Events in Baghdad are being seen as vindication for the hawks, Conor O'Clery reports from New York.
As the dramatic pictures of American soldiers and Iraqi citizens working together to pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein were broadcast on television yesterday, US President George Bush was attending a meeting of his national security council in the White House.
The meeting was interrupted and Mr Bush and his officials gathered around the television sets. "They got it down," said President Bush as the statue was pulled by an American army vehicle to slump drunkenly over its pedestal.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was careful not to sound too triumphant, only that Mr Bush was "heartened by the progress we're making".
But the private jubilation in the White House can only be imagined.
In the words of television talk show host Chris Matthews on MSNBC, what happened in Baghdad yesterday was a "big win for the hawks" - the hawks being Mr Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.
Mr Cheney, by chance, was making one of his rare public appearances yesterday, speaking at the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in New Orleans as the US cable channels showed jubilant Iraqi crowds greeting American military vehicles in Baghdad.
He, too, was careful not to say the war had been won, but he could not resist claiming victory at least over the commentators who found fault with the Pentagon's war plan.
"In the early days of the war the plan was criticised by some retired military officers embedded in TV studios," he said as the newspaper editors laughed appreciatively, "but every day, with every advance by our coalition forces, the wisdom of that plan becomes more apparent."
In his moment of apparent vindication, he reached into history for parallels. The conclusion of the war would mark "one of the most remarkable military campaigns ever conducted", he claimed. It could be compared for audacity and flexibility to the advance of Gen George Paton across northern France in the autumn of 1944.
The theme was taken up on all the American news channels. The scenes in central Baghdad were compared to the fall of the Berlin Wall and other great moments of liberation. MSNBC's embedded reporter Bob Arnot, arriving in Baghdad with US marines, said it was like Paris in 1945 and that "I explained to them that they were free".
Mr Rumsfeld also watched the television news, which he described as "breathtaking", and also compared the American triumph to great military moments in US history. Watching the people celebrate, he said, "one can't help thinking of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Iron Curtain".
In all wars the reason for their launching often becomes obscured, and the proclaimed aim of the Bush administration has been to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction. So far there have been no major finds of banned weapons. The evidence has been small-scale and insubstantial, noted the New York Times, which speculated that "Iraq simply has far fewer horror weapons than many have suspected".
In the absence of a major arms find, however, the sight of Arabs greeting American soldiers was the best bonus the US administration could hope for to justify their secondary claim that this was a war of liberation.
Mr Rumsfeld said that Saddam Hussein was taking his place alongside such dictators as Stalin, Lenin, Hitler and Ceausescu. Indeed, he appealed to Iraqis to approach the embedded journalists arriving in Baghdad to tell their stories of the viciousness and brutality of the regime, and to reporters to take the opportunity to get such stories. This is the message the White House wants to get to the Arab world and that is why yesterday was so important for the Bush administration.
The fact that the statue of Saddam did not crash immediately to the ground at first, but hung drunkenly from its pedestal, provided a metaphor for the resilience of some pro-Saddam forces still holding out in the city and in Iraq.
There are still days of fighting ahead, Mr Rumsfeld warned. "This is not over despite the celebrations on the street ... a lot more people are going to be killed."
There are also difficult days ahead in preventing anarchy, in ensuring that Baghdad does not become a divided city, in dealing with the consequences of the humiliation of an Arab nation.
But yesterday was not a day for that. The message was, as Ari Fleischer put it, that it was a day when the world saw "powerful evidence of mankind's desire to be free".
Conor O'Clery is North America Editor of The Irish Times