The burning question is, where next? After Ben Ali and Mubarak, others may not fall as easily, though most regimes are candidates.

When, in 1981, Margaret Thatcher met Fahd bin Abdul Aziz bin Saud for the first time, she came away distinctly unimpressed. ”You say this man runs the country,” she sniffed, ”he didn’t have a word to say for himself.” She was wrong. Fahd, who has died aged 84, was only crown prince of Saudi Arabia at the time, and what the British prime minister did not realise was how punctilious the house of Saud was in its notions of hierarchy.

There is one broad certainty about the highly professional assassination of Rafik Hariri, the billionaire former prime minister who has dominated Lebanese politics since the end of the civil war in 1991. He fell victim to the hapless role this small, politically fragile and religiously divided country is once again playing: the battleground of international conflicts larger than itself.

When, at dawn on March 20 the US and its British ally went to war against Iraq, they were intervening in the region on such a scale that Arabs everywhere compared the invasion, in its potential geopolitical significance, to that seminal upheaval of the last century: the collapse of the Ottoman empire.