The man is French lawyer Jacques Vergas. He will be one of the great lawyers of all time. Eighty, he still fingers his Cuban cigars and can count to his credit the defense of Nazi official Klaus Barbie and the terrorist Carlos the Jackal.

This, however, is his biggest case.

Vergas defends Saddam Hussein.

Somewhere in Baghdad in the early years of this new century it starts: the trial of Saddam Hussein. This will be numbing. Satan incarnate on trial for butchering Kurds, Shiites and others. Leagues of witnesses poised to testify: Americans, Iraqi’s, Kurds, and Shiites, people from many nations from around the earth.

This will be a trial that much of the world has awaited since Hussein attacked his own people, tried to overwhelm Kuwait and finally was overwhelmed himself.

Finally, a trial.

Documents filling whole rooms will be ready. Witness after witness will testify to Hussein’s inhuman temperament, his cruelty, his ability to kill without remorse, his opulent lifestyle and his plans for the conquest of his part of the world. Hussein will be vilified, dehumanized. And he will doubtless be proven guilty of numerous horrid acts, deeds, intentions.

Of course the Frenchman knows all this. He is not foolish. But the Frenchman will not let the trial of Saddam Hussein stop there. He will conduct two trials.

One will be about what Hussein might or might not have done. The other will be far more damaging.

That second trial, that other trial will be a trial of the United States of America and how over many years it helped keep Saddam Hussein in power, made it easy for him to conquer domestic troublemakers and make Iraq safe for one purpose: to sell oil to America.

If the Frenchman has his way, this will be the great trial of the millennium, pitting the awesome power and wealth of the Christian/Jewish West against the weakness and abject poverty of the Muslim East.

This lawyer has defended Algerians who planted bombs in the 1960s against French colonial authorities. Why he even married one of his Algerian clients.

He will know how to defend even a madman when the madman’s backdrop is set up by the even larger madness in the Middle East. He has not gone off looking for evidence. That would be futile anyway. There is plenty of proof that Saddam Hussein is a world-class thug. But how could this thug grow from a Sunni criminal to a despot?

The easy answer is, he was the Americans’ man in the Middle East for many years. He took whatever America, and the rest of the West world, would give him.

And what, exactly, did the West give?

Weapons, lots and lots of weapons; for years and years, all so he could fight his opponents. And those opponents were, of course, people who bothered his minority-led government. Shiites were far greater in number than the tribal populace of Hussein’s Sunni religion, but Hussein had the guns and the biological weapons and the chemical weapons. The majority didn’t have the weapons, so it’s impossible to gauge what they would have done had they had the hardware.

But Hussein showed the world what he would do by his attack on another minority, the northern Kurds. He was perfectly fine using every chemical and biological weapon at his disposal and leaving whole communities dead in the streets and in the homes.

This is a far cry from the regular bad guy.

This is a bad guy who will take every horrific weapon available, store them and finally use them to get what he wants. In other words, he was a real life monster.

But until he attacked Kuwait in the beginning of the last decade, he was our buddy. Then he became out enemy.

America – fearing a disastrous change in the balance of power in the oil rich Middle East, coupled with the potential horrors resulting from a chemical, biological and even nuclear attack – put together a multi-nation coalition, counter attacked and beat Hussein.

So his incursion into Kuwait was a conventional war, and it was quickly turned back, with great Iraqi losses. But not before Hussein’s troops inflicted a variety of horrors upon the Kuwaiti’s.

Several years later, as Saddam Hussein and his corrupt regime was regrouping and trying to heal the Iraqi national wounds, an assassination plot was uncovered; the intended target was former President George Herbert Walker Bush. It was asserted that the power behind the plot was Hussein. But either there was not enough direct and tangible evidence to go after Hussein, or there were ‘larger considerations,’ which of course the public will probably never be privy to, that resulted in Western inaction.

But Hussein must have been concerned when George H.W. Bush’s son, George W. Bush, was appointed president of the U.S. by the American Supreme Court. And there was good reason for nervousness.

Not too long after September 11, 2001, Mr. Bush declared Hussein needed attacking again. And now we know that plans for such an attack were under consideration even before Osama bin Laden and his perverted haters committed their atrocity.

The U.S. knew of course about the heavy weaponry Hussein had once had at his disposal; we gave it to him. But what might be left after Hussein’s many battles and his major defeat was uncertain. The entire Western world did not have a realistic hint of what Hussein did or did not have on hand at the beginning of our new, anti-terrorist, war.

Intelligence was breathtakingly wrong.

