Iraqi civilians watch as US troops tear down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in April 2003.
“Oh, whoops! We're totally not conquerors! Totally not conquerers!”
Tbf if u remember correctly the only reason they pulled it down was because the locals were trying first, but in such an unsafe manner engineering corp stepped in do no one would get hurt.
I was referring to putting the American flag on it. Stupid move.
Yeah, good job no civilians got hurt during that invasion.
Yep, that was a bad call, but they fixed it.
It was such a weird time then, everyone holding their breath wondering what was going to happen next then the first car bomb blew up in a crowded market and the rest is history.
21 years ago. Jesus.
Yeah I know, we’re getting old
My back hurts.
What?
He said that his ankle hurts
Oh I had the squirts yesterday
When you get older never trust a fart.
What's that? You wanna watch Paul Blart?
My knees a’swell’n, must be a storm brew’n!
Where's your shirt?
No thanks, already had dinner
Ohhh. Why didn't you tell me you knew Jeremy Renner? We know his grandpa.
THE BLESSING
Ohh. I pledge allegiance to the flag,
Shoulder for me, I hurt it sitting awkwardly
I remember being an adolescent (5th grade at the time of the 9/11 attacks), and listening to the radio in my bedroom the night we invaded Baghdad. I was young and naive, and thought "Oo-fuckin'-rah" as they described the cruise missiles landing in the city.
Fast forward a couple years and I was getting the shit kicked out of me for saying "Bush is a war criminal, there's no reason for us to be in Iraq." I had a cousin in the USMC, deployed there at the time, and he described what he could about what was happening there.
It's amazing how a couple years and a little context can change your mind. (Hopefully).
Seems like quaint, ancient history now.
Fast forward a couple years and I was getting the shit kicked out of me for saying "Bush is a war criminal, there's no reason for us to be in Iraq."
This is my "favorite" part of MAGA acting like they're the anti-war activists and have been all along. Who the fuck was beating the shit out of anti-Iraq war protestors all those years ago? The libs?
Nope. Has to be at least 3 weeks ago.
Mission accomplished
Apart from the theft, mass torture and depravity....
I was in 6th grade watching it on the news before school started
This is one of my earliest memories about foreign news, I remember setting on the floor playing with my kitty toy train, and News is showing footage of American tank in desert is on the TV right next to me.
You know this was a staged op right in front of the hotel where the worlds press was stsying with bussed in "Iraqi Civilians" ....
I was there and it wasn’t.
I remember watching this live… incredible and poorly made statue
Ripped the head off didn’t it?
Also watched it live. Remember they put the US flag on it first before someone “fixed it” with the Iraqi flag?
I came here to say this. when I saw it, I knew it wasn't 'appropriate' but man did it feel good to see that
Why? The 2003 Iraq war was one of the most disastrous foreign policy decisions in US history.
Not for Barack Obama. He voted against the war while HillaryClinton voted for it. This distinction was the catalyst of how Obama was rocketed to popularity and ultimately beat Clinton for the nomination and won the presidency. People have speculated that if the war had not happened then Hillary might have been the front runner instead. Could Hillary have beaten Romney? This would have changed so much.
But yah. If Saddam was still in power he would have been fighting against Iran and no Isis. Sometimes it’s better to have a small Tyrant in the region fighting your fights for you than purging a rats nest only to have another rat invade the purges nest and you have to do it all over again to infinity. Just not worth it
Obama kept it going for another 8 years and here comes the 100 plus down votes
As we have seen recently pulling out of conflicts is a whole lot more complicated than getting in to them...
eh tbf the invasion itself was actually pretty well executed, its a lot of the political decisions made after that took what could have been quite a successful mission into a geopolitical shitshow.
Neocons in Washington were so obsessed with getting the Iraq they wanted rather than just a stable democracy that they ended up pulling shit like firing the entire civil service because of its ties to Saddam's regime.....we didn't even do that in Nazi Germany because its guaranteed to cause a collapse of any and all public services right after a war (the worst time for that to happen) and opens the door for all kinds of foreign actors with an axe to grind to start using the instability to find influence. That by far and away was the single dumbest decision I think anybody could have ever made and is directly responsible for turning the whole thing into the real shitshow it ended up being.
I'm pretty sure had they managed to do that the US would have been able to ride out the storm of not finding the WMD's they claimed they would much better. The international community probably would have been willing to write it off as a well intentioned mistake if we had got a stable post war Iraq rather that the ongoing COIN war that cost the lives of far to many civilians.
