Cliff, I much appreciate the plug – and I must say the thought of Mark and I prosecuting Saddam together would probably appeal to Saddam about as much as a good day of water-boarding. But I think Krauthammer is being a bit unfair.

First, I think the trial has been going pretty well. We are getting a lot of information into the public domain of the through-and-through barbarity of Saddam and his regime. The testimony of murder, torture and sexual humiliation has been chilling.

It is a pity that the media in our celebrity-obsessed culture seems more interested in Saddam’s every imperious utterance than in this gruesome evidence. Better coverage would not only be edifying for us as far as why the administration was so right to depose Saddam; it would also help put our current faux-torture debate in some valuable context if we could compare what the Europeans and Senator McCain are calling “torture” to what Saddam’s regime actually did. But there’s nothing the administration or the prosecutors can do about what information the MSM – which is so opposed to Bush and Iraq – chooses to highlight. Good news from Iraq has been suppressed for 3 years; there’s no reason to hope that trial coverage will be different.

Second, no matter how good the prosecutor is, it is always the judge who sets the tone in a courtroom. The prosecutor and the guards have no power to muzzle Saddam, to order him removed from the courtroom if he makes a spectacle of himself, or to embarrass him by publicly deriding his outbursts. Only the judge can do that. And Krauthammer is wrong to give the judges here a total pass – they are not new to all this. There’s no question that Iraqi prosecutors and police needed a lot of schooling in the fundamentals of due process, but the Iraqi judiciary was actually fairly well trained. Controlling a courtroom, moreover, is a rudimentary judicial skill; it’s not something that you should need to teach.

Unavoidably, the lead defendant is always center-stage in a big trial. And, again unavoidably, the defendant whose defense is that the prosecution is “political,” always tries to put his political opponents on trial – it is a standard way of not dealing with the actual evidence. In a fair trial you have to let the defendant put on his defense, and there’s no way Saddam’s defense was ever going to be anything other than an attack on America. We were obviously not going to go the summary execution route, so this was inevitable.

Further, while I don’t know exactly what Krauthammer means when he says the Saddam the public is seeing should look like the guy pulled out of the spider-hole, the fact is that such a thing would never happen in the U.S. At the moment of arrest, mafia dons, drug kingpins, and terrorists may have to do the perp-walk in their jammies, but they are always resplendent by the time the trial rolls around – and I have always been of the view that this flashing of their egos (like other demonstrations of their egos) is enormously helpful to the government’s case (at least in a jury trial which, admittedly, Saddam’s trial is not).