The death in a US air strike of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an ultra-violent jihadi with views bordering on fascism, who was thought extreme even by the leaders of al-Qaeda, is an occasion for unqualified celebration. Whether it will amount to "an opportunity for Iraq's new government to turn the tide in this struggle", as a jubilant President George W. Bush put it yesterday, is altogether another matter.

Zarqawi was a specimen for psychopathology as much as a study in radical Islamist politics. His utter disregard for human life and taste for slaughtering captives like animals raises him high in the annals of barbarism. But what, unfortunately, cannot be denied is that he was good at what he did.