The single dumbest mistake was invading a country that was not involved in 11/9/2001 attacks. KSA citizens made up most of the attackers as well as funding coming from influential people in KSA. That was one very giant fucking huge mistake, until you realise the bunch of lies told prior.
Deposing Sadam made the power vacuum that allowed ISIS to be a thing.
yeah I’m sure it feels good when you are being deepthroated by propaganda, some people are just like that lol
You invade a country, and then put your flag on their property, and feel "good" about it?
I guess Americans and Russians aren't so different after all.
Bit like Russians raising a flag over some bombed out ruins id reckon.
I had the opposite reaction. It felt like baldfaced imperialism to me when I watched it.
Yea, then rode it around https://youtu.be/Vd-M3Y-IprU?si=4KiLi6TXo_JJ32BV&t=111
I remember watching it live too, but they brought in a tank recovery vehicle to tear it down, not much was going to stand up to that.
I remember seeing it live as well, 21 years ago. An invasion the US had no business in doing. They should have focused on getting Osama. But Saddam tried killing Juniors Daddy, and wasn’t really the decision maker after all.
Iraqi civilians first tried to pull down Saddam Hussein's statue but couldn't. Then, U.S. Marines stepped in with a vehicle and successfully brought it down.
And all those Iraqis racing toward it when it came down to smash it some more.
Yep. A good friend of mine was there for it.
Me too. I watched it in the student union of my college between classes. Well, more likely while I was skipping a class.
Where was the Republican outrage over them destroying history?
Plenty of statues closer to home for Americans to pull down.
There's a difference between our country and their country....
They were too busy looking for WMD to be outrage.
I remember the US troops first hung an American flag over the statue head, and then an in later they replaced it with an Iraqi flag
I'm not sure if it's this one, but one of the Saddam statue heads now resides in a Kuwait Museum. It's at the end of a long hallway. I visited when I was a contractor in Kuwait. They allow visitors to take off their shoes and throw them at his head, lol. The head is so scuffed up and dirty, lol.
this is how most statues are
Watching it live like a Saturday morning cartoon was surreal. Even more insane that it ended up not being as spontaneous as the coverage would have had you believe https://www.npr.org/2008/04/09/89489923/reminder-saddam-statue-was-toppled-by-psy-ops
MARTIN: So we can't say that it was the idea of this Marine colonel. He basically was surveying the circumstances, saw that there were Iraqis who were already kind of attacking the statue, and so the U.S. military, according to this report, just facilitated something.
NPR is so dickless they'll (accurately) call it a psyop in the title and then bend over backward to make excuses for the government. your liberal media in action.
it's shameful to discuss this event at all without this comment at the very top. it was a literal "totally synthetic" event, staged for tv, but I've never heard Alex Jones mention it.
I remember a guy trying to take it down with a hammer
I was home sick from school and watched it on CNN. I immediately thought "I'm witnessing history'. It turns out I was correct.
Me too! My mom let me be late for school that morning so we could watch the statue fall.
Was the WMD underneath the statue?
I believe they were under the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi bodies.
The reason US troops did this was that civilians were trying to accomplish this in a very dangerous manner. US troops stepped in to do that to prevent folks from getting hurt.
I remember reading an interview some journalist did with the Iraqi guy who first started to try and take down the statue with a sledgehammer, some 15 ish years after the invasion. He said he regretted taking part in that symbolic moment because of how much worse Iraq became after Saddam was toppled
He said something along the lines of "Before we had one Saddam which was bad but now we have thousands of Saddams running everywhere"
Saddam was a brutal dictator who would execute people over the smallest of things, but that level of brutality did keep other aspiring dictators from rising up. He kept order through fear, but it was still order. Toppling his regime created a power vacuum that the region is still feeling the effects from.
The real mistake was purging the entire Baath party after toppling saddam. We didn’t even do that to the nazis, for good reason - you can’t just wipe out the entire administration of a country and hope it will work out ok
Being a dictator is not fun and games chopping heads, it’s endlessly trying to make sure your party doesn’t get killed off and replaced like you did to the previous government. The CIA got Saddam to power, then he almost got overthrown by the Soviets, Kurdish rebels funded by Iran, Israel bombing their nuclear reactors, then ultimately replaced by the US again.
Then I keep wondering why do some people desperately want to be dictators?
