Cpl Edward Chin from New York of the 3rd battalion, 4th Marines regiment, set up the star and stripes flag on the face of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s statue, in downtown Bagdad, Wednesday, April 9, 2003. (AP Photo/Laurent Rebours)

The Army’s internal
study of the war in Iraq criticizes some efforts by its own
psychological operations units, but one spur-of-the-moment effort last
year produced the most memorable image of the invasion.

As the Iraqi regime
was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in
central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a
Marine colonel — not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely
assumed from the TV images — who decided to topple the statue,
the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological
operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi
undertaking.

After the colonel
— who was not named in the report — selected the statue as
a “target of opportunity,” the psychological team used loudspeakers to
encourage Iraqi civilians to assist, according to an account by a unit
member.

But Marines had draped an American flag over the statue’s face.

“God bless them,
but we were thinking … that this was just bad news,” the member
of the psychological unit said. “We didn’t want to look like an
occupation force, and some of the Iraqis were saying, ‘No, we want an
Iraqi flag!’ “

Someone produced an Iraqi flag, and a sergeant in the psychological operations unit quickly replaced the American flag.

Ultimately, a
Marine recovery vehicle toppled the statue with a chain, but the effort
appeared to be Iraqi-inspired because the psychological team had
managed to pack the vehicle with cheering Iraqi children.

© Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times