BAGHDAD, 11 April 2003 — From the outset, it had all the trappings of an intensely personal affair. If the man himself proved elusive, the symbols of Saddam Hussein’s hold over the people of Iraq were everywhere. As US and British forces swept across the country they targeted statues and paintings of the Iraqi leader to show Iraqis his rule was over — and they had nothing to fear.
“For the population there is a broader recognition that this regime is coming to an end and will not return,” US Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said at invasion headquarters in Qatar as Marines in Baghdad hauled down a statue of Saddam. Like dictators through history, Saddam nurtured a cult of personality. His image, like his security services, was everywhere.
Modeling himself on Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and ruthlessly crushing the merest hint of dissent, he towered over Iraq and became an inescapable part of daily life. His face stared down from countless heroic portraits and statues. Some portrayed him as a new Nebuchadnezzar or Saladin. Others showed him in a white suit, military uniform, tribal costume, Kurdish dress, even a Bavarian hunting outfit.
“Everyone wants Saddam to go but nobody says a word,” Abdullah, a barber, confided to Reuters correspondent Michael Georgy on the outskirts of the southern city of Basra two weeks into the war. “You never know who you are talking to.”
But in a war mixing military might with tactical psychology, the symbolism of the US Marines toppling the towering statue of Saddam in central Baghdad on Wednesday was inescapable.
As Iraqis danced on the wreckage and dragged the decapitated metal head through the streets, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, an architect of the war, proclaimed: “Saddam Hussein is now taking his rightful place alongside Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Ceausescu in the pantheon of failed brutal dictators, and the Iraqi people are well on their way to freedom.”
Just what constitutes ultimate victory in the war to rid Iraq of Saddam and the weapons of mass destruction Washington says he has been hiding is the subject of intense debate. The US military insists the war is not about any one individual, despite President George W. Bush’s determination to go after “the man who tried to kill my dad” — a reference to an alleged Iraqi plot to assassinate his father in Kuwait in 1993.
The war began on March 20 with a speculative airstrike on a building where Saddam was thought to be meeting. As the undeclared battle for Baghdad unfolded on Monday, a US B-1 bomber bombed a house in the city’s wealthy Al-Mansur district after its crew was told: “This is the big one”.
Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his main ally, and others say they just don’t know whether Saddam is alive or dead. But with uncertainty about the fate of Osama Bin Laden a nagging reminder of unfinished business from Washington’s Afghan war, the hunt for Saddam — or what remains of him — is on.
In the battle of symbols, US and British military planners and spin doctors have trodden a thin line — keen to come across as saviors of the Iraqi people rather than conquerors. In this war, symbols of Saddam’s rule were fair game for the invading forces from the very start.
British tanks made a lightning raid into the center of Basra and took out the statue of Saddam in the main square, sending a message to a population cowed by more two decades of harsh rule.
US soldiers with a blowtorch helped residents of the central Shiite holy city of Karbala topple another statue. In the nearby holy city of Najaf, US soldiers blew up a huge statue of Saddam with sword in hand on a rearing horse.
