The ultimate humiliation: Allies drive their tanks through the Hands of Victory

Somewhere, in a fortified bunker hideaway, Saddam Hussein is clinging to a semblance of power, directing resistance to the "infidels" as his regime enters its death agony.

But above ground, all across Iraq, grandiose projects built by the despot are being overrun. US troops completed his humiliation yesterday when they drove tanks under his Hands of Victory arch, which has ruled the skyline since the Iran-Iraq war. Towering 45 metres (140ft), it is made up of two pairs of crossed swords, crafted from the guns of dead Iraqi soldiers that were melted and recast as 24-ton blades. Captured Iranian helmets are held in a net between the swords. Around the base of the arms are 5,000 more Iranian helmets taken from the battlefield. The fists holding the swords are replicas of President Saddam's own hands.

The monument will, no doubt, soon be toppled like the hundreds of statues and portraits of the President that have already been bulldozed as the Allies generally go about wiping his image from the face of his country.

In Basra, British tanks have hauled down and rolled over great concrete statues. In the holy city of Najaf, US army engineers blew up a colossal equestrian sculpture.

As a crowd cheered that demolition, a sergeant told The New York Times how a professional does the job: "Six Bangalore torpedoes. Eight blocks of C-4. One M-12, that's shock tube, it'll detonate when you push the button. One M-11, another shock tube. One M-14, a timer fuse, set for five minutes. Two M-81 fuse igniters, in case the shock tube doesn't blow, and 50 feet of detonation cord." Et voilà! The horse and rider came crashing down.

When the job was done, locals took snapshots of each other on top of the rubble, or posing with US troops. Which is exactly what was intended.

Every statue toppled, every palace entered and every Saddam photo ripped up serves to show that the tyrant is mortal and to taunt loyalists into showing themselves, so their strength may be measured.

Such moments have always accompanied the collapse of a hated regime. Today's Baghdad is no different from Berlin in 1945, or Moscow in 1991 as the crowds toppled the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB.