SADDAM ON TRIAL.(The Talk of the Town)

In different circumstances, the image of Saddam Hussein and seven other Baath Party officials sitting inside the defendants' corrals of a Baghdad courtroom would have been a simple tableau of justice. On October 19th, they heard charges and entered not-guilty pleas in the killings of more than a hundred and forty men and boys in the Shiite town of Dujail in 1982. Everything about the scene suggested that the modern history of the Middle East is being rewritten in Iraq. The ex-President was not a bullet-riddled corpse propped up before television cameras, like one of his predecessors (Abdul Karim Qasim, in 1963), or a collection of body parts dragged through the streets of Baghdad, like another (Nuri es-Said, in 1958). Saddam was alive, in good health, his hair dyed black, his suit respectable; and he was permitted to address the court with the vainglorious defiance of the President he still believes himself to be. At his first court appearance, in the summer of 2004, Saddam looked confused and cowed, as if he were expecting the summary justice that his own revolutionary courts once handed down to tens of thousands of Iraqis. By last week, he seemed to have realized that the nature of justice had changed in Iraq, along with power, and a shadow of his old swagger was back.

The chief judge, the graying and even-tempered Rizgar Mohamed Amin, is a Kurd. He belongs to an ethnic group that has been barely tolerated in the Arab world when it hasn't been actively persecuted; but, sitting in judgment over a dictator responsible for the deaths of almost two hundred thousand Kurds, Judge Amin displayed respect and firmness in exactly the right proportion. Between Saddam's delusional claims of Arab and Islamic glory and Amin's steady focus on the particulars of the case, the difference between a reign of terror and the rule of law was made vivid. Outside the courtroom, around the country, life came virtually to a halt as Iraqis watched the televised proceedings and were free to debate their meaning.

But other aspects of the trial make its difficult circumstances painfully clear. Reporters and others in attendance had to pass through multiple levels of security inspections, including three-hundred-and-sixty-degree body scans, to get inside. The courtroom itself, in the old Baath Party headquarters, is a fortified chamber inside the fortified Green Zone, and setting up the trial has cost American, not Iraqi, taxpayers some hundred and thirty million dollars. The five judges in the case were trained largely by American experts; the Special Tribunal that is administering the trials of former Baathists was established under American occupation, by American officials, with American money. The identities of the judges, apart from that of Amin, have been kept secret for their own protection, and they work under heavy guard. Nor are the defendants' lawyers immune from Iraq's epidemic violence; one, Saadoun Sughaiyer al-Janabi, was dragged from his law offices the day after his court appearance and later found dead, shot in the head.

Iraqis are trying their former rulers in the middle of ...