In , the industrialist invited Kobold to come see the leg. He had loved touching historical objects since he was a child, when his uncle, a history professor, would let him hold old manuscripts and ceramic pieces. The leg was nothing much to look at, but it mesmerized Kobold all the same. Then in June, the industrialist contacted Kobold again. Did Kobold want it? Kobold quickly agreed to buy it—for a price, he told me, of less than ten thousand euros.
He told me that the leg had arrived in Europe on a ship that unloaded it in Rotterdam. When I mentioned that media reports in said that it had come through Bremen, he was surprised.
In any case, the discrepancy did not worry him. As for the flag, it's "One of the Firdos myths" that Iraqis brought an Iraqi flag to put over the statue.
Another myth is that it was brought by a U. Media Ignored More Important News for 'Upbeat' Story Maass says that, in the rush to cover the state-toppling, the media ignored or avoided far grimmer--and more important--stories: "On that day, Baghdad was violent and chaotic. The city was already being looted by swarms of people using trucks, taxis, horses, and wheelbarrows to cart away whatever they could from government buildings and banks, museums, and even hospitals.
There continued to be armed opposition to the American advance. He chronicles several examples of editors ordering journalists to cover the story, which reporters warned wasn't real news. The essence of all these historical figures was supposedly distilled down into Saddam, uniting the Iraqi people and Mesopotamian history, reaching out across the whole Middle East. After the Gulf war in , sanctions imposed by the international community banned all trade with Iraq except in humanitarian circumstances.
Among many hardships, this made it difficult for artists and sculptors to access materials. One way to get paint, canvas, bronze and stone was to paint pictures or make sculptures of Saddam. If the art was right, the regime would provide. While the Iraqi people suffered under sanctions, Saddam built vast palaces filled with monuments to himself. It is unclear how many statues of himself Saddam put up in this period, though there were hundreds in Baghdad alone. There was nothing special about the statue of Saddam that was put up in Firdos Square in April to mark his 65th birthday.
Firdos Square is not the most important location in Baghdad, and the statue was unexceptional: a bronze standing figure, 12 metres high, weighing around a tonne. The fact that it was not a big deal may be one reason why, since its destruction, there has been confusion as to who made it. At least two different sculptors have been credited with creating this statue, with two different narratives.
The boundary between what is real and what is fake would soon disappear altogether. T he French philosopher Jean Baudrillard defined hyperreality as a state in which you cannot tell the difference between reality and a simulation of reality.
There were two reasons for this. First, the events were carefully choreographed through the media: the coalition military controlled which images could be shown, and which journalists were allowed to report.
The television-watching public audience in the west was shown non-stop video footage of firework-like bombings, and point-of-view shots of missiles heading to their targets. The effect was that of playing a computer game: clean, surgical, without consequences. The coalition was always going to win, and Saddam, for all his posturing, was in no position to fight back. The hyperreality of the Gulf war that Baudrillard described caught the imaginations of writers, artists and film-makers.
It looked ever more prescient as the internet began to connect the world. Excitement and anxieties about real versus virtual experiences grew. A hyperreal war was played out in the political comedy film Wag the Dog loosely based on a novel , in which an American president creates a fictional war abroad to distract from a sex scandal at home. Hyperreality was the basis of the action science-fiction blockbuster The Matrix. A ground invasion was the focus. The battle is still going on.
Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad. Behind him, viewers could see Iraqi troops fleeing from American tanks on the other side of the river. It would be presented to the world as a climax: the triumph of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The coalition forces were cast as liberators, allowing the Iraqi people to rise up at last and tear down the most powerful symbol of the dictator who had oppressed them.
But the reality was not so simple. Since they had invaded Iraq on 20 March, coalition forces had been pulling down dozens of statues of Saddam. For example, on 29 March, British forces had blown up a cast-iron statue of him in Basra. But no one filmed this event, so — while it was reported by the BBC and other news organisations — it made little impact outside Basra itself. Their commander ordered his troops to find a statue that could be destroyed, and to wait until Fox News arrived before they began to destroy it.
Soon enough, they found an equestrian statue of Saddam. The television crew turned up, and the soldiers duly fired a shell. The footage was not exciting — just Americans destroying stuff, no crowd of grateful Iraqis — so it did not get much play.
The next day, British troops took out another one in Basra. There were so many statues of Saddam in Iraq that they were being felled on a daily basis. A number of international journalists who were covering the invasion moved into the Palestine Hotel on Firdos Square, where Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf held his amusing press conferences.
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