BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 19 - From the very start of the trial, from the moment Saddam Hussein refused to tell the judge his name, Hiba Raad said she knew that she was watching the same man who had ruled over Iraq for decades with muscular authority.

"He's a hero, he's a tough leader," Ms. Raad, 20, an education student at Mustansiriya Univerisity, said as she reclined in black pants and a T-shirt on a sofa in her living room. "If he came back, I'm sure he'd provide us with security."

In her home in the Sunni Arab neighborhood of Adhamiya, Ms. Raad had just finished watching the opening session of the trial on an Arab network with her parents and sister. They continued staring, transfixed. The grandmother, Samira alBayati, shuffled into the room.

"I felt sorry," she said. "I almost cried. Every country in the world has terrorism. All the presidents of this region torture their people. Why, of all the countries, do they come after us?"

So went some of the talk on Wednesday afternoon as millions of Iraqis spent hours gazing at the stern, wrinkled visage of the leader they once feared, loathed and lionized. It was nothing less than a national spectacle.

Viewpoints varied widely, some calling it a tawdry display of victor's justice, others a long-awaited, if somewhat unsatisfactory, accounting for sins too numerous to list.

The opinions generally divided along ethnic and sectarian lines, with many Sunni Arabs expressing some sympathy for Mr. Hussein, one of their own, and long-persecuted Shiites and Kurds barely containing their hatred. Everyone, though, seemed to take notice of Mr. Hussein's fierce disposition and his unwillingness to bend to his captors.

In Tikrit, his hometown, scores of protesters waved Iraqi flags and photos of Mr. Hussein, chanting, "You're still the son of Iraq."

In Baghdad, in the Shiite slum Sadr City, crowds called for a swift, though preferably painful, execution.

"This is divine justice," said Shakir Majeed, 38, an appliance repairman fiddling with an electric generator in his shop to keep the television going. "The proper sentence for him is execution, but this method of trying him is not encouraging. His crimes are many, and the court shouldn't spend time hearing him out. The court should judge him at the first session without listening to his defense."

Mr. Majeed added, " We'd like him to be tried the same way he tried his victims."

Mr. Hussein's display of unalloyed confidence, the willpower that may have propelled him to the ranks of the modern world's most feared dictators, disturbed many people.

"The judge dealt with Saddam as a regular man, not as a criminal," said Akil Jawad, 20, a tailor in Sadr City trying to mend a shirt with a sewing machine while watching the trial. "We suffered a lot under him. And I don't feel optimistic about the trial, because Saddam smiles a lot and feels confident in his answers."

Ali Abbas, an air conditioner repairman, also in Sadr City, suggested bypassing the trial.

"There's no need for Saddam to be judged, because he's been indicted already," Mr. Abbas, 28, said. "We don't want him to be executed. I'd rather that he be beaten by shoes. Execution would be mercy for him."

To be flailed with the soles of shoes is one of the ultimate humiliations in the Arab world. Many Iraqis hoped to see Mr. Hussein suffer such disgrace. But they came away disappointed - Mr. Hussein remained defiant until the very end of the session, when he scuffled with a guard.

"It's a historical farce, not a historical trial," said Furad Saadadeen, 35, a resident of the embattled northern city of Mosul. "Saddam doesn't deserve anything but execution - and his government, too."

Elsewhere in Mosul, a city where the insurgency has strong support, some rationalized the killings during Mr. Hussein's rule. As for the mass executions in the Shiite village of Dujail, for which Mr. Hussein is being tried, some residents argued, hadn't the people there tried to assassinate Mr. Hussein? In the case of Halabja, where 5,000 Kurds were killed by chemical weapons, wasn't he protecting Iraq from an unholy Iranian-Kurdish alliance?

"Saddam doesn't deserve all this," said Ahmad Muhammad, 31, a taxi driver. "In Halabja there was an entire Iranian army inside our land, and who helped them enter? The traitors. What should he have done other than kill the traitors and our enemies?"

The same support could be found in the deserts of western Iraq, the rebel heartland, and even on the streets of Mansour, an upscale neighborhood in western Baghdad.

"I watched some of the trial and I was upset, because his rule was better than what we have today," Qusay Muhammad, 24, said as he sold tea from a sidewalk booth. "I don't mean to say I love Saddam. I'm just making a comparison between the old regime and the government today."

In the south, dominated by Shiites, the attitude was markedly different. Mr. Hussein's forces swept through that region in 1991 and killed at least 100,000 Shiites at the end of the Persian Gulf war. That, along with the mass killings of Kurds in the late 1980's, is likely to form the basis for the next set of charges brought against Mr. Hussein.

"I had four sons executed by Saddam," said a 64-year-old woman in the Shiite holy city of Karbala who gave her name as Umm Mahdi. "When he's executed I'll finally hold their funerals."