Who, after all, are we? That we should sit at ease in the sun, The only country, the only one, Unmolested and free? Catch him! Catch him! Do not wait!

Or will you wait, and share the fate
Of the village of Lidice?
From "The Murder of Lidice," by Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Wall Street Journal had a chilling editorial on Wednesday, March 8. Writing about Saddam's trial (Saddam's Lidice), the WSJ pointed out that there is nothing new under the sun in terms of the modus operandi of ruthless dictators.

In the late spring of 1942, the world learned the name Lidice. Czech resistance had assassinated deputy SS chief Reinhard Heydrich in Prague...[s]o the decision was made to obliterate an entire village, so that the world would know the price of Nazi blood.

On the evening of June 10, German troops sealed off the Czech mining village of Lidice, chosen because two of its native sons were serving in Britain's Royal Air Force. They gunned down Lidice's 173 men in groups of 10, shipped the women to the Ravensbruck concentration camp and deported some of the remaining children to Germany.

Next the Germans had the village razed, its graves dug up and its rubble buried. Finally, they proudly broadcast the details of what they had done. The world got the message. "If future generations ask us what we are fighting for," said U.S. Navy Secretary Frank Knox, "we shall tell them the story of Lidice."

Fast forward 40 years and to another village, this one called Dujail, in Iraq. In July 1982, Saddam Hussein was nearly killed there when gunmen opened fire on his motorcade. The dictator's reprisal came swiftly...

As with Lidice, Dujail was razed and its orchards bulldozed. Also like Lidice, the purpose of the massacre was not to dispense justice but to make an example of the villagers.

We tend to forget that, for all of Iraq's current troubles, the U.S. and its allies deposed a dictator whose methods and purposes were eerily similar to those of the Nazis..

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