When Saddam was toppled

By RUPERT CORNWELL

The toppling, on live television, of President Saddam Hussein's statue in the centre of Baghdad may become the war image which imprints itself on popular memory. The White House and Downing St will certainly hope so.

Other images will offer competing reminders that for some this was not just a glorious war of liberation. Remember the boy who lost his parents and his arms in an air raid?

But in terms of drama, of a shared moment of release, and relief, for an oppressed people, the fall of the statue is likely to be the shot we remember.

It will take its place alongside other such moments: United States Marines erecting the Stars and Stripes above Iwo Jima in 1945; the last helicopter lifting off the US Embassy in Saigon in 1975; the crowds dancing on the Berlin Wall in 1989; the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990; Boris Yeltsin jumping on to a tank to defeat the communist coup in 1991; the aircraft flying into the twin towers in 2001.

Unlike most of these, the toppling of the statue was partly staged. Several efforts were made to get it right.

Consternation must have been felt in Washington and London when two Marines - doubtless remembering their forefathers on Iwo Jima - scaled the statue to wrap the head in the Stars and Stripes.

That was not the picture the world was supposed to see. This was a war of liberation, not a war of conquest.

One can imagine the political movie directors in the Pentagon wanting to scream down the hot-line to the field commander telling him to get rid of it.

The Marines tried again with an Iraqi flag, provided by the crowd. No, no, the director must have shouted again. We cannot show the world a shot which presents us toppling the Iraqi flag - only toppling Saddam.

Eventually, the Marines got it right and pulled the statue over. It turned out to be hollow, failing to tumble with a satisfying crash but slumping to the horizontal - rather like the regime.

At last the US and Britain had the clear, simple image they wanted. Saddam's fate may still be uncertain but his statue had been torn apart live on television and Baghdadis had danced on the pieces.

Has there been anything like it since the end of World War II, when the Allies invaded and defeated Germany and Japan and imposed entire new systems?

True, in the past 20 years, US troops have gone into Grenada and Panama to impose regime change by military force but there is little parallel with the feat accomplished, apparently successfully, by the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and the destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Dictatorships and authoritarian governments die in different ways. Some collapse in violence. Others perish in slow motion - like the Soviet Union when perestroika undermined the system from within. Soviet Communism truly died with the attempted anti-Gorbachev putsch of August 18, 1991, when the would-be restorers of Leninist orthodoxy failed in that most basic of communist skills - organising a decent coup.

A few months later Russia, Belorussia and the Ukraine pulled out of the Soviet Union, and when the Russian flag replaced the hammer and sickle above the Kremlin on Christmas Day that year, and President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, it was the quiet sealing of the self-evident.

Invariably, however, these regimes collapse as a result of internal pressures from below, not, as in the case of Iraq, with an almighty push from outside. Only perhaps in the birth of Bangladesh, when India's army played the decisive role in the disappearance of the former East Pakistan in 1971, did something similar occur. By the time the Indian army rolled in, the East was already in rebellion against the dominant West Pakistan.

But for the rest, whether peaceable or violent, it has been the people that have sparked the revolution, not infrequently with the crucial backing of the military, to overpower the secret police who usually are loyal to the tyrant to the last. Even Vietnam in 1975, portrayed as the ultimate American defeat, was the culmination of a 20-year internal war of national liberation and re-unification.

So it was in April 1974 in Portugal, one of the most memorably joyous and peaceful of them all. "Um povo unido jamais sera vencido," the people of Lisbon chanted, "a united people will never be defeated", as they thrust red carnations in the barrels of rifles carried by the soldiers whose swift uprising blew away the stifling Salazar/Caetano dictatorship like dust from the palm of a hand. Later that year the Portuguese example was followed by Greece; only this time it was the vicious and ignorant military junta of the colonels that crumbled amid the humiliation of a botched coup in Cyprus.

Within hours, Constantine Karamanlis, the former prime minister "dans la reserve de la republique", returned from de Gaulle-like self exile in Paris, and thousands of Greeks rushed to the airport in the small hours of the morning to greet him in joy.

Five years later, an exile named Ayatollah Khomeini returned to his native Iran on the morning of February 1, 1979, to an even more tumultuous welcome, as a million people waited at Mehrabad Airport, and two million more lined the route into Teheran. A fortnight earlier the Shah had slunk off to Egypt for what was officially called an "extended vacation", but which everyone knew was for good.

