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Hard to believe -- it was 16 years ago today that the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Baghdad by U.S. troops. I was there, watched it happen, and later wrote about the myths created on that day. (Thread) newyorker.com/magazine/2011/…
The toppling of the Saddam statue qualified as a "pseudo event" -- a media spectacle created to be reported on, as Daniel J. Boorstin defined these things in the 1960s. Boorstin was thinking mostly of political debates and press conferences, not events on the battlefield.
It was neither a spontaneous act carried out by joyous Iraqis, nor was it staged by the U.S. military. If there was an actor that played a central role, it was the media -- the journalists who were there, and the ones back in the U.S. who gave the toppling wall-to-wall coverage.
I'll try to keep this short (ha, wish me luck) but the background is that during the invasion I followed the battalion of Marines who tore down the statue. I was with them for weeks beforehand, and have re-interviewed many of them and the journalists who were there, too.
Why wade back into this? The young men and women fighting America's forever wars were in diapers when this happened. Understanding how our wars begin, how our myths are created -- it's not just a matter of knowing our history, but shaping our future (hopefully for the better).
In 2011, I wrote a lengthy story for The New Yorker about the toppling. It started with a scene of the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Bryan McCoy, taking a sledgehammer to a mural of Saddam shortly before his troops headed into the center of the city. Here's a photo I took of it. 
McCoy's battalion was known as "the sharp guys," as a regimental planner later told me. They got business done, Marine-style. They were tasked with securing the center of the city where the Palestine Hotel was located. That's where hundreds of journalists were staying.
A mile from the Palestine, McCoy got an order to secure the hotel. It wasn't marked on his maps -- he didn't know where to go. A photographer, Markus Matzel, was asked to hop onto the lead tank to show the way. Here's a screen grab of Matzel atop the tank (rear of the turret).
Gen. Charles Krulak coined the term “strategic corporal.” He wrote that in an inter-connected world, "in many cases, the individual Marine ... will potentially influence not only the immediate tactical situation, but the operational and strategic levels as well."
As McCoy's battalion entered Firdos Square, a gunnery sergeant named Leon Lambert radioed an officer and said, "Hey, get a look at that statue. Why don't we tear it down?" The officer told him to forget about it -- they had to secure the area.
A small group of celebrating Iraqis walked into the square. There weren't many --probably less than 50 at the start. Lambert asked permission to give them a sledgehammer and a rope to tear down the statue in the square. He was allowed to do that.
That's how the toppling got going -- with Lambert's sledgehammer and rope. He was this event's strategic corporal. He had no idea what would come of his initiative. Nobody did.
Journalists at the Palestine started broadcasting live the event happening in front of them. It seemed the perfect visual for the news of the day, U.S. troops taking the center of Baghdad, Iraqis joyously hammering the ousted dictator.
I was in the square and had no idea this event was being broadcast live. It seemed a sideshow to me. There was fighting and looting throughout Baghdad. But once this telegenic event began, fulfilling an almost cinematic narrative of liberation, it got wall-to-wall coverage.
After a short while, the sledge-hammering and rope-pulling ceased, because the statue was not coming down that way. Photographers drifted away from the statue's base, because they had gotten their pictures. The Iraqis drifted away, too. The toppling was not going to happen.
Here's where Boorstin's idea of a pseudo event really comes into play. McCoy, the battalion commander, was inside the Palestine during the sledgehammering. When he got out, he realized the excitement was ebbing. He was very smart about the media. Something needed to be done.
"You've got all the press out there and everybody is liquored up on the moment," McCoy later told me. "You have this Paris 1944 feel. I remember thinking 'The media is watching the Iraqis trying to topple this icon of Saddam Hussein - let's give them a hand.'"
After getting permission from his commander, McCoy told the leader of his battalion's tanks, "Do it."
There had been no order from the Pentagon to topple the statue. There had been no plan to topple the statue. There was no military necessity to topple the statue. But McCoy realized that with so many journalists around, there was propaganda value to toppling the statue.
The battalion's tank-recovery vehicle had a crane and was tasked with the job. When it started to move, few people were at the statue or paying attention to it. But the M-88's movement was like a cue -- everyone scurried back to center stage. (Photos by Bryan Mangan)
The crowd’s size—journalists, marines, and Iraqis—does not seem to have exceeded several hundred at its largest, and was much smaller most of the time. Most were journalists. The people who jumped atop the tank-recovery vehicle were journalists, not Iraqis.
The presence of so many journalists, and their role in encouraging (by their presence) the events that happened, was not communicated that day. Nor was a key dynamic communicated -- that the small group of celebrating Iraqis did so mostly in response to the presence of cameras.
In my New Yorker story, I described a famous sociological study about Douglas MacArthur's visit to Chicago that showed the role cameras can play in creating a crowd reaction that's mostly spectacle. If you've read this far in my thread, it will be worth your time to read this:
The Marine who clambered atop the crane to put a chain around the statue's neck also placed an American flag on the face of Saddam. Here's a photo I shot of that moment, which seemed to delight audiences in America (but not elsewhere).
And then the statue was torn down by the Marines. The next day's front page of The New York Times encapsulated the general rapture that greeted the event.
We're on the homestretch -- thank you for reading this far!
The toppling was a demonstration of what Walter Lippmann wrote about World War I -- how wartime myth-making is composed of "the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a counterfeit of reality."
"Men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities [and] in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond," Lippmann added.
Thank you for taking the time to indulge my inability to not rant. If you'd like to read more, please check out the story I wrote about the toppling in 2011 for The New Yorker. newyorker.com/magazine/2011/…
