Falling of Baghdad - 2 years later

Everyone who followed the invasion of Iraq must have at least one war scene pinned in her/his mind. For many, this was the dramatic scene of American soldiers toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein in front of the world press (most of which were embedded with the coalition troops). For some others it was the scene of the American flag covering the head of that same statue of Saddam, and then quickly replaced by an Iraqi flag for the sake of political correctness. For black comedy fans, the scenes of Muhammad Saeed Al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister at the time of the invasion, were definitely the most remarkable.

For me, a much less popular scene summed up the whole Iraq war thing. It was the scene of some patients of a mental institution wandering in the streets in front of their looted asylum. Yes, the looting went beyond the museums, palaces and libraries; it even reached crazy houses. The doctors and nurses had to flee the place, and of course after the equipment and furniture got looted the place was left wide open for the patients, maybe for the first time since they got in there. I can't forget those baffled eyes of the patients, probably confused and asking themselves: Which side of the fence is more insane?

As everyone knows by now, by the time a whole city was being looted, the only Baghdad buildings that were guarded by the coalition forces were the ministry of petroleum and the ministry of interior. The documents in those buildings were definitely more important than thousands-of-years-old monuments, rare books and mentally retarded patients.

One more thing, a little bit off-topic though. At one of the press conferences during the war, a European correspondent asked the American forces spokesperson about the carpet bombing of several areas of Baghdad, and if the alleged weapons of mass destruction sites could be accidentally bombed. The answer of the Pentagon spokesperson was that those sites were all known and avoided.