The streets of Baghdad were as empty Wednesday as the streets of Pittsburgh are on Sundays when the Steelers play.

		Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476).

The opening of the first of several trials of Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity is an indication of how far Iraq has come since American tanks entered Baghdad two and a half years ago.

Two Associated Press reporters captured divisions which should put our political squabbles into perspective.

"The moment Saddam Hussein appeared, a Shiite housewife spat on the screen and then sat gnawing her fingers, seething, as her family crowded around the television.

"Across the Tigris, in the mostly Sunni Arab district of Azamiyah ... a former army officer was on the verge of tears of pride as a defiant Saddam argued with the judge."

The political divide in Iraq is between the friends and relatives of his victims, and those who helped him perpetrate his crimes. More than 200,000 bodies have been found in mass graves since Iraq's liberation, but the prosecutors are starting small. This trial is about the murder of (at least) 148 men, women and children in the village of Dujail, in response to an attempt to assassinate Saddam there on June 8, 1982.

Saddam's revenge was comparable to that taken by the Nazis on the Czech village of Lidice after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The families of those suspected of supporting the assassins were rounded up and shot. The date palms on which the community's livelihood depended were destroyed. Saddam removed the ravaged town from official maps.

Saddam's lawyers portray the trial as a vendetta by revenge-minded Shiites and Kurds, a view with which The New York Times sympathized in an editorial Wednesday.

"What we have is a narrow sectarian government, still struggling to come up with a nationally inclusive constitution, that is conducting what looks like a show trial," the Times said.

The Washington Post account of the opening of the trial begins with five paragraphs describing a defiant Saddam. A mention of the crime of which he is accused was relegated to a single sentence deep in the story.

Last week was a good week for Iraq, but you'd have had a hard time telling that from what you read in the papers.

By a large margin in a big turnout, Iraqis apparently approved their draft constitution. This is a watershed event, but many in the media cast doubt on its validity.

On Tuesday, the Post-Gazette ran on the front page an AP story under the headline: " 'High' Iraq Vote Questioned." You had to read deep into the story to learn the recount the Electoral Commission was doing in these provinces would have no impact on the outcome.

The issue was whether Sunni Arabs opposed to the constitution would be able to muster a two-thirds vote against it in three provinces. Opponents did so easily in two provinces with heavy Sunni majorities. But in the two provinces in which Sunnis had only narrow majorities, the constitution passed comfortably.

The recount was done in three Kurdish and nine Shiite provinces where the "yes" vote exceeded 90 percent.

Also encouraging was the fizzling of al-Qaida's "Ramadan Offensive." There were 350 attacks on polling places in the parliamentary election in January, resulting in the deaths of more than 40 Iraqis. There were barely 10 percent that number of attacks this time, resulting in nine deaths.

On Wednesday, the insurgency's top financier, Saddam's nephew Yasir Sabhawi Ibrahim, was captured in Baghdad. Better still, he was captured as a result of a tip from the Syrians, which suggests they may be rethinking their support for the insurgents.

The trial of Saddam Hussein is another step on Iraq's journey to political maturity.

"As the prosecution went deeper into the details and facts ... those among us who were demanding a bullet in Saddam's head now seemed pleased with the proceedings," wrote the Iraqi Web logger Mohammed Fadhil. "We were watching an example of justice in the new Iraq, a place where no one should be denied his rights, not even Saddam."

Note: After I'd written my column last week on the letter Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaida's No. 2, allegedly sent to Musab al-Zarqawi, al Qaida's chief in Iraq, Zarqawi claimed it was a forgery, a charge repeated on some antiwar Web sites.

"We have the highest confidence in the letter's authenticity," said a spokesman for John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, after the controversy erupted.