An eyewitness to Khomeini's return wrote of the extraordinary atmosphere it generated, of how "a millennial frenzy took over the country".

Outwardly, the scenes in Baghdad - the sporadic fighting, the looting and the toppling of the dictator's statues - recalled nothing so much as Bucharest 1989, when a little-noticed protest in the northern Romanian city of Timisoara in mid-December suddenly metamorphosed into a national uprising that saw the megalomaniac Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife driven from power and executed after a summary court martial on Christmas Day.

But in Iraq, it took an American-led invasion to achieve what in 1991 even external defeat in Kuwait and internal uprisings in the north and south could not. The circumstances of Saddam's fall mean this will be nation-building on an epic scale.

Germany and Japan were after all homogeneous, developed societies cowed by shame at what their governments had done in their name. That is one reason why it will be a miracle if post-Saddam Iraq matches Portugal, the Czech Republic, Poland and the rest and attains the functioning democracy of which Washington's theorists dream.

Warm welcomes for occupying armies often prove fleeting.

In Mogadishu a downtrodden populace paraded with joy when US troops marched into their mutilated metropolis. Months later, Somalis just as jubilantly dragged the butchered remains of American soldiers down the same dusty streets.

As the British learned in Northern Ireland and the Israelis in Lebanon, occupying armies often find happy faces replaced by frowns and firebombs that can linger for decades. Invading armies almost invariably wear out their welcomes.

People tend to be submissive when victorious troops first arrive, said Sandra Mitchell, an International Rescue Committee lawyer who has worked missions in Kosovo and Bosnia. Their priorities are finding loved ones and food, clothing and shelter, and usually the neediest people come forward with open arms, she said.

When the Israeli Army entered Lebanon in 1982 to root out guerrillas, Shia Muslims threw rice and roared out a welcome. When British troops intervened in Northern Ireland's sectarian strife in 1969, Catholics greeted them with tea and crumpets.

"But when they began to put up checkpoints, barbed-wire perimeters and limited population movements, attitudes began to change," Mitchell said.

Russell Glenn, a Rand analyst, said public sentiment often goes against the occupiers when promises of peace and prosperity don't materialise quickly.

"We don't know what the expectations are in Iraq when the military shows up," Glenn said. "Inevitably, it's not enough."

Yet military occupations sometimes work, most notably in turning Nazi Germany and Japan into democratic societies after World War II, a process that involved suppressing media and dissent. Even the mission to Somalia halted mass starvation.

Since US-led Nato forces landed in Bosnia in 1996, the country has never returned to anything remotely resembling its earlier warfare. Though many people denounced the Dayton Accords that partitioned the country along ethnic lines, the enforced separation of the combatants finally made the place relatively safe for civilians.

Away from Iraq itself the American occupation is going to leave a scar across the Arab world. The image of Iraqis, assisted by Americans, destroying the statue of Saddam Hussein shocked the 290 million Arabs from the Persian Gulf to Casablanca.

"These people are releasing their hate and anger against the regime - soon the Iraqis will fight the Americans if they do not leave the land of Iraq," said Yazeed Sawafta, a Palestinian lawyer.

"This is an earthquake," Qassem Jaafer, an Arab analyst, told al-Jazeera television. "The regime has been quickly collapsed. We should be realistic. We did not need the American tanks to make this change in Baghdad."

"The defeat of Saddam is the defeat of the Arab regime in all Arab countries, and not a defeat for the Arab nation. All Arab leaders are liars, collaborators and thieves," said Hosni al-Zein, a Palestinian sweet-shop owner.

The Arab unease was reflected in the Muslim countries of Asia.

In Pakistan, The Nation announced: "US Tanks in Heart of Baghdad ... Unbearable picture of killing, destruction". In its editorial, the paper said: "The whole thing boils down to a subordinate status for Iraqi."

In Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country where there have been huge demonstrations against the war, a Muslim newspaper ran a headline saying, "Colonising soldiers hold Baghdad", under a picture of a US soldier draping the Stars and Stripes over the head of the Saddam statue.

Maher Abdullah, a commentator for al-Jazeera, put his gloss on the shock. "Before, the people of Iraq were shouting, 'We sacrifice our soul and blood for Saddam'. Tomorrow, they will shout, 'We sacrifice our soul and blood for Iraq'."

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Herald Feature: Iraq war