MARCHES AND PARADES.(Iraq War)

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The sight of President Bush taking his extraordinary victory lap earlier this month aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln made it more difficult to argue with those (a planet-wide majority, if we can believe the international polls) who accuse our leaders of arrogance. Flying in at the controls of a Navy jet, making a tail-hook landing, back-slapping sailors in the California sunshine while wearing a fighter-pilot flight suit, then announcing, against the blue Pacific, the end of major combat in Iraq--well, it had a certain swagger. And yet there are signs that the Bush Administration is genuinely concerned about not seeming triumphal over its victory in Iraq. In fact, we are told, there was no victory--only a liberation--and the Administration has been trying to get out the message that homecoming parades for the troops, including a big one here in New York, should somehow make that distinction clear. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and some of the military's top brass have been spending "significant time talking about this and thinking it through,"according to Victoria Clarke, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon. They're all hoping to avoid, as the Times put it, "parades that might appear to be gloating."

Why this sudden sensitivity to appearances? To anyone even slightly familiar with the record of Saddam Hussein's regime, a bit of gloating over its destruction doesn't seem unreasonable. And this is, after all, the President who dismissed the demonstrations of February 15th--when ten million people, in six hundred cities across the globe, marched against the invasion of Iraq in what was probably the largest one-day protest in history--with the observation that he never listened to "focus groups."

Still, the protesters had a greater effect on events than today's conventional wisdom recalls. Domestic and foreign opposition pushed the Administration to go back to the United Nations, for instance, for one more round of weapons inspections, and perhaps to take added care in avoiding civilian casualties. The war, of course, went ahead. The more dire predictions of its opponents did not, thankfully, prove correct, and the relatively quick fall of Saddam Hussein seemed to mean, both logically and morally, the defeat of the antiwar movement.

Except that few of the war's opponents, domestic or foreign, have become wholehearted supporters of the Administration or of its plans for Iraq's future. And support matters. Even though Spain's Prime Minister, for example, was one of the willing, the opposition of ninety per cent of his voting public meant that he was confined to contributing a hospital ship and humanitarian help, rather than combat troops, to the war effort. A private deal cut with Turkey's top politicians fell apart on the parliament floor despite American inducements amounting to some twenty-six billion dollars, because the Turkish public wouldn't abide it. If the United States learned anything in the tortuous months of politicking leading up to the war, it was that today it must win over not only the leaders of foreign countries but their citizens.

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