Fifteen hours after Operation Red Dawn concluded magnificently with the capture of deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein who was found hiding in a hole near his hometown of Tikrit, analysis after analysis of the impact of the news has been gushing like Middle Eastern oil.

Amidst the incredulity, joy has reigned on every Iraqi street, and it spread to neighbouring Arab states.

At the joint press conference in Baghdad held by the United States armed forces and Paul Bremmer, the US governor of Iraq, and a representative of the US-handpicked Iraqi governing council, proceedings began with these words: "Ladies and gentlemen, we've got him" and ended with "God bless America". Typical.

Still at the press conference, you could see the contrast between two emotions. Western media representatives were subdued, sombre and, given that the US Defence Department wasn't going to give away too much information too soon on Saddam's capture, the press corps remained a little bit cautious and pressed on with inquisitive questions.

On the other hand, the Arab media, when shown video footage of Saddam looking exhausted and old and bearded and being examined by a US doctor, jumped to their feet, punched the air with fists, called for "death to Saddam". They asked the most pathetic questions but, typical of many Arab journalists, sang praises of the US army and government.

In the US, analysts ran riot. Most cast very positive implications for Iraq's stability, security and prosperity. But most think US President George W. Bush has, with Saddam's capture, been vindicated now for taking the US to war in Iraq. That's not all: Bush's star will rise and rise as he enters 2004 and the start of active campaigning for re-election to a second term as president of the world's most powerful nation with the biggest and most important economy, which in the third quarter put on quite a performance with a stunning 8.2 percent gross domestic product expansion.

With the Democrats hopelessly in disarray, and the Al Gore-backed Howard Dean looking like the beleaguered party's only viable candidate to challenge Bush, analysts think the election result is a forgone conclusion anyway. Bush, they say, will win hands down. And worse still for the Democrats, they haven't a clue about making an effective policy responses to the Bush administration. Bush seems unassailable. And anti-Democrats, despots and tyrants everywhere had better watch-out: if Saddam's capture is any measure of US will at all, the days of other dictators are also numbered. What's more, Bush's critics will soon also shut up.

Meanwhile, with the spirit of American gung-ho-ism renewed by Saddam's arrest, the US will roll out its global democratisation and global free-marketisation project, hand-in-hand, on a red carpet, to continue the onslaught of the American-led globalisation of the world. Whatever the discontent with globalisation, they'll soon also be swept aside. For the discontents are ideologically bankrupt - again. Make no mistake: the American virtue of freedom is one by which all in the world will live, and with which all in the world will comply. It's another episode that adds to the veracity to Francis Fukuyama's late 1980s call of the "end of history". For the last man standing is, again, the stars-and stripes draped liberal.

Even critics of US policy in Iraq seem to have jumped ship suddenly. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder congratulated Bush as effusively as did French President Jacques Chirac. Even the fanatical Islamic cleric-dominated Iranian regime, labelled by Bush as one of several in his "axis of evil", joined the clamour. So too Kuwait and Saudi Arabia; and no doubt the staunch pro-US Jordanian king, Abdullah, also will soon enough.

Another bogus claim

Perhaps that's just the problem amid the euphoria over Saddam's capture: it's just too soon for sanity and objectivity to prevail. If this euphoria is used by the Bush administration, the British government of Tony Blair and that of Australia's prime minister John Howard, to legitimise their unilateralist decision to go to war with Iraq - and they will if they haven't already - it will amount to nothing more than yet another bogus claim by these men. This was a war based on lie after lie, and deception after deception.

This was to have been a war against an imminent threat posed by Saddam and his programme of weapons of mass destruction, and indeed his regime's links with the transnational terrorist organisation al-Qaeda. But even before this, this was to have been a war against global terrorists. That war, against a rogue state like Iraq, came more as an after-thought - after the defeat of the Islamic barbaric fundamentalists, the Taliban, in Afghanistan, and after the US had miserably failed to track down and capture or kill Osama bin Laden while still not being able to guarantee the security of their handpicked man, Hamid Kazai, in running a warlord state and a narcotics-producing and still massively ravaged economy.

Capturing Saddam does not in any way cancel out the fact that Bush, Blair and Howard had lied and deceived their own people and the world about the need to go to war. Nobody begrudges the arrest of Saddam nor that he'll be put on trial in Iraq. But now will come even more strenuous claims by critics that the forces of the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq should quickly ensure their departure and allow the return of a sovereign Iraqi state. But that's naive.

Here's the thing: the coalition will only go if it can see - unambiguously - that the government that is popularly elected by Iraqis is one with which they can live and work with, given their vast geopolitical and economic interests in the region. While all of these interests are related to Arab oil, they'll grow to other key commercial interests if US plans for the democratisation and free marketisation of the Arab political economies are put on the ground.

But there's sure to be strong resistance to US plans, too, given the array of feudal interests ranged against US plans. To prise apart intractable historical links between feudalist politics, economics and variants of Islam will give Bush nightmares. There's another sticking point for the US: equitable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. As long as the US backs Israel, unreservedly and whether implicitly or explicitly, and the longer it maintains US bases in the region, the capture of Saddam will come to nought for the stability and security of the Middle East.

There's no fundamental difference in the attacks by transnational and regional terrorists organisations against those regimes that back the US and host US military personnel to the direct attacks on US military personnel and their proxies and commercial and political interests anywhere in the world. Like it or not, the world hasn't fundamentally changed for the better, even with the capture of the vile Saddam Hussein.

MANJIT BHATIA is managing director of AsiaRisk - a political and economic research and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. The writer specialises in international economics and politics and the Asia-Pacific region.