interested in his trial than Iraqis were.
From the beginning, Saddam's trial had the words "Made in America" stamped all over it. In July 2004, an American who was at Saddam's arraignment told me why television cameras showed only three people: Saddam, the judge and a guard. Everyone else who was present - more than 30 people - was American. Yesterday, one suspected that Saddam's sentencing had far more to do with Bush's fear of losing Congress to the Democrats tomorrow than with the future of Iraq.
Yes, some Kurds and Shia Muslims, Saddam's main victims, celebrated his sentencing yesterday. But, as early as July 2004, I heard a Shia who had been tortured and imprisoned for 10 years by Saddam say the country was better off before the US invasion. A few days ago in Paris, a Kurd who was granted political asylum in France from Saddam's Iraq told me the same thing.
Three-and-a-half years after the US invasion, the arithmetic of slaughter has relativised Saddam Hussein's evil. The fallen dictator was convicted of crimes against humanity for the murder of 148 Shia Muslims in Dujail in 1982; 148 is not an unusual death toll for a single day in post-Saddam Iraq.
How many people did Saddam kill? Three hundred thousand in 35 years was the oft-stated estimate when his trial started; well in excess of one million, if he is held responsible for the deaths of the 1980-1988 Gulf War, which he prosecuted with western support. But who, one must ask, is responsible for the deaths caused by the 2003 invasion, estimated by British medical journal The Lancet last month at 655,000?
One of Saddam's French lawyers said yesterday that he was not trying to save a dictator, but was leading a crusade against the death penalty. It is unfortunate that the verdict, however predictable, leaves such a deep sense of flouted justice: that Iraq was not able to rise above a violent past and ban capital punishment; that the international community was not allowed to organise an orderly trial for such a despicable criminal.
Saddam Hussein reportedly smiled when he walked out of the courtroom yesterday. It was a barely perceptible, ironic little smile of vengeance, a smile that signified, I suspect, "après moi, le déluge".