Saddam Hussein death sentence a milestone

Mr. Nadhmi helped Hussein in 1959, when he fled to Cairo after participating in a botched assassination attempt against the sitting leader.

"They promised us – the Americans – there would be democracy and human rights. But we see them violated in every day's happenings," says Professor Nadhmi. "The majority of Iraqis think the drastic failure of this regime and the Americans to bring security and human rights to Iraq, does not entitle them to conduct such a trial [or] issue a guilty verdict."

But the sentencing, regardless of its imperfections, is likely to be seen as justice by Iraqis who often did not grasp the magnitude of Hussein regime crimes – often heard about, but rarely physically encountered – until scores of mass graves began being unearthed starting in 2003.

Besides the Dujail and Anfal cases, tribunal investigators say they have documented evidence of more than 100,000 people tortured and killed in the aftermath of the 1991 Shiite uprising.

Some 5,000 Kurds were killed by chemical weapons in Halabja in 1988. Hussein ordered his armies into Iran in 1980, sparking nearly a decade of war that left 1 million dead and wounded, and in which Iraq used chemical munitions. And Iraqi troops occupied Kuwait in 1990.

Iraqis reeled from the legacy of those acts, but could rarely quantify them until the regime fell. Among the most poignant scenes came in late April 2003, just two weeks after the fall of Baghdad, at a graveyard adjacent to the Abu Ghraib prison. There, some 993 graves were marked only with crude numbered signs, until families, most of them Shiites, found lists that matched victims' names with numbers. "O my father, my father!" lamented Mustapha al-Fadil at the time, weeping uncontrollably at grave No. 659, when his family came to dig up the remains for reburial.

Fadil Sadoun, an overtly religious man, had been arrested in 1996 and never came home. "You should be happy," mourned the son. "Saddam is gone."

The scene repeated itself hundreds of times that day, with broken families taking home the broken remains of executed loved ones. At least they could be identified; most mass graves around Iraq are filled with anonymous victims.

But if state-sanctioned violence defined the former regime, Hussein threatened its use again on Sunday, when defense lawyers reported, after a lengthy talk with their client, that the former Iraqi dictator vowed to "die with honor and with no fear."

Americans in Iraq, defense lawyers quoted Hussein as saying, "will see rivers of blood for years to come. It will dwarf Vietnam," Reuters reported.

Days earlier, Hussein's chief defense counsel, Khalil al-Dulaimi, said after a guilty verdict, "The doors of hell will open in Iraq, the sectarian divide in the country will deepen, and many more coffins will be sent back to America."

But Iraq's prime minister, whose own Islamic Dawa Party had claimed responsibility for the Dujail assassination attempt, saw it differently. "The martyrs and all Iraqis have a right to smile," said Mr. Maliki.

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