I haven't been watching the news for a couple of hours, so my info may be a little dated....
However, It isn't all that simple: The US and a bunch of newly free Iraquis "own" about half of Baghdad, but the Baathist / saddamites still sort of control the other half. There seems to be no real spokesmen for saddams's administration and absolutely no command and control left of the Iraqui military. Even "Baghdad Bob" the Minister for disInfirmation hasn't popped his head up, and the Iraqui Ambassador for the UN is saying "Game OVER, man, We're Toast!"
But still, no representative of saddam's government has uttered the word "Surrender". We may never hear that word from them, except as we have from thousands of individual soldiers.
The war is far from over, It will probably be at LEAST a couple of months before we can neurtralize hundreds if not thousands of little pockets of resistance. Mostly the celebrations you have been seeing are amongst the Shiite and Khurdish people who have been viciously oppressed by the Sunnis / Baathists.
Outside of Baghdad, about 1/3 of Iraq still has limited to no coalition presence. We still have a bunch of fedayeen to kill, Republican Guard to captrure or send home, and general anarchy to control all over the country.
What we saw today is the most oppressed people in Baghdad itself finally realize that dead, hiding in a bunker or on the run somewhere, Saddam's control is OVER forever. Until today, they really couldn't be sure that we wouldn't pull back and let saddam or any of his buddies to come back in power. They were afraid that 2003 was going to be another episode of 1991 when (primarily due to the UN), we stopped short of finishing the job.
Today was an emotional turning point for the "people" but we still have a lot to do in Iraq.
Hopefully in the next day or two, some civilian government and law enforcement will start taking control. It will take a while to make any serious progress: We still have at least 100,000 military and paramilitary who hate us and will try to kill us and any of our Iraqui supporters, even though they are pretty much reduced to small arms and RPGs (and maybe chemical weapons, there is still about 10,000 gallons of nerve gas and anthrax unaccounted for) and probably a million civilians that will hate us, even though we free them.
Today WAS a historic day- not so much a military victory- That really was a foregone conclusion the moment that President Bush said one word to General Franks:"GO.".
But today was a huge political victory; It was probably a turning point on the war against terrorism and against the world wide hate of America and the values which it represents.
Today, more so than any single previous day, 12 years of growing disrespect for America was turned around; 1/3 of the world may still hate us, but they are learning to respect us at least. The impact of this will have incredibly far reaching economic, political and diplomatic consequences, and mostly (I believe) for the better, not just for America, but the whole world. Despots, dictators and terrorists world wide now have some serious re-thinking to do.
We can still screw this up though, so keep your fingers crossed.
