“HAVING travelled hundreds of miles, we will now go the last 200 yards,” President Bush said yesterday. But the question facing the Pentagon and Ministry of Defence is where exactly in bomb-ravaged Baghdad will victory be located? Where is the symbol that demonstrates to Iraqis and the rest of the world that liberation has arrived and President Saddam Hussein is gone?

Is it the image of coalition troops atop the ruins of Saddam’s presidential palace? Is it the dictator’s statue toppled in the mud surrounded by jubilant Iraqis? Is the victory broadcast, in Arabic, from a hastily rebuilt state-controlled television centre? The Nazis posed before the Arc de Triomphe to prove the fall of Paris, and continued fighting; the Allies marched through its streets past cheering crowds to demonstrate its liberation.

“See the conquering hero comes!

“Sound the trumpet, beat the drums.”

But not in this conflict. Most of the great icons of Saddam’s power have already been flattened and those still standing must be deployed with care, for this has been decreed a war without triumphalism.

“We will not fly our flags in their country,” declared Colonel Tim Collins in his defining eve-of-battle address; those that were raised have been hastily taken down. No Stars and Stripes will be draped over the Saddam murals; no ranks of troops will march through a city where Fedayin may lurk indefinitely. No enemy will be paraded in chains.

Even Saddam, if he survives, will be spirited away in apt and utter silence to a courtroom, or a ditch.

The only images of freedom that will work for a liberated Baghdad will picture Iraqis: poking flowers into the barrels of coalition guns, burning pictures of Saddam, perhaps swapping their Arab keffiyehs for British Army berets.

The coalition leaders must already be hoping that, somewhere beneath Baghdad on the day of victory, they will find Saddam’s legendary luxury bunker: with the evidence of weapons of mass destruction to prove his guilt, and the evidence of personal turpitude to deny him martyrdom.

Images of Nazi atrocity were a crucial element in the perception of Allied victory. As with the first Gulf War, Saddam’s torture chambers will play a crucial part in the symbolic representing the fall of the current Iraqi regime, and the birth of the next.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the liberation of Paris, was that more Parisians subsequently claimed to have been lining the Champs Elysées than could possibly have been there in reality. It might be no surprise to find the French there again this time around. As the Allies reached Paris, De Gaulle persuaded Eisenhower to delay, in order to allow General Leclerc to make the first, all-important entry.

An Iraqi equivalent of the Free French may be required to show this is not conquest, but liberation.

“The war against hunger is truly mankind’s war of liberation,” wrote John F. Kennedy. This war started as self- defence against weapons of mass destruction, but it is swiftly evolving into a war for humanitarian principle.

So perhaps the liberation of Baghdad will not be symbolised by flags, shattered statues, uniformed generals, recaptured monuments, formal acts of capitulation or parades; but by packets of food, handed out to hungry children.

Times Recommends

• Experts baffled by vanishing sea lions
• CIA caught in a dirty and secretive war
• Double life of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab