Two Year Anniversary of Firdos Square Farce

Two years ago today, I was driving home, somewhere on I-440, listening to the radio when Rush Limbaugh started hailing what he described as a crowd randomly gathered in Firdos Square in Baghdad vociferously celebrating the US-led "liberation" of Iraq by toppling a statue of Saddam Hussein. The "Maha Rushie" was beside himself with praise about how the War Party had been vindicated by the jubilation of the Iraqi people.

Turns out the whole thing was a media-made farce.

As Harry Browne, a former Libertarian Party Presidential candidate writes,

[...] it was all an illusion – the kind created by the best
magicians.

There were three elements in the illusion:

1.) The statue was actually toppled by U.S. Marines using their own equipment – not by Iraqis.

2.) The Marines first draped an American flag over the statue’s face,
but then realized that this would make it too obvious that the Marines had come to occupy, not liberate, Baghdad.

3.) The square wasn’t filled with thousands of Iraqis. Only a hundred or so people witnessed the event. The few people there weren’t oppressed Iraqis – celebrating the event with joyous relief that their years-long oppression in Baghdad had ended. The people crowded around the statue were mostly members of the Iraqi National Congress – an organization of Iraqis who had been living outside Iraq, and had been flown into Iraq just before the event.

It is time to add this event to a long line of outright lies and blatant deceptions surrounding this undeclared, unconstitutional, and unjust war of "global democractic revolution."