WE'LL TELL YOU WHEN IT'S A CROWD

Ok, it looks like we more-or-less took Baghdad.

And there was much rejoicing on the streets of the city:

Amid chaotic scenes of rejoicing, looting and scattered gunfire, Iraqis danced and trampled on the fallen 20-foot high metal statue in contempt for the man who had held them in fear for 24 years in which the country sustained massive human losses and economic damage from three wars.

(...)

Earlier, in scenes recalling the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, Iraqis hacked at the marble plinth of Saddam's statue with a sledgehammer. Youths hooked a noose around the statue's neck and attached the rope to a Marine armored vehicle, which dragged it over.

The crowd swarmed over what was left of the statue, waving their arms and fists in the air and dancing for joy. (emphasis mine)

This, as you may have seen if you turned on your friendly cable news channel, was the scene:



Thing is, if you watched the video, there were no more than several hundred, or maybe a thousand people there.

Yet Reuters calls it a "crowd" that "swarmed". I was a little confused by this. In August of 1991, as Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank outside the assembly buildings in Moscow and yelled into his bullhorn, he and anyone else there could have been easily shot, yet there were hundreds of thousands of people there, people who had been oppressed and often brutalized for decades, celebratory about being on the brink of freedom. Or howbout the hundreds of thousands, or more, who filled the streets of Belgrade to call for the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic? They went through plenty of shit too!

I'll let BartCop take it from here (he had the same questions I had):

Wait a minute - Baghdad is a city of five million people - where are they?

Out of five million, only 1,000 people are celebrating in the streets? I'll bet if Iraq won the World Cup, there'd be a full million dancing in the streets.

They can't be afraid to come out - the Marines are sitting on curbs smoking cigarettes, talking and laughing with the locals. It's obvious Saddam has no forces with which to attack them, so where are the other 4,999,000 people?

Did we kill them all?

Well, no, but the amount of dead civilians certainly exceeds the size of that "crowd" today.