Why not just establish a peaceful country/Democracy, where you can serve your decade in power, and then retire with a good sum of money and enjoy the rest of your life or work on your passions? You'll still be powerful, you can still be rich and respected, but it's a lot more chill.
Why this desire to start an awful death cult and then spend your entire life with high blood pressure looking over your shoulder, trying not to get murdering, while increasingly murdering everyone else due to paranoia?
People who like power like the total power of dictators.
Proverb for the ages, with very good accuracy….“The grass is not always greener on the other side”.
I like the version that goes something like, "The grass is greener on the other side but you can't see from here all the fertilizer it's taken to get it there."
Butchered it, I know, but the sentiment is good: "A lot of ordinary people living the good life had to manage a lot of crap before things got as good as they are."
I always heard "the grass is green where you water it"
Had to stop Saddam from getting one last kill
Wow very nice troops. So caring.
And then ended up being responsible for 1 million civilian deaths shortly thereafter.
Aww so kind of them to be concerned about the well being of the Iraqis. Is that before or after the up to one million people they slaughtered?
That time when our meddling resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead. All over a false narrative of weapons of mass destruction when it was really about oil. Shameful history.
I am glad that much of the US population has woken up to this fact though, and that US foreign policy doesn't seem so enthusiastic about starting new conflicts elsewhere. I imagine 2003 US military would have likely joined Israel after the Hamas attack, instead of trying to mitigate some of the damage. At least compared to early 2000s and 90s, the US has been quite reserved during this Israel conflict.
Did US officially apologize to Iraqi people for that?
The sad part is Iraqis don't even hate america for what they did. We just want to move forward from the aftermath of 2003 and the years of civil conflicts.
Holy shit, people still believe the bullshit lazy oil narrative?
mind sharing what you believe the real reason was?
I've only ever heard it was either: (1) Bush's attempt to get revenge in Iraq for the humiliating loss earned by his father, (2) to spread freedom to poor brown people that Americans totally truly care about, and (3) to secure control of oil for Americans and our "allies".
there's also this (first link on google):
“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”
Still waiting to see those WMDs!
The US military staged the event.
I can't believe this is so far down
Reading that article it doesn’t really sound staged? More so it seems they say Iraqis trying to tear it down, and helped them do so, but wanted to still appear like the Iraqis were the ones tearing it down and not the US military. It’s finicky but having let them swing sledge hammers all day isn’t much better
The interview mentions an official report. The report has more details. It was very much staged in the sense the soldiers did not spontaneously help the Iraqis, the press were escorted in to cover the event, and if you dig deeper, much of the crowd were Iraqi expats under Ahmed Chalabi's control who the US brought back into the country to form the next government. Chalabi was backed by the CIA and many in the US government.
Remember when the US had their own version of Muslim hatred after 9/11??
And we invaded Iraq even tho they had nothing to do with it??
And the Saudi government was involved but we couldn't admit it because we needed their oil??
??
And how we reelected the leader who did this while pretending, “eh, it’s a good thing to wrongfully invade another country!”
Many forget that the war was pretty unpopular and the economy wasnt great at the time he was running for re-election. His big campaign promise was a constitional ban on gay marriage, and he won on that.
Pepperidge farms remembers
Pepperidge farms must have some serious PTSD at this point 😭
Pepperidge Farms suffers from night terrors.
I member
Bin Laden from Saudi/Afghanistan has attacked America.
Lets invade Iraq!
And invading Iraq also redirected key military resources from Afghanistan prolonging that war?
The US did not invade Iraq with any direct regard to the actions of the terrorists of 9/11.
He said: "When we reported that we did not find any weapons of mass destruction they should have realised, I think, both in London and in Washington, that their sources were poor. They should have been more critical about that."
Blix said that he had privately confided to Blair in autumn 2002 – before the inspectors returned to Iraq – that he thought it "plausible" that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
However in the weeks leading up to the invasion in March 2003 – after the inspectors had failed to uncover anything significant – he said that he had cautioned Blair that there might not be anything.
He said that he told Blair: "Wouldn't it be paradoxical if you were to invade Iraq with 250,000 men and find very little?"
He added: "I gave a warning that things had changed and there might not be so much."
Hans Blix has condemned the invasion and Bush since its undertaking in multiple interviews.
Mighty fine of the US and the UK to kill hundreds of thousands over a "maybe".
Weapons of mass destruction were a maybe. No bid contracts for Halliburton and American oil company profits were an absolute yes.
