Hearing that President Bush was on his way to Northern Ireland, Dr Steven King, an adviser to David Trimble, suggested a demonstration - in support of the war. The Bush visit will highlight David Trimble's difficulties, writes Frank Millar, London Editor.
He wasn't being entirely serious, but he wasn't exactly kidding either. Marching in support of the allies would reflect the most basic unionist instinct. And Mr Bush's presence on Ulster soil - to meet the British Prime Minister to discuss the prosecution of the war on Iraq - should be an exquisitely unionist moment.
Air Force One has been seen before at Belfast's Aldergrove airport, but back then it carried a Democratic President Clinton, perceived, as Mr Trimble remarked this weekend, to have an emotional attachment to the cause of Irish republicanism.
No such perception attends President Bush. Tony Blair may recoil when asked on television if he prays with his coalition partner but Dr Paisley went to the White House and comfortably talked about matters spiritual.
At a political level, mainstream Presbyterian and Anglican Ulster might be expected to sense the huge symbolic significance of this event. Never before has an American president flown to the United Kingdom for talks with his closest ally about world affairs in the still-British territory that is Northern Ireland.
Reference to the "dreary steeples" of Fermanagh and Tyrone may be fashionable shorthand for those astounded that the Northern Ireland question persists at all and, more, that anybody outside the six counties should actually give a damn.
Yet for unionists, any Churchillian quote is itself reminder of the most glorious chapter in the Anglo-American partnership - the fight against Nazi tyranny.
The fact that Ireland was officially neutral in that defining conflict of the 20th century is often quoted by unionists in explanation for their stubborn determination to define themselves as British rather than Irish.
Through the long years of the IRA's war against the British "occupation" of the North, Ulster's unionists found themselves derided for assertions of their Britishness in terms all too often embarrassing and incomprehensible to "mainland" Brits themselves.
Much of the unionist establishment clung to the certainties of sectarian conflict and division while a newly confident pan-nationalist leadership courted international approval with its message of inclusivity, conflict resolution and a new beginning.
And as Britain anticipated Mr Blair's first election victory, Mr Trimble, too sensed a quickening pace of change and the certain need to respond to it. The result was the Belfast Agreement.
On a personal level, there is no doubt Mr Blair would have found the sectarian stranglehold on Northern Ireland politics offensive and unacceptable.
It offered a continuing ugly scar on the British political landscape Mr Blair was pledged to modernise and reform. Indeed, when asked to explain the prime minister's extraordinary commitment to resolving the Northern Ireland problem, one key Irish insider cites this ahead of any other possible motivation.
Mr Trimble saw the possibilities rather than the "threat" of change thrown up by New Labour's modernising agenda. Crucially the UUP leader also saw the potential to place inevitable change in the context of the Blair government's equality, justice, human rights and devolution programme for the rest of the United Kingdom.
Unionists would have to endure the pain of change, but the gain, Mr Trimble would argue, was partnership rather than confrontation with the British government and a settlement rooted in the principle of consent which left Northern Ireland firmly within the United Kingdom.
That was the theory. However President Bush's arrival in Belfast this evening brings a sharp reminder that five years on, Mr Trimble is still fighting an uphill battle to persuade unionists that it was they and not the IRA who won the war.
The clearest illustration of that may be found in the fact that for many unionists there will be nothing at all exquisite about the symbolism of the president's meeting with the British Prime Minister, and that Dr King's enthusiasm for the war on Iraq is not universally shared in the wider unionist community.
To the contrary, at least some of those who backed Mr Trimble and endorsed the agreement in 1998 see double-standards in a Blair/Bush partnership intolerant of "terrorism" abroad while the British at least seem a good deal more tolerant of it closer to home.
As for later this week, it seems that a final resolution of the policing issue will not feature in the "acts of completion" to be heralded by Mr Blair and the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern. The British appear comfortable that the republican leadership simply needs "time" to make this final transition to democratic politics.
The SDLP now faces into an election against the Sinn Féin charge that it settled too soon on the North's new policing dispensation, while pro-agreement unionism may be undermined by this evidence that Sinn Féin's transition has some way still to go.
It is depressing to think - but also, surely, politically dangerous to allow - that another American envoy may have to wrestle with the problems of policing in Belfast all over again, and long after regime change in Baghdad has been accomplished.