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> The world was divided over who was telling the truth, and there was no way to tell (until “Baghdad Bob” fled). What? Nobody believed a word this man said.

• LandR 5y ago
  Yeah, the guy was a running joke / meme.
• ethbr0 5y ago
  His press briefings were widely played on international media, so someone believed. Because there's always someone gullible out there.
  • dtech 5y ago
    It was mostly because everyone thought it was hilarious
  • unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    Nobody believed. They were broadcast because he was an official spokesman and because they were newsworthy in their surreal falseness. And the thing about him is that it was not an attempt to convince at all. He didn't think anyone would believe him; he couldn't have, because you could see it in his face. It was theatrical, showy, a performance, not a tedious attempt to lie. If he had a purpose beyond personal survival it was to humanise the regime as much as was possible. Really nobody thought it was true, but perhaps it was useful to them that it was optimistic, brazen, indomitable, even charming.
    • ethbr0 5y ago
      That's like saying no one believed Sean Spicer. If someone has an official title, they'll find a believing audience.
      • unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        No, it's not, quite. I don't know if I can describe the difference without getting into politics which is apparently as unwelcome here as humour, but here goes. I am trying to be apolitical here. Baghdad Bob and Sean Spicer were really quite different. OK so you are partly right on two fronts. One, there was a Baghdad Bob moment right at the beginning, the whole "largest crowd ever PERIOD" rant, but even the presentation and the sentiment of that were rather different. It had no humour, it was an angry, hectoring, nasty, shouted attempt to bully and control. Two, he failed at it in spectacular fashion, which did lead to him being car-crash television in kind of the same way BB was, except he'd so severely soured his relationship with the press corps that you were watching a man slowly shrinking, rather than a man in control of the limelight. But Spicer also was just plain bad at his job, ignorant of history, incompetent, indifferent or unkind on screen to the people he spoke to, had terrible presentation, no theatrics, no presence, and he told humdrum, lazy, formulaic lies among his charmless distribution of the day-to-day humdrum stuff. Not comparable to BB. No one believed in him, but the press corps went there expecting to -- needing to -- be told the truth. Apolitically: a really bad press secretary, in short. Out of his depth. Trump's own press conferences were much more like Baghdad Bob in tone and approach; Trump inflated the truth, told huge, flowery, dramatic lies, timed press conferences to distract, and used one ridiculous hoax claim to distract from the fallout from another. Theatrics, performance. A weird amount of car-crash TV control from sheer, unprepared brinksmanship and BS (in the specific sense of indifference to the distinction between truth and lies). Like with Baghdad Bob, the truth was never being approached; it's not what the Trump press conferences were even for. I often felt a little sorry for Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, who to be clear told the same sort of lies as Spicer, but at least you could tell it made her uncomfortable to do it, and you could tell she cared about the press corps as people. She especially hated clearing up after a Trump press conference.
• bena 5y ago
  Yeah. That war was essentially broadcast on cable. And yeah, sure, access to the U.S. military came with caveats, but it was possible to be a non-affiliated reporter. But it's also not like the stories couldn't be cross-checked with, you know, reality. You could relatively trust the information coming from U.S. sources, because they coincided with reality. Iraq was doing their best to prevent information coming in and going out. That's why Baghdad Bob became a meme. Because his accounts were hilariously at odds with reality. He'd go on TV and claim the American forces were in full retreat while being frog marched out the studio by those forces. And it's also not like this is going to be the first conflict in the social media age.
• unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  I genuinely thought... is this article satire, because I wasn't expecting that. The author isn't even too young to remember, so I am really puzzled by that claim. I, like everyone else, am glad that Baghdad Bob made it out alive, but I think we should have paid more attention to the idea that post-modern post-truth trolling could come from a source we expected to simply lie.
• jessaustin 5y ago
  Nobody believed a word this man said. Did he ever deny the presence of WMDs? Sometimes we must review our memories with the benefit of facts we learned later.