A man, a plan, a canal . . .

Said Aburish, a Palestinian with excellent English who worked for years in Iraq, wrote a very good biography of Saddam four years ago. He brought out the full horror of the regime, and showed how Saddam’s hero was Stalin, even to the point that Stalin’s works were Saddam’s bedtime reading (such, at any rate, was the theory: porn magazines were probably the reality). Killing off Shias, clearing the Kurds out of the oil towns in northern Iraq, and launching himself as hero of the down-trodden Arabs, Saddam clearly had Stalin in mind.

Aburish’s book was a good one, but it was also inspired by animosity — ‘from vigilance of grief compell’d/ To hate from having loved too well’, in the words of the old song. He fled Baghdad, as so many of Saddam’s people had to do. Arab unity is a cause that some Palestinians greatly support. After all, how otherwise will they be able to get their own back on Israel? Saddam failed in that respect, and even discredited the entire cause. Its symbol remains the Scud missiles fired at an unresisting Israel in the first Gulf war; most failed to arrive on target, and anyway they had a war-head containing lumps of concrete only.

But why is it so difficult to attain Arab unity? It should, after all, make a certain amount of sense, given that the language and culture between Atlantic Morocco and Mesopotamian Baghdad are on the surface the same. But it never works; as an Israeli foreign minister once said, nothing divides the Arabs so much as the question of their unity. Only one public figure in the Middle East ever managed to make more of it than rhet-oric: Gamal Abdel Nasser.

His greatest moment came in 1956, when, nationalising the Suez Canal, he challenged the British and French: they had to withdraw, ignominiously, when both the United States and the USSR opposed them.