Argument Whether the US will agree to the Baghdad conference proposed by Jack Straw on the model of the one in Bonn on Afghanistan remains to be seen. But chillingly, a Washington official close to the ORHA planning process was quoted in The New York Times yesterday saying: "To the victor, the spoils, and in this case the spoils are choosing who governs." This is about as far removed from the idea of letting – in some cases unknown – Iraqi leadership figures emerging from a genuinely broad-based interim administration to contest eventual elections – if and when they finally happen – as it's possible to be.

For all the harmony in Belfast, in other words, real differences are emerging between the British and the US about the post-war settlement. You could see a little symbol of it at US Central Command yesterday, when British officials – as excited as everyone else by the television pictures of a hauling cable round the massive statue of Saddam in Shahid Square – held their heads in their hands in despair as overenthusiastic US Marines planted the Stars and Stripes over the statue's head.

In some ways these differences mirror those over whether to involve the UN before the war, reflecting in turn divisions within Washington, which according to Western diplomats are much bitterer and more ferocious now than they were then. But this time the usual story that it will be all right on the night, that the US President will come down on the side of the angels, won 't work. Events are moving too fast for that. And the stakes are too high. For many in the Middle East – including inside Iraq itself – are now looking directly to Britain as their one hope of moderating what they fear could so easily turn in to a US proconsulate followed by the establishment of a puppet regime. "The foresee an occupation, and they say, if that's not what you're about, you'd better prove it," says one diplomat.