Why I went electric as soon as I could afford it.
I went electric because I'm a whore who likes saving money, but to each their own.
I'm just a whore so
I'm just electric
I'm just.
war crimes and abuse by troops.
Just a minor United States foreign policy misadventure. No big deal.
lmao..
WikiLeaks wasn't enough for ICC to charge and punish those criminals? Was anyone trialed?
Polling showed more than 20% of Iraqis had one or more HOUSEHOLD family members killed during our invasion and subsequent occupation.
How do you think the old 'hearts and minds' tactic turned out?
So he was just two brooms hiding inside a person this whole time?
Who would have thought that he was on stilts.
Originally the citizens were trying to tear it down themselves, but the way they were doing it was so dangerous that the troops decided to help them out and tear it down for them. If the citizens did it they may have hurt themselves or worse with how they were trying to do so.
It’s amazing how many people believe that story!
The US troops didn't want the Iraqis to get hurt after they've just bombed half of them and ruined their country.
Not a conspiracy theorist but i like the person linked above do think it couldve been an army psy op (useless buzzword nowadays) using it to their advantage to make it look like they were “liberating” and not conquering iraqis by helping them get it down. Kinda suspicious how they put the US flag and then replaced it with the iraqi flag knowing how it might look with the American flag, all coincidentally in front of some news station btw
Kinda suspicious how they put the US flag and then replaced it with the iraqi flag
Not really suspicious. Bunch of Marines on the ground who spend every day being the most American they can, especially in war time. They decide to fuck some shit up and when they are done toppling the statue do the natural thing and put their flag on it. Someone higher up who is paid to use their brain sometimes calls over the radio to knock it the fuck off and change the flag, so they did.
Way* they where doing its
So considerate and loving, the American troops. Giving the dumb Iraqis freedom then help them topple the last symbols of evil, the statue!
Literally a statue of Iraqi Hitler but go off king
Probably one of the Bushes makes a more appropriate “Iraqi Hitler” since the US sanctions and invasion killed millions of Iraqis.
Looking for 'weapons of mass destruction' under Sadam's plinth... Didn't find so much as a letter bomb
Hold up. Shouldn't they have honored the rich Ba'athist heritage that statue represented by letting it stand?
Those were fine men shooting back at the US soldiers. To tear down that statue was elitist and an attempt to erase history
I see what you did there
Resistance against the completely unjustifiable US invasion of Iraq was indeed entirely legitimate, in spite of Saddam's many crimes.
US leadership intentionally manufactured an obvious lie, first about support for Al Qaeda and then about WMDs, both of which have since been proven thoroughly wrong. Even officials who engineered this invasion have since admitted that they sold an obvious lie to the American people.
They then invaded a country they had kept at death's door through sanctions since their last invasion in the 90s, killing thousands in bombings and hundreds of thousands through the intentional destruction of critical infrastructure; total death estimates range from 150,000 to over 1,000,000.
Afterwards, imperial administration completely botched the occupation of their newly conquered colony, as their main goal was not to win "hearts and minds" but to extract resources and kill dissidents. No serious attempt was made at actually understanding the culture of the people they had just violently subjugated, and as such, religious tensions flared up, contributing to the rise of ISIS, which killed thousands more.
This was the US acting like an 1800s colonial power, with all the barbaric atrocities that went along with that, and you have the despicable audacity to blame people for shooting back.
Wasn’t the crowd way smaller than they tried to pass it off in the press? Like, pretty much *just* what you see here?
Remember when we invaded Iraq and over a million Iraqis died and destabilized the region forever, and nobody went to jail for it?
Well,that president should be persecuted under ICC
It’s wild dog, that man was a piece of shit but he was also the leader of a nation. They just rocked up and fucked up iraq for no reason
that's how we do dog. Saddam tried to invade Iran before... and just like Russia tries to invade Ukraine, we are heros we come in, and we make sure that people think they are getting good info from the media, but then many years later we tell them the truth and they go "oh man, they lied, that's bad... but this war we got going on now, no, that's real, that's good, the media told me so"
Well that all “ended well”.
WHAT ARE THOSE?!!?!
To be completely clear; these Soldiers did this at the request of the Iraqi civilians. They (the civilians) were already attempting to dismantle the statue with sledge hammers and the Soldiers happen to be present with a tank recovery vehicle (M88A2)
Was this before or after they found the weapons of mass destruction?.... oh wait they didn't
Raise of hands, how many Americans here are praising this yet think removing statues such as general Lee is erasing history and wrong?
