Airstrip One

Those cheering crowds, ctd

The picture below comes from an article in the left anarchist site Infoshop, so treat the source with care. However it alleges that this is a BBC picture of the toppling of the Saddam statue outside the Palestine Hotel. I can't find the picture on the BBC site.

So if the picture is kosher, where are those cheering crowds that some of the dimmer pro-warriors touted as a main justification for going in? I'm no crowd expert, but there don't appear to be more than a couple of hundred - a good proportion of who must be journalists. Now I know that this may have been a less populated part of town, people were still afraid of Saddam and all that, but still...