«On April 9, 2003 the entire world watched the scene in Baghdad as American troops through a noose round the neck of the dictator and surrounded by jubilant throngs of Iraqis, pulled him from his pedestal in a gesture charged with symbolic meaning. The apparently immovable monument swayed back and forth before falling. Before it crashed to the ground with a satisfying thud, there was a moment of suspension as the force of gravity sought to overcome the statue's grotesquely unnatural, horizontal posture. Bobbing gently up and down, the massive figure hung precariously in the air for one last horrible moment. And just as an optical illusion, looked at long enough , will undergo a gestalt switch, so the public perception of the war in Iraq seemed to perform a volte-face with this scene. The morally obscene infliction of shock and terror on a mercilessly bombarded, gaunt and helpless population, morphed on this day in the Shiite district of Baghdad into the image of joyful citizens freed from terror and oppression. Both images contain an element of truth, even as they evoke contradictory moral feelings and attitudes. Must ambivalent feelings lead to contradictory judgements?»


This is Jurgen Habermas writing soon after the event. (It later transpired that the "jubilant throngs" were Iraqi exiles of the Chalabi party, shipped in by US troops for the occasion.) Aside from the parallels to Saddam's actual execution, the passage still intrigues me for the way it talks about a "tipping point" in perceptions.

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