Capture of fallen president may do little to quell guerrilla campaign or opposition to US

The euphoria in Washington and London over the capture of Saddam Hussein may turn out to be as premature as the triumphalism which followed the swift capture of Baghdad in April.

It is not surprising that American and British leaders are pleased with the first piece of good news out of Iraq since the end of the conventional war. But Saddam Hussein, lurking in holes in the ground beneath farms around Tikrit, was clearly not the co-ordinator of the resistance movement which is taking an increasing toll of American troops. This was always admitted by US commanders on the spot who shook their heads in bewilderment at stories out of Washington claiming that Saddam Hussein or his henchman Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri were orchestrating guerrilla attacks.

If anything, the guerrillas will now probably try to inflict more casualties on the US in order to prove they are still in business despite the capture of the former Iraqi leader.

The leaders of the resistance are middle-ranking army officers and Baath party members, say US intelligence and members of the Iraqi Governing Council. They are men who lost power with the fall of Saddam's regime, but they are not necessarily "Saddam loyalists". Many of them joined the guerrillas after the US dissolved the Iraqi army and security forces in a fit of over-confidence after the fall of Baghdad.

An important question now is to see if the US again overplays its hand. It faces a myriad of enemies or potential enemies in Iraq with differing motives and methods.

The guerrilla war since mid-summer has shown that in a conflict as highly publicised as this, the Iraqi resistance can inflict serious political damage on President George Bush with limited means. Thus, an attempt by the White House to claim it was winning on the ground in October, as the presidential election campaign was getting under way in the US, was punctured when rockets hit the al-Rashid hotel as Paul Wolfowitz, the Under Secretary for Defence, was staying there.

The evidence of recent months is that guerrilla campaign is locally organised (and there is no shortage of trained and armed men in Iraq) but that there is some central direction and financing. It is unclear how far the cells which let off bombs beside the road to catch US convoys are connected to suicide bombers who are targeting anybody, Iraqi or foreign, who is allied to the US.

The resistance will know that the capture of Saddam Hussein, however little he may have been doing, is an important psychological boost for Mr Bush, the US administration in Baghdad and the interim Governing Council. It will be important to see over the next month or so to see if they can raise their level of attacks to show Saddam being taken prisoner is an important incident but not a turning point in the war. It would not, in fact, be difficult to increase US casualties if the suicide bombers start attacking US convoys and checkpoints as the Lebanese guerrillas did against Israeli forces in Lebanon in 1983. At present, the suicide trucks and cars have mostly been directed against Iraqi police stations.

The capture of Saddam Hussein will alter the geography of Iraqi politics in another respect. It will depress the Sunni Muslim community, many of whom have concluded that for them life under Saddam Hussein, himself a Sunni, was better than it is today. It will be universally welcomed by the Kurds who were slaughtered by the Baathist regime.

But the sight of Saddam being dragged off to prison will not only be welcomed by most Iraqi Shias, 60 per cent of the population, but will have an important effect on the way they behave towards the US forces. Up to now, whatever misgivings the Shia leaders had about American policy in Iraq, they knew that the alternative to Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, was Saddam Hussein or some variant on the old regime.

The Shias will no longer have this fear. They will feel freer to oppose US policy. This is likely to be through mass demonstrations rather than by force. There are signs of this happening already in the city of Hilla south of Baghdad, where there have been prolonged and well-organised protests against US-appointed governors.

It is understandable that there should be a sense of triumph in the US and Britain over the capture of Saddam Hussein. But it is easy to forget that he was a wonderful enemy to have as a target. He was enough of a demon to be easy to demonise but was also militarily and politically incompetent. He ruined his country by invading Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990.

Now that he is imprisoned it will be impossible to blame Iraqi resistance on his machinations. The next few months will show if the US-led coalition has truly reached a turning point in the struggle for Iraq.