Making New Year predictions about Iraq really boils down to making them about Saddam, for nowhere more than Iraq is a whole country's fate so utterly bound up with its leader.
And the only really significant question is whether he will stay or go, and, if he goes, the manner of it.
On the other hand, though there can certainly be no upturn in Iraqi fortunes until he does go, the price to be paid for it might be so high that even those who most devoutly desire it cannot but dread it, too; with his savage misrule, he has created such a political vacuum around him that only chaos, massacres and civil war might be there to fill it.
No ruler deserves a final reckoning like Saddam: none has been more adept at postponing it. However appalling the uses he has made of power, in his ability to seize and preserve it he has been one of the most successful despots of the 20th century, proof against all the shocks and disasters he has brought on himself, his regime and people.
So what ground is there to believe that, since he has survived so long and so much, this year should bring the longed-for, yet dreaded, change? Not a great deal, really.
And yet, I think it more likely this year than it was last. There are two ways in which he could go. One would be through the agency of outsiders, the regime's adversaries, Iraqi and/or foreign. This way is susceptible to planning and preparation, and likely to be accomplished - if accomplished at all - within a more or less foreseeable period of time.
The other would come from within the system itself; though inherently likely at any time, when it finally came, it would come as a complete surprise. In both cases, the pressures on him are mounting, highly visible in the one, totally invisible in the other.
With the latest military showdowns - the one that was narrowly averted in November only to be accomplished in December - the Americans crossed a Rubicon, and, however much the prospect may unnerve them, they are bound to work more and more seriously towards Saddam's destruction. For they are quite simply out of alternatives. It is true they are still clinging doggedly to "containment". But its manifest futility, along with the moral and political unsustainability if sanctions, the absurdity of repeatedly going to the brink of war and then either retreating from it, in response to another eleventh-hour Saddam climb-down, or unleashing a few symbolic cruise missiles somewhere in the desert, the growing conviction that the only way to get his weapons of mass destruction is to get the man himself - all this, I believe, has now earned the Clinton Administration so much ignominy that it cannot but have done with such methods, and make the new, subversive strategy the test by which it wishes to be judged.
Since this is so overt, so visible, it is something which public opinion can easily measure for seriousness of intent; and public opinion, led by Congress, already finely attuned to Clinton's waverings and back-slidings, will be severe, impelling him onwards.
What, in practice, the US is now contemplating is a popular uprising, or some variant of it. That is the meaning of the signature which, in October, Clinton appended to the Iraq Liberation Act.
AN uprising is, in one key respect, very different from a military coup, the other way which, insofar as it has tried to get rid of Saddam at all, the US has hitherto favoured. It is something which, the more resources are devoted to it, the more likely it is to succeed. And however reluctantly Clinton may have come round to this approach, now that he has actually done so, there is, in principle, no limit to the amount of resources he can throw at it.
If the US is truly serious about it, that will soon become apparent from its dealings with the Iraqi opposition, the other party to this joint venture, and from the concrete steps - political, financial, military - it starts to take in conjunction with them.
The more serious these look the greater their psychological impact, not merely on all those, among the Iraqi people, who dream of Saddam's removal, but on the regime itself, right up to the innermost circles of power.
The mere prospect of an uprising could pre-empt its own necessity; the outsiders' planned, foreseen finale could trigger the insider's unforeseen one. By this I mean Saddam's assassination by a member of his entourage, or some new convulsion at the top, one which this time (unlike the last, the spectacular flight, in 1995, of his son-in-law, Hussein Kamil Majid) proves disastrously destabilising to the whole system.
It would, by definition, be unpredictable - for who but the most highly placed insiders are privy to the inner workings of the House of Saddam? - and it is not something which the US, the opposition or anyone else can hope to play much part in bringing about. But I believe that it has always been the most likely way for him to go, and the knowledge that the US is truly serious would make it more likely.
True, the normal response of insiders, under threat, is to rally round their chief more loyally than ever, knowing as they do that if he goes they go with him. But in this ruling elite of gangsters and psychopaths there is surely someone who, sooner or later, is going to raise his hand against the monster of monsters on whom they all utterly depend, but whom, surely, they also fear and loath.
It is precisely when such a person feels the game is almost up that he is most likely to strike, driven either by a lust for personal vengeance in the hour of doom, or by some desperate hope that, as the tyrannicide, he can save his own skin amid the vengeance of an entire people.
But, even then, there would still remain the awesome question: what comes after?