Remember when that statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Baghdad in the early days of the Iraq War, back in 2003? If you're like many liberals, you probably encountered the theory that the entire thing was staged by the Pentagon to look like a spontaneous uprising of cheering, grateful Iraqis. I remember reading something about how according to knowledgeable people, some of the crowd looked Kurdish, so the suspicion was that they had been bused in for the occasion.
A couple of weeks ago, Peter Maass -- a journalist who was there at the time -- published a fascinating exploration of the event in The New Yorker, and he paints a picture that's slightly different. It's worth reading the whole thing, but the summary is this: The picture that was presented to the world was in fact highly misleading, but it wasn't because of some sinister plan hatched by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. The involvement of U.S. troops was largely spontaneous. But because it happened in Firdos square, right in front of the Palestine Hotel -- where a couple of hundred journalists were staying -- cameras were there to capture it. And though there were relatively few Iraqis present, those pictures were cleverly framed to show what looked like a huge crowd. The Pentagon was no doubt overjoyed, but they didn't create the narrative. Guess who did:
The powerful pictures from Firdos were combined with powerful words. On CNN, the anchor Bill Hemmer said, "You think about seminal moments in a nation's history ... indelible moments like the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that's what we're seeing right now." Wolf Blitzer described the toppling as "the image that sums up the day and, in many ways, the war itself." On Fox, the anchor Brit Hume said, "This transcends anything I've ever seen. ... This speaks volumes, and with power that no words can really match." One of his colleagues said, "The important story of the day is this historic shot you are looking at, a noose around the neck of Saddam, put there by the people of Baghdad.” ...
The networks almost never broke away from Firdos Square. The event lived on in replays, too. A 2005 study of CNN's and Fox's coverage, conducted by a research team from George Washington University and titled "As Goes the Statue, So Goes the War," found that between 11 A.M. and 8 P.M. that day Fox replayed the toppling every 4.4 minutes, and CNN every 7.5 minutes. The networks also showed the toppling in house ads; it became a branding device. They continually used the word "historic" to describe the statue's demise.
I'll admit that although I never looked too deeply into it, I had assumed that the Bush administration or the Pentagon had done some sort of advance planning to ensure that the event accomplished its goals. So this is a good opportunity to remind ourselves that we shouldn't assume that our opponents are guilty of every dastardly deed unless we have actual evidence that they are. There's no doubt that a lot of dishonest propaganda came out of the Bush administration before and during the Iraq War, but this is one charge of which they seem to be innocent.
-- Paul Waldman
