Even those who deplored the manner of his death will agree that Saddam Hussein was a brute. But he was a curiously old-fashioned brute. We may not see the likes of him again. Saddam's demise does not mean the end of dictatorship, of course, but perhaps of a certain kind of dictatorship, whose symbols and trappings were typical of the 20th century, and now look as fusty as, say, Winston Churchill's cigars and Homburg hats, which already in his day had a distinct air of the 19th century about them.

Like all dictators, Saddam was a bit of a magpie when it came to his promotional apparatus, taking whatever came in handy. Often in military uniform (even though, like most military dictators, he never saw actual combat), he also liked to strut in the garb of a pin-striped gangster, shooting off guns in the air. In his pan-Arab guise, he was depicted as Saladin, the Muslim general who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187. Anyone who aspires to leadership of all the Arabs has to claim the mantle of Saladin, even though he was actually a Kurd. Conveniently, Saladin was born in Tikrit, like Saddam himself.