EDITORIAL
After Odai and Qusai: an Iraq turning point?

Few men have been more deserving of their fate than Odai and Qusai Hussein, Saddam's feared and reviled oldest sons. Yet their deaths Tuesday in a deluge of American ordnance falls short of cause for elation.

Violent outcomes of any sort — as with war, a last resort for civil society — ought to be regretted. True, media descriptions of the siege of their Mosul mansion hideout suggest that the two brothers and their two companions were bent on going out in a blaze of what they took for glory, and no attempt to capture them alive was worth risking more lives — either of American soldiers or innocent neighbors.

But taking them alive, had it been possible, was surely the preferred outcome.

For starters, it would have eliminated the difficult choice now under consideration in Washington — whether to exhibit grisly photos of the riddled corpses to stem powerful doubts across Iraq that Odai and Qusai really are gone.

That things truly are different now would have been reinforced exponentially as a lengthy public prosecution subjected them to daily humiliations, as testimony to the full extent of their horrors unfolded in painful detail, and they finally paid the price before the bar of justice.

And their interrogation might have yielded information helpful in capturing their father, in curtailing resistance and in advancing the vital mission of establishing a popular Iraqi democracy.

Because it is unclear whether the brothers had any role in causing or coordinating the guerrilla attacks on U.S. forces, it is difficult to predict whether their elimination will greatly worsen, or greatly improve, the situation.

What is clear is that these monsters will not be mourned:

• Qusai is said to have implemented the revenge killings and terror that put down the postwar uprising in 1991, and to have "cleansed" overcrowded prisons by killing several thousand prisoners by shooting or torture.

• Odai is accused of routinely kidnapping women off the streets, raping and sometimes torturing them, and personally supervising the torture of hundreds of prisoners. He bludgeoned to death a servant at a party given in honor of the wife of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.

Dead or alive, these men, who organized and directed Saddam Hussein's death squads and were his chosen political successors, are gone. Iraq is clearly a better place.