Hussein had no chemical or biological or nuclear weapons. Not one.

But how could this be? Virtually all the most sophisticated countries in the world took it as a given that Hussein had mega weapons – no scintilla of doubt. No scintilla of evidence either.

It is not unreasonable to assert that these factors were involved when the United States President George W. Bush pushed aside all reservations and ordered that Iraq must be secured. In securing it, however, he has turned Iraq into a seething bed of terrorism.

To Westerner’s, of course, this seems more like Satanism than anything relating to God.

In history, the only similar circumstance to have confronted America was the Kamikaze pilots from Japan during World War II. They posed a similar intellectual challenge, since it was largely impossible to understand why anybody would want to commit suicide by crashing their own airplane into an American ship? This makes no sense to a Westerner.

The West values both life and the individual. It is hard for Western cultures to comprehend that there are other societies, other cultures, where both life and the individual are devalued.

Fighting the Nazi’s in Europe was brutal, but even the German SS troops, when surrounded or cornered with no way out would surrender. Not so the Japanese troops, they would often die to the last man. That is principally why American veterans of the Pacific War have historically been less voluble in recalling their experiences than veterans of the European Theatre of Operations, and it is also one of the central reasons that the Pacific War has received less overall commentary than the European War. It is harder to understand – perhaps impossible to understand – the underlying philosophy of the enemy America confronted in Asia from 1941 to 1945, and therefore expository discussion of the war is often confounded as soon as it moves past specific details of a given battle.

The Western mind reeled at the genocidal atrocities committed by Germany, but it was possible to perceive the actions of Hitler’s minions as criminal behavior and seek to bring the ringleaders to trial, which of course was accomplished. But it was less easy to comprehend the vicious behavior of Japanese troops, who revealed such contempt for any enemy that did not seek to fight to the last man or to die before surrendering that they treated the people they captured as though they were sub-human.

To the Germans, WWII was a battle for position and domination, and in the process the elimination of a hated minority, the Jewish population, but to the Japanese WWII was more than a fight for control of a large part of the globe, it was a struggle to assure that the ‘son of God,’ and ipso facto the Japanese nation, would not be overshadowed by other, secular powers.

This is an extremely difficult concept for Westerners to understand, and the radical Muslims that are now confronting the West are even more alien to Western thought than the Japanese were 60 plus years ago. The Islamic killers aren’t fighting for the benefit of a living God, and the collective well-being of a nation comprised of that God’s chosen ethnic group. They are killing and dying for a different cause; they are willing to commit murder and mayhem, and to die, in order to halt Western culture and to replace it with Islamic culture.

But perversely there are some similarities to the WWII Japanese belief system. The Muslim extremists of today believe that to die in battle, or in the commission of what the rest of the world considers monstrous crimes – such as suicide bombings – will assure immediate salvation; that is, for the killers of the infidels, the non-believers, the doors of their heaven will swing wide for their entrance into eternal bliss.

So it seems obvious that the fighting between East and West will go on until one side wins, in the usual manner, or until both sides decide to understand one another. But for the immediate purposes of the trial of Saddam Hussein, all the Frenchman must prove is that United States President George W. Bush decided to charge Hussein with complicity in potential terrorism in order to take the second richest oil reserve on earth away from him. Of course, as everyone now knows, this is largely what has happened.

Bush, however, violated one of the most basic concepts of warfare; that is, there has to be a rationale for fighting a war: there has to be some solid reason behind an action that is clearly going to cost many lives. In this case, there was none; the rhetoric was empty.

There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, there was no terrorist activity until America inadvertently imported it by providing an opportunity for the vicious haters in nearby Arab states to see a way of exploiting their twisted goals by entering Iraq.

And certainly the Iraqi people do not feel exactly "liberated" from oppression. If Jacques Verges gets to present his case, his defense of Hussein will clearly involve a condemnation of the United States and its current president. But such a trial might never happen; at least, that is Atty. Verges’s fear.

Verges suggests that the United States may be so venal as to try to cancel the trial by killing Hussein in his jail. But if America is to emerge from the Iraq war with any honor, it absolutely must prove the Frenchman wrong; it must have this trial.

If such a trial besmirches the American presidency via George W. Bush, and reveals decades old United States policies that are shameful, that may be regrettable, but nonetheless will be sustainable in a healthy democracy, where lessons can be learned from mistakes. But if the trial does not happen, especially if it never happens because Hussein meets his death before trial, America’s hands will reek of blood for many, many years to come, and the Islamic Holy War will be fueled to new heights.