BAGHDAD — Boushra Khalil walked through the metal detectors and into the vast convention center, a crumbling relic of a fallen dictatorship with walls still emblazoned with murals of Scud missiles.
It took only a few minutes for one of the security guards prowling the halls to catch sight of her.
"Hey, excuse me," his voice rang out. "Aren't you Saddam's lawyer?" Soon they were all around her, five young men with U.S. military-issued badges clipped to their sports shirts. Their eyes were wide; they smiled.
"Tell him you met young people here, youth that are sending their greetings to the president," one of the young men said. "We believe he is suffering injustice," said another. They spoke quickly and eagerly, and pressed Khalil for her autograph.
Iraqis who had been cleared to work in the drab nerve center of Iraq's U.S.-backed government, in the heavily fortified Green Zone, might appear to be unlikely fans of the ousted president.
But perhaps no supporter is more improbable than Khalil, a Shiite Muslim lawyer who has traveled from Lebanon to defend him.
Like most Arabs, Khalil, who is Lebanese, is no stranger to the hard reality of despotism: Her Iraqi cousins were put to death for rebelling against Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime.
But ever since the wintry afternoon she switched on Al Jazeera and caught sight of the bedraggled Hussein in U.S. custody, she has devoted herself to securing his release. Her work on his defense team has invited angry slurs from fellow Shiites, but Khalil views her work as an epic assignment on behalf of the pan-Arab "nation" -- a cause Hussein espoused during his years in power. Khalil believes it eclipses religious divisions and the question of whether Hussein was a worthy leader.
"When I met [Hussein], he looked at me and smiled and said, 'These Americans think I am fighting to save my job as president, but I am fighting to defend my homeland,' " said Khalil, who is unabashedly enthusiastic about the Iraqi insurgency. "He never surrendered. He did not quit. If he'd quit, then the whole Arab nation would have been handed to America on a plate of gold."
Khalil's story illustrates an inherent irony in Hussein's war crimes trial, which is grinding through the first phase of closing arguments: The Americans pushed to get him into court, but it's America that has ended up standing trial in the eyes of the Arab public.
