The world is a better place without Saddam Hussein in it, but is it a safer one?

That’s the question many were struggling with when the news came that the dictator’s executioners had done their work, perhaps more swiftly than the Americans who had engineered his downfall and capture would have liked. Few can doubt that justice was served when considering the trail of blood and tears he traced across the Middle East and the widows and orphans he left not only among his enemies but his own people as well. Saddam was ruthless and homicidal even when judged among the company of his fellow tyrants, and, if anything, his death came not too soon, but decades too late.

And yet the muted reaction of the Bush administration, in contrast to the jubilation that greeted his capture three years ago, reflected the somber mood of this nation. Saddam’s death came in the same week as that of the 3,000th soldier killed in the Iraq conflict, and our country struggles to understand what it, or the world, has earned for the sacrifice. The Middle East seems less stable, not more, with Iraq in suicidal turmoil and now Iran feeling emboldened to flout American power and global pressure. And while Israelis rejoiced at the news of the death of a man who had aimed Scud missiles into the very heart of their country, they also considered how he served as a counterweight to Iran’s expansionist dreams and Shia Islam’s jihadist fantasies.

Saddam Hussein created the conditions for his own demise, and good riddance. The president can say, at the very least, that one of the aims of the war has been achieved. Now America, the Iraqis, Israel, and the world await the next chapter and ask how the president aims to address a tragedy to which Saddam’s death seems, ultimately, merely a footnote.