On April 9th, 2003, footage of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdous Square brought down by American soldiers was aired time and again on all news channels. The streets around the Firdous Square were almost empty except for US tanks and a few hundred Iraqis standing in the square. The US soldier who reached the head of the 12-meter statue and fastened a chain around its neck before covering its face with the US flag seemed to set up an execution scene: the chains became a noose and the US flag was the hood covering the head of the victim at the moment of execution. For a short while, the Iraqi flag replaced the US flag before the head was bare again, with the chains around the neck. An American tank tied to the statue pulled back slowly. In a few seconds, the statue was brought down. American commentators and state figures hailed the fall of the statue as the triumph of the US army in ending Saddam Hussein’s regime. Rather than dismissing the fall of the statue as an event manipulated by the media, my paper examines its implication for the American army, and for Iraqis. On the one hand, I endeavor to understand the significance of the toppling of the statue by an occupying force, and the type of violence it involved. Indeed, the destruction of the statue by the American troops, and the triumphalist discourse accompanying it, was an act of revenge and of illegal lynching. One the other hand, I explore how the fall of the statue indicated an act of transgression as far as Iraqis were concerned in that a public embodiment of Saddam Hussein was destroyed publically, and how the immediate defacement of the statue can be seen an act of revenge by Iraqis against the tyrant. By dwelling upon the fall of Saddam’s statue, I address questions of violence, revenge, occupation and transgression.