Easter Sunday.. and the tabloids are looking for something to keep the country's interest now Saddam appears to have retired to some undislosed place of comfort..
Seems the focus is retrospective.. and yet there are still some who speculate on the eventual process of reconstruction in Iraq.
Others are evaluating the effect this action has had on Tony..The Mail on Sunday says he is planning to visit the Middle East soon...reporting that he will try to find a solution to what it describes as one of the world's most intractable disputes - the bloody conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians...
Tony's future now depends on peerhaps two issues.. how the Middle East recovers from the body blow the West has inflicted.. not many countries in that particular area are comfortable with the reality that either the US or Britain could come a'marching in.. and depose rulers unfriendly or despotic..
However.. there are those who are not as sure this success has enhanced Tony's political position.. that the number of anti-war Labour supporters who will not vote for him again will roughly cancel out the number of pro-war campaigners who usually dislike him, but feel he should be rewarded...
Note...the challenges that were crowding in on the government before the war have not gone away and the way Tony deals with them might not be dramatically different to how he would have done beforehand...
It is a matter of pride for the country as a whole this morning... as we read once again "If you are ferocious in battle, remember to be magnanimous in victory".. the words of Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins, as he led the 1st Battalion Royal Regiment into battle in Iraq..the speech profoundly moved Prince Charles to the point of writing a personal letter to the colonel, telling him "What you said encapsulated, in a brilliantly inspired way, everything we have come to expect from our armed forces." The address went down well in Washington too.. President Bush is to hang a copy of it up in his office.. the inspirational words, observes the paper, contrast strongly with those of US Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating, who told his troops: "When the president says go, look out - it's hammer time..
Ahh well.. rhetoric is rhetoric.. and we British have had much more time to polish our speeches to the troops than have perhaps the Americans..
Regardless..