Who would have believed, a year ago, that it would be the beardless features of Saddam Hussein we would have to hate, rather than those of the unshaven Osama bin Laden?
When did it take place, this transition of "the evil one" (Newsweek) to the Beast of Baghdad? Osama faded from our screens, only to be replaced by Hussein. Our enemy no longer lived in Afghan caves, but on the banks of the Tigris.
I recall a similar phenomenon more than a decade ago. Hussein had been our hate figure ever since he invaded Kuwait, but we had driven the Iraqis out of our favourite emirate, and all of a sudden General Colin Powell turned up in northern Iraq - the Kurdish bit we had decided to save rather late in the day - talking about "Iraqi officials".
I was at Powell's news conference that day, and I asked him why he no longer mentioned Hussein. He just shrugged his shoulders and went on talking about "Iraqi officials". Hussein had been airbrushed out of the United States administration's script; just as he was written back in, at centre stage, earlier this year.
So I owe my enlightenment to Professor Robert Alford of the City University of New York Graduate Centre. A series of tables he drew up shows something remarkable: that the Iraq story started growing - and the Osama saga diminishing - just as the Enron scandal broke.
In January, Enron was receiving 1 137 "mentions" in the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and Iraq only 200. Iraq stories grew almost 100 percent by early spring as Enron mentions declined by 50 percent to 618. After a dip in early summer, Iraq soared to 1 529 mentions, with Enron down to 310. Remarkable, isn't it, how you can clear a messy economic scandal off the front pages by renaming your hate figure? Of course, it's also a good idea to change hate figures when your closest ally, Israel, is in danger of producing one in the form of Ariel Sharon, its prime minister.
If we hadn't had Bin Laden and Hussein to worry about we might all have been taking a closer look at Sharon, who greeted the slaughter of one Hamas man and nine children in Gaza as "a great success".
Then there was the Middle East peace conference that was going to take place in summer. Colin Powell announced just that in the spring. But it never happened. The "peace" conference vanished, just like Bin Laden. And we never even asked why. In a new world of secrecy, we don't bother to do that. And oddly, that's what the past year produced: a kind of lethargy about the tragedy of the Middle East; a failure to respond to real injustice, occupation and misery.
So let's go back - to the United Nations arms inspectors. They got into Iraq and - horror - didn't find a microbe. Then we had to get our hands on Iraq's weapons manifesto. And then - all 12 000 pages of it - we complained there was too much of it. The Americans - who would have screamed foul if Hussein handed over a mere 10 pages - announced that it was a "blizzard".
It was also the year of "regime change". Not just Hussein's, but Yasser Arafat's too. Arafat must go, his corrupt regime replaced by a state-of-the-art democracy amid the ruins left by Israel's air raids.
Or so we were told. Bush's decision that Arafat had to pack up ensured the dreadful old man would be re-elected. But when Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, referred to the "so-called" occupied territories - presumably thinking the soldiers all over the West Bank were Swiss - it looked as if the US had lost its grip on reality.
So let's talk oil. Bush was an oil man. Dick Cheney, his deputy, was an oil man. Condoleezza Rice was an oil woman. And we owe it to the New York Times's most right-wing columnist, William Safire - well connected to the Bush administration and, personally, to Sharon - to learn what all this means. In a recent article he gave the game away.
"The government of New Iraq," he wrote, "would reimburse the US and Britain for much of their costs in the war and transitional government out of future oil revenues and contracts."
The evolving democratic government of New Iraq "would repudiate the corrupt $8 billion 'debt' Russia claims was run up by SaddamE"
More disturbing for Russia, Safire said, would be "the heavy investment made by US and British that will sharply increase the drilling and refining capacity of the only nation whose oil reserves rival those of Russia, Saudi Arabia and Mexico".
I wonder if we will remember that when we go to war in a month or so. Certainly we won't be talking about Enron. - Independent Foreign Service