This week in the saga

Four days in the Gulf, and the register of the whole term is on display in one week. In Riyadh and Doha and Abu Dhabi he signs commitments worth two trillion dollars in three days and walks marble halls built for exactly this. A country gives him an aeroplane, and he spends two posts explaining that it is a gift to the Air Force and only a fool would refuse it. Then Friday comes and the other half of the week begins. The highest court in the country rules that the men held under a two-hundred-year-old wartime statute cannot be put on planes without notice and a hearing, and it does this twice in one day, and by evening he has written the sentence plainly: the Supreme Court will not allow us to get criminals out of our country. On Sunday afternoon the man he took the office from announces a diagnosis, and the reply is four lines long, uses the family's first names, and wishes him a fast recovery. On Monday he is on the phone to Moscow for two hours and comes off it saying negotiations begin immediately. They do not.