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Originally Posted by Usually Lurkin
As a sign for how happy Iraqis were over the downfall of Saddam, who knows?
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I know.
This event that Reuters compared to the fall of the Berlin Wall involved a a rent-a-crowd of 50 or so Sadr city (mostly) teenaged boys in USMC sealed area in and around Firdos Square. I vividly recall one scene of some reporter with *throngs* of cheering Iraqis standing behind him. He was describing the jubilation when the camera panned to the left, revealing the *crowd* to be nothing more than 6 or 7 people and showing one dude standing off to the side, literally picking his nose.
(Not-too-surprisingly, the cameraman quickly returned his focus to the "action"....)
The event itself was no more monumental than a scene from Walker, Texas Ranger which uses some real-live local folks as stand-ins.
What makes the event something more than trivia (in my mind, at least) is the extent to which the free and independent watchdog media reported this as something monumental. These media outlets had boots on the ground. They could see what the scene really
looked like. Why didn't one fairly prominent media outlet report something like, 'this is a small crowd of guys who were escorted into the square that by US tanks, and frankly it looks Army Psy-ops is running the show.'?
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... if the gov had been saying, "we're at war" all along, then they would have confused the matter greatly, because we weren't.
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We weren't at war in Iraq in the fall of 2002, yet we were repeatedly bombing Iraq in the fall of 2002...right?