WITH the Operation Desert Fox air strikes against Iraq now halted, the political truce in Britain also ends as Opposition parties pressure Tony Blair on what happens next.

Mr Blair tells us that the four-day bombardment has put Saddam Hussein "back in his cage" - by severely impairing his capacity to manufacture the weapons of mass destruction that underpin his ambitions for dominance of the Middle East.

This may well be so. But in the past, when caged by similar air strikes against his military arsenal and restrained by economic sanctions and UN weapons inspections, he has remain unchastened and as determined as ever to acquire nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

And as long as he remains in power it seems inevitable he will carry on as before.

Given this, there is clear logic in the Tories' call for the government's strategy to include the removal of the cause - Saddam himself - so that the prospect of having to deal again and again with the effects of his objectives is diminished.

This, of course, is easier said than done.

The toppling of this dictator might require a prolonged ground war of even greater magnitude than that of the 1991 Gulf conflict - and the political will or stomach for that in an international community that havers even at the limited action of Desert Fox is something upon which even the most ardent "Get Saddam" advocates cannot rely.

And even if they could, the question of what sort of regime might replace Saddam's is not one that can be answered with assurance, not when a bitter civil war inside Iraq, provoking strife beyond its borders, is among the prospects.

Saddam, then, may, as far as British and US strategy is concerned, fall into the category of the devil we know - even if his menace and ambitions mean that operations like Desert Fox may be needed repeatedly over the years to keep him in his cage.

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