It is always a joy to see vicious criminals brought to justice (assuming the trial is genuine), but ultimately it means nothing. History is not made by one person, and to claim that putting Saddam on trial is somehow an important victory shows how little we've learned.
Saddam isn't the first dictator to come to a bad end; it wasn't a lesson to him and it won't be a lesson to any would-be tyrants in the future. That's the thing about madmen: they're mad, and don't learn from the past. Even Saddam might've gotten away with it if Bush I hadn't given him permisison to invade Kuwait.
The victims of the Saddam regime know he couldn't have devastated the country alone; the hundreds of thousand of people who worked ceaselessly to enhance Saddam's power are mostly still at large, and many of them are either in the employ of the United States or running the US government.
Besides, what are the chances it'll be a real trial? Saddam knows too much about the workings of American foreign policy for him to be simply put in prison - who knows what his memoirs might reveal? My money is on either acquittal or that he'll be found strangled in his cell the day before the verdict is announced.
After WWII, the Nazi war criminals ought to have been tried for their crimes, and they were. But no one would say that is was anything more than the smallest fraction of the work that needed to be done.
