That Uday and Qusay Hussein are dead is a victory for the Americans and, far more important, a victory for the Iraqi people. Both needed the break.

Uday and Qusay may have been organizing the postwar resistance to the invaders and directing a campaign for which they had years to plan and recruit and store away men and materiel. But how they ran the chain of command to their units when US electronic surveillance of the whole country is apparently so complete remains a mystery. It is possible that the resistance of diehard Baathists is being mounted by independent units, operating to a flexible plan. For the moment in any case there appears to be no letup in the assault on American troops, two more of whom were killed within hours of the death of Uday and Qusay. On top of this, another audiotape purporting to be from Saddam Hussein has been broadcast, in which the fallen dictator calls for resistance to continue.

There is now an immense intelligence effort centered on the Mosul villa where Saddam’s sons were run to ground, to check for clues as to their father’s whereabouts. How did Uday and Qusay come to choose this place to hide out? Was it a long-established safe house? Could it be that their father is not far away?

For the ordinary American soldier in Iraq yesterday was a heartening and morale-boosting day. The hunt for Saddam will be redoubled and there may indeed be valuable clues in the Mosul villa, which it took the whole might of the US military six hours to capture.

Yet the harsh truth remains that the only way that the Americans can fulfill their international legal obligations to the Iraqi people is to stem the rising tide of violence in the country: in Mosul, in Fallujah, in Baghdad. Until that stops Iraqis will not be able to focus on a future without Saddam and his brutal Baathist regime.

By concentrating all their efforts on Saddam and the Baathists, moreover, the Americans may well be ignoring other sources of resistance, other sources of violence in Iraq. The disparate groups that make up the country are still finding their voices — for too long they were silenced and supposedly subsumed into Saddam’s machine. Now that the regime is gone, these groups are clamoring to make their voices heard. Perhaps the resistance is rather a violent medley of messages, to the ordinary Iraqis as much as to the Americans, that these different groups exist and are a force to be reckoned with.

If that is so, the deaths of Saddam’s sons were in truth only a small step along the long and difficult road to a free, peaceful and united Iraq.