I have stood in Firdos Square in Baghdad many times, in the exact place where American Marines helped pull down Saddam Hussein’s statue in 2003. I remember being in that exact spot and thinking, Fucking hell, imagine being here when that happened.
Imagine witnessing (symbolically at least) the downfall of a man who had ruled through fear for decades. Closing your eyes and transporting yourself to the moment of the cheering, flags, the enormous statue coming crashing to the ground, a dictator defeated, country liberated – HOPE… hope. Good triumphing over evil. A moment that makes you believe, just briefly, that history has some sense of justice. “Karma’, “what goes around comes around”… I don’t know.
But standing there, more than twenty years later, I had a thought and its stayed with me ever since. So here goes (don’t attack me)….. What if that wasn’t the happy ending everyone thought it was?
Not because Saddam had any good qualities or deserved to stay, absolutely fucking not. I to be clear am not defending dictators, and I find the romanticisation of men like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad quite extraordinary.
Some defend that during their time they to some degree had functioning hospitals or affordable petrol but we must remember that doesn’t excuse torture, political imprisonment or the systematic destruction of basic freedoms. HOWEVER, I think we need to think about what comes AFTER, because I feel like we never think about after. Okay invade Afghanistan, now what? Take out Irans supreme leader? Fair enough but now what?. We should be capable of having a conversation about what happens after a dictator falls without someone assuming we wanted him to stay because there’s a rather important difference between removing a terrible man and building a better country.
In 2003, the statue of Saddam Hussein came crashing down and we watched it and called it liberation. And yes, I’ll say it, removing a dictator does not automatically liberate a country. I mean if you look at Iraq I would almost argue it simply created a vacuum for something even more terrifying to take place.
Look at ISIS, they seized Mosul (then far beyond) and declared its so-called caliphate, unleashing a campaign of terror, enslavement and mass murder all in the name of Islam. A religion practised by nearly two BILLION people, whose faith these extremists claimed to represent while violating its most fundamental principles. Also, let’s not forget that Muslims themselves were among ISIS’s greatest victims. They are not Islam.
I suppose I am asking a far more uncomfortable question – What is the value of bringing down a dictator if we have no fucking idea what happens to the people left standing in the rubble?
In many ways ISIS was on no ones radar but it didn’t appear out of thin air, it’s roots stretched through the insurgency, the collapse of institutions, sectarian divisions and years of political failures. But I wonder how many people watching that statue come down could have imagined what Iraq would endure in the decades that followed. Then think of Gaddafi…. All the other jerks.
If you know me, you know I love philopshy and I think Hannah Arendt articualtes its best when she says, “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.” I think there’s something rather brilliant about that observation, it is one thing to fight against power and quite another to exercise it responsibly. And I was fortunate enough to see that in Mali, Burkina Faso, Syria. Revolutions require courage, anger and a common enemy but building a functioning society requires patience, compromise, accountability and the rather unglamorous ability to keep the fucking lights on. Actually that’s a western thing… eat bread.
And that’s the problem, the theatre of revolution, the speeches, the photographs… the hope that what’s coming will be amazing.. with no plan or ambition. We remember who lost power, but not always what happened to the people who were supposed to gain it.
Think about how fucking strange that is, entire countries with thousands of years of civilisation, literature, architecture, music, intellectual traditions and ordinary human lives, reduced to whichever man happened to be running the place during our lifetimes.
We know their dictators before we know their poets, their wars before the native language, their terrorist organisations before the colour of their flags. Yet everyone is so damn opinionated declaring their worldly stance.
I want to be careful here because I have enormous respect for journalists, particularly those reporting from conflict zones. The people are heroes who risk their lives to expose atrocities, document human rights abuses and challenge official narratives. Local journalists, translators and fixers take extraordinary risks without the recognition or ability to leave that foreign correspondents may have. Passport privilege is a thing.
A country can be beautiful and oppressive, while its people can be wonderful while its government is cruel. Both things can be true without cancelling each other out (really thinking about Iran right now).
I wonder whether we’ve confused having strong opinions with actually understanding something so let’s throw in a bit of Socrates, who famously questioned how much he really knew. A philosophy I can wholeheartedly get behind, because the more I see of the world, the less I seem to understand it. We live in an age where watching a documentary, reading three headlines or spending a week in Afghanistan apparently qualifies someone as an expert on several centuries of history, religion and geopolitics.
And frankly, I don’t even know if any of this makes sense, it started off thinking about dictators, then world peace, then people. I’m currently sleep-deprived, somewhere on my way to Qatar, about four red wines deep and as always attempting to solve the philosophical and geopolitical problems of the modern world at 35,000 feet and all the thoughts that run wild through my head.
I have also cut this rant down by 2000 words so if you made it this far thank you.
Written, 30th June 2026
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