It was an unforgettable moment in modern Arab history. Yesterday, as the death sentence was pronounced at Saddam Hussein’s trial, the former Iraqi dictator rose to shout about the “Arab nation.”

“There’s no point,” Chief Judge Raouf Rasheed Abdul-Rahman told Saddam. “There’s no point,” he said again as the deposed tyrant rambled on.

Indeed, there was nothing more to add in that Baghdad courtroom, at the close of one of the darkest chapters in the dark history of a dark region. The death sentence, handed down after a nine-month trial, draws a line through an unspeakable 25-year rule by a clique of amoral, depraved, so-called Arab nationalists, as well as their rotten sons, relatives, and mistresses; their injustices, torture chambers, unimaginable corruption, and absolute ruination of Iraq.

To be sure, this is not the end of tyranny. As the judgment that concluded one era was read out, massacres and violence were ushering in another age across Iraq, championed this time by Islamists instead of Baathists.

Still, yesterday’s verdict and everything it projects are a shot across the bow for dozens of rulers of Saddam’s ilk in the failed Arab states that surround Iraq — wherever tyrants and their families have expropriated their people’s rights to life, hope, and justice.

No doubt the Arab press, from Al-Jazeera on, will heap scorn on the ruling and America’s double standards in a torrent of commentaries that has already begun. But through it all no Arab king, prince, sheik, or president — and surely none among their citizens — will fail to contemplate how the wheels of history turn. How long for us? they will wonder.

These are difficult times to say it, but if for nothing other than the majesty of that moment in Baghdad yesterday, America’s venture in Iraq was well worth the sacrifice of American and Arab lives. As a notable leader of the Indian revolt against the humiliating 190-year-long British rule of the Raj said on independence in 1947, even with all the chaos of the Pakistan-India breakup in full view: “To make omelets, you’ve got to break some eggs.”

Eggs are still cracking in Iraq, and they will be for some time, as will many more elsewhere in the Arab world. Yet amid the mind-numbing violence there and the bitterly partisan arguments in America over its role, we should not miss the import of the evolution under way in the Arab world — one we might have helped along.

Moments like the verdict in Baghdad — or the murder of Prime Minister Hariri of Lebanon, which sparked the glorious Cedar Revolution in Lebanon and the ejection of Syrian troops there — remind us that the old order is cracking, its infrastructure tumbling. And these moments connect like dots in the consciousness of the people.

What Arab on this day has not let his or her mind drift to images of tyranny at home, of corruption run amok, of double standards the ruling elite has applied to themselves and generations of oppressed subjects, of the crucial moment of liberation — and of the gallows that follow?

Yes, Iraq has gone bad, as will Egypt when the ruling sphinx there, President Mubarak, and his thieving sons, Jamal and Alaa, tumble one day. And yes, they will be followed by the murderous Muslim Brotherhood and its inevitable bloodbath against seculars, women, and minorities. But this is not reason enough to stop the pressure for change. It is now clear that these passages are inevitable in the Arab and Muslim worlds, a necessary tax for years of illiteracy, deprivation, and pent-up anger.

It seems there is no panacea for the Arab world. It has to undergo purgatories where souls remain until they have paid for their flawed ideologies, self-deception, and skewed values.

Eventually, America will exit Iraq, but when we look back, we should take the long view. We cracked a few rotten eggs there and pushed a country over the fence to contemplate another way of life beyond the likes of Saddam and his coterie.

When it is all over, say 20 years from now, it will be said the rivers of blood were worth traversing to get to that other imperfect form of government: democracy.