SO HOW does it feel to have been against this war now? A difficult question but one which deserves an answer. The jubilation filling the television screens last night can hardly be ignored, as crowds of Iraqis massed while a statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled. Those pictures certainly represented a joyful release - from the tyranny of Saddam, from 12 years of crippling sanctions and from the cruel bombardments.

The television lens captures a small picture and makes it big, taking a few hundred cheering Iraqis and building a huge canvas from a narrow focus. Yet to those who support this war, those pictures will be all the justification they need - an "I-told-you-lot" moment to be played again and again, as if to silence all opposition.

Beyond the rim of the TV lens, a wider and more complex picture emerges of an uncertain and scared nation. And what a fearful price seems to have been paid in blood by the Iraqi people.

Other images coming out of Baghdad provide uncomfortable evidence of what has been done in the name of liberation. On the same day that Saddam's statue toppled, a national newspaper filled its front page with a gruesome photograph showing a horrible tangle of Iraqi bodies in a Baghdad mortuary.

'Victory' in this war was never in doubt for a military moment, considering the might of the invaders, huge in numbers and technological bluster. Now we have to wait and wonder what liberation will bring and if the US invasion will lead to stability.

It is the way of these huge events that the world will eventually lose interest and the cameras will move on somewhere else; how often does still-troubled Afghanistan make the TV news these days?

The toppling statue of Saddam reminds us that wars have their icons, figures to hate or admire. Saddam obliged as a monument to evil, while the two PBs (President Bush and the presidential Blair) put in an enthusiastic appearance for the other team.

Then there have been the other icons, the wounded and dead of both sides.

In the US, the most vibrant human image has belonged to a young and conveniently pretty woman soldier rescued from an Iraqi hospital. In Britain, the role has fallen to an 18-year-old soldier who was sadly less fortunate, dying in the battle for Basra.

Pte Jessica Lynch, 19, has not yet returned to the US but she is a heroine already, a cause of pride and celebration. Hollywood film and TV moguls are scrabbling over her story ("Our business works quickly," said one unabashed TV producer).

No one is likely to make a film about Pte Kelan Turrington, of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, who dreamed of joining the Army, and duly became the youngest victim of this conflict. The headlines hailed "Our boy, our hero", while Pte Turrington's father, himself an ex-soldier, said: "My son died for old fashioned reasons... for honour, pride in his country."

A grieving father may well find comfort in such thoughts. Yet it would hardly be surprising if other parents in the same situation found time to wonder in their grief what their child had died for, in a far-off land during a war orchestrated by a US president.

In a Baghdad hospital bed, a 12-year-old boy, Ali Ismaeel Abbas, lay without his arms, having survived a missile that left him an orphan. Here was another icon, but one without hope or pride. There can be no scale between one loss and another, but Ali Ismaeel Abbas provided a tear-inducing tableau of tragedy, displayed in the frailty of one blighted boy.

Updated: 11:00 Thursday, April 10, 2003