Saddam's guilty verdict will test the government

It comes as no surprise that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has been found guilty of crimes against humanity and has been sentenced to death. After all, during his nine-month trial, the ex president admitted that 150 Shiites in the city of Dujail had been rounded up on his orders nearly 25 years ago.
Saddam was charged with masterminding the torture and murder of the Shiites and went on trial in January, after he was arrested by American troops. He was discovered hiding with an unfired pistol in a hole in the ground near his home village north of Baghdad.
The murderous dictator ruled Iraq with an iron fist until the U.S. and its coalition partners invaded the country in December 2003.
In his defense against the charges, Saddam contended that the deaths of the 150 Shiites were justified because they had been found guilty in a legitimate Iraqi court of trying to assassinate him in 1982.
Early Sunday, an Iraqi court in the fledgling Democracy found Saddam and six subordinates guilty of the torture and murder of those viewed as enemies of the dictator. Shiites and Kurds, who were targeted by Saddam and were tormented and killed by the tens of thousands, celebrated -- with caution.
The prospect of violence by Sunnis, the ethnic group favored during Saddam's reign of terror, looms as a test for the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Act of reconciliation
The trial was presented by the government and its sponsor, the United States, as an act of reconciliation. The hope was that bringing Saddam and others to justice would somehow cause Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds to ends centuries of hatred and distrust.
However, what the U.S. and its coalition partners had not counted on with the 2003 invasion and ouster of Saddam was a prolonged period of sectarian violence fueled by Sunni insurgents. Almost 3,000 American soldiers and countless Iraqis have been killed in the last three years, and shortly after the verdict against Saddam was announced there was talk of the possibility of an all-out civil war.
It prompted Prime Minister al-Maliki to call for reconciliation.
"The verdict placed on the heads of the former regime does not represent a verdict for any one person," the prime minister said in an address to the nation. "It is a verdict on a whole dark era that was unmatched in Iraq's history."
The message he was trying to impart was this: Saddam's iron-fisted rule hurt all Iraqis, not just the Shiites and Kurds.
But that will be a tough sell in the current climate of ethnic bloodletting.
President Bush, who is counting on the war in Iraq to return Republicans to power in Congress, called the verdict "a milestone in the Iraqi people's efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law."
But the rule of law in Iraq today is tenuous at best and a full-scale civil war would certainly be a major setback for the U.S., which has made Iraq the laboratory for democracy in the Middle East.
Old enmities die hard in that part of the world -- as we are finding out with the explosive situation in Iraq.