GWB should be in the Hague for war crimes.
The Hague was never meant to hold leader of the "Rule Based International Order".
Dude, such an interesting point they made in “Three Kings”! (Or the Green Zone maybe?) It’s not the people tearing down the statue, it’s the Americans! As a kid in this era I’d only seen the statue fall, never seen who was actually pulling it
That's nice and all but we still shouldn't have been there.
Good riddance to him.
fuck the military
Is this before or after the US lied about WMDs so they could steal all the Iraqi gold and torture and bomb innocent brown people?
Then, US soldiers proceeded to kill, rape, torture and pillage the Iraqis.
USA is a cancer.
Just wait til you see what they did with the actual guy
Huh. So we SHOULD tear down statues of oppressive regimes. looks at confederate statues
I feel it’s more appropriate for the local population to tear down a statue if that’s what they want to do. Not the guys who came in and mowed down thousands of their people.
They tried. Iirc there were unprompted attempts by the civilians in the picture to tear it down. The marines helped when it was clear that wasn’t going to happen.
Though that’s disputed.
Only by kids who don't know better.
Do you know anything about Saddam Hussein? Trust me, the vast majority were fine with it.
The locals were trying to tear it down but they didn't have the means to do so safely. The Marines, being experts at breaking shit, gave them a hand.
They also shared their crayons with the locals during the celebration. Though the Iraqis didn’t know to eat them at first as it’s not customary in their culture.
Made it worse than it was.
Saddam down!
Thought the statue was a pair of nods at first.
Did we bring freedom and democracy yet?
Kid is probably standing there wondering “what the hell am I doing here?”
I learned recently (like a few years ago or so) that Iraq had actually gotten worse after Saddam. Like getting rid of an evil dictator actually made the country worse. Weird shit huh? And apparently invading the country ruled by a dictator who literally gassed his own people, murdered anyone he wanted to, and stole food from the UN was, in hindsight, a bad thing. Crazy to think about that now
Depends who you ask. Sadam committed genocide against the Kurdish population in 1988 and indiscriminately bombed them in 1991. US intervention secured Kurdish autonomy from Iraqi violence.
Order and evil in power tends to be preferred to disorder and evil in power, which is what often happens when the country doesn't have any natural progression towards Democracy, or any of the cultural foundations that would be necessary for a Democracy to flourish.
Not to say it's impossible but the people would need to want it and the culture overall would have to be geared towards it.
Ahhh the gold old days when our president made all kinds of blunders and mistakes OUTSIDE the country.
Merica: "Look they have WMD's, we have to invade!!!"
20 years later
Russia: "Look there's Nazis there, we have to invade!!!"
As an American, it pisses me off to no end that this country did that. The way everyone looks at Russia, now.......is how people should have looked at the United States then. (some did)
I'm almost always Anti-War. This in particular is why I couldn't stand GWB. I've had many friends come back screwed up from Iraq and Afghanistan. I've always suspected the whole Iraq thing was to get the win that "daddy" didn't get.
Even Afghanistan could have been handled with special forces to get Bin Laden, there was no need to have tens of thousands of troops there for 20 years.
It's also a big reason this country is broke......GWB had a budget fuckin surplus when he took office.
Woe
At a good distance just in case it went boom boom
wow i'm amazed
No anthrax here.
In Tikrit, we just blew up his statue.
Yup, even that bombed out hotel just outside the palace. It was decided we should blow it some more because it could harbor snipers overlooking the palace. I think they just made the whole thing worse. It was fun watching the detonation though, the blast blew out a few windows in the palace. We were blowing shit up all over Tikrit.
Oh look. A SSN and blood type.
all show for nothing
all show for nothing
There were like a few dozen actual Iraqis participating in the pulling down of the statue. The rest, as the picture shows, just watched, neither helping nor hindering. Those in charge of the invasion chose to ignore the feelings of the local population, and decided that everyone welcomed them. The body bags flown home, the amputees, and the broken minds of US soldiers said otherwise.
"WE CANT ERASE HISTORY!?!?!"
And the Iraqis lived happily ever after.
Ahhh ... when we blamed Iraq on something Saudi Arabia did.
What happened to his pants?!
I remember when they first covered up the 'face' with the US flag...which lasted all of five seconds before they realized that it might not be a good look.