SINCE its founding in 1945, the Arab League, now embracing 22 countries (including Palestine), has sought to forge unity. Yet its annual summits have tended to produce either quarrels or platitudes. The latest gathering in the Qatari capital, Doha, followed much the same pattern but did produce unity—of a sort. Independent Arab commentators, as opposed to the state-controlled media, were united in calling it a waste of time.

“The only use of summits,” said Salama Ahmed Salama in Egypt's daily, al-Shorouk, “is that they sharpen trends of rejection and opposition to these regimes.” “The only novelty they bring is new divisions,” chimed Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of al-Quds al-Arabi, a daily published in London. “Rising non-Arab powers in the region, such as Iran and Turkey, rub their hands in glee at the spectacle,” he asserted.

With 17 heads of state in attendance, the meeting did agree on one thing, however. Fellow Arab leaders rallied around Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, in a chorus of condemnation against the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which has ordered his arrest on charges of organising the extermination, rape and forcible transfer of a large part of the civilian population of Darfur. Delegates denounced the court for picking on Arab and Muslim leaders while ignoring the alleged crimes of Israel. Syria's president, Bashar Assad, said the court had no right to interfere in countries' sovereign affairs—an understandable complaint, as a UN tribunal is investigating Syria's likely involvement in a series of political murders in Lebanon.

But the summiteers skirted issues that have lately divided them. The Arab leaders said little about Iran, the non-Arab regional heavyweight allied to Syria but regarded with suspicion by other Arab leaders because of its nuclear ambitions, its championing of Islam's minority Shia branch, and its backing for non-state actors such as Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.

On the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Syrian president drew nods of approval by complaining that, since offering a peace initiative in 2002, the Arabs had yet to find an Israeli partner and may fail to find one in Israel's new government led by Binyamin Netanyahu. They reiterated the peace offer that calls for Israel to withdraw from all the land it has occupied since the 1967 war in exchange for full Arab recognition. But while suggesting that a precise time limit be tied to the offer, it declined to set one.

As usual, the meeting was enlivened by the longest-serving Arab ruler, Libya's flamboyant Muammar Qaddafi, who mumbled insults at King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia from behind his wraparound sunglasses. The two later met to heal their rift, which began in 2003 when the king insulted Mr Qaddafi after the exposure of a Libyan plot to kill him.

But the meeting failed to resolve the biggest current row between leaders. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, whose ancient and populous country once dominated inter-Arab diplomacy, disdained to travel to Qatar, reflecting intense irritation with diplomatically hyperactive Qatar. Aside from hosting exiled foes of Mr Mubarak, the tiny, gas-rich emirate sponsors the al-Jazeera TV channel, which often ridicules Egypt's 80-year-old leader and backs the Muslim Brotherhood, his main opposition.