Firdos

Battalion 3/4 had experienced heavy fights during the 2003 invasion and had hauled down Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, an image seen around the world.

The Road to Haditha 2006

Battalion 3/4 had experienced heavy fights during the 2003 invasion and had hauled down Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, an image seen around the world.

The Road to Haditha 2006

Battalion 3/4 had experienced heavy fights during the 2003 invasion and had hauled down Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, an image seen around the world.

The Road to Haditha 2006

On April 9, 2003, the world watched live on television one of the biggest spectacles of the Iraq War, the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Firdos Square.

Story Pick: The toppling of Saddam's statue Ian Shapira 2011

Maass was actually at Firdos Square when the statue went down, and he remembers something quite different from a victorious feeling in the air:

Story Pick: The toppling of Saddam's statue Ian Shapira 2011

The subsequent years of civil war, which have killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people, have revealed the events at Firdos to be an illusional intermission between invasion and insurgency.

Story Pick: The toppling of Saddam's statue Ian Shapira 2011

The spectacles of joy in Tripoli today recall the delirious scenes in Baghdad's Firdos Square in 2003—the statues pulled down, the palaces of faux grandeur and kitsch ransacked by people awakening to their own sense of violation and power, the man at the helm who had been full of might and bravado making a run for it, exposed as a paranoid and pretender, living in fear of his day of reckoning.

From Baghdad to Tripoli Fouad Ajami 2011

When the statue of Saddam came down on April 9, 2003, there was great rejoicing in America -- Administration mouthpieces proclaimed a victory for liberty on par with the fall of the Berlin Wall -- but when two American soldiers were killed in Firdos Square by suicide bombers about 36 hours later, the incident wasn't even reported, let alone the irony pointed out.

Joseph A. Palermo: An Unsanitized Look at the Origins of the Iraq War 2010

When the statue of Saddam came down on April 9, 2003, there was great rejoicing in America -- Administration mouthpieces proclaimed a victory for liberty on par with the fall of the Berlin Wall -- but when two American soldiers were killed in Firdos Square by suicide bombers about 36 hours later, the incident wasn't even reported, let alone the irony pointed out.

Joseph A. Palermo: An Unsanitized Look at the Origins of the Iraq War 2010

When the statue of Saddam came down on April 9, 2003, there was great rejoicing in America -- Administration mouthpieces proclaimed a victory for liberty on par with the fall of the Berlin Wall -- but when two American soldiers were killed in Firdos Square by suicide bombers about 36 hours later, the incident wasn't even reported, let alone the irony pointed out.

Joseph A. Palermo: An Unsanitized Look at the Origins of the Iraq War 2010