ssAnne Applebaum, author of Gulag, has a great piece in the Washington Post contrasting the trial of Saddam Hussein with the Nuremburg trials in Germany following World War II. Excerpt:
Yet Nuremberg was, in retrospect, a huge success, and as the trial of Saddam Hussein begins today in Baghdad, it is worth remembering why. If it achieved nothing else, Nuremberg laid out for the German people, and for the world, the true nature of the Nazi system. Auschwitz survivors and SS officers presented testimony. Senior Nazis were subjected to cross-examination. The prosecutors produced documents, newsreels of liberated concentration camps and films of atrocities made by the Nazis themselves. There were hangings at the end, as well as acquittals. But it mattered more that the story of the Third Reich had been told, memorably and eloquently.
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