as an "advance man", hired to choreograph the handover so it would look decent on TV. He said of the ceremonies: "There is a pageantry involved." Yet there was not. The swearing-in of the president, prime minister and government could not have been more simple. The principals sat on an auditorium stage adorned by nothing more than 18 Iraqi flags, and swore plain oaths under God to Iraq, democracy and the people with their hands on a big red Koran. It was appropriate to the occasion. The advent of what is supposed to be the opposite of dictatorship looked suitably modest. Just before the swearing-in began the Iraqi leadership waved to the people watching. As they did, they looked like middle-aged people look when the restraining bar locks into place on an extreme funfair ride about to lurch into the air. For despite the constraints the US and Britain will keep on them, they have power and responsibility, and they know that in trying to invent a new narrative for Iraq, they are only doing what their Arab and Kurd predecessors did in learning the strange art of politics under the Ottomans and the British, likewise times of violence, revolt, occupation and compromise. We will have to wait for Mr Bremer's memoirs to know what he thought, looking down as his Chinook banked over the parched date groves, yellow cubescape and sluggish brown river of summer Baghdad for the last time. Yet between the disastrous spell of looting which began