After the Gulf war in 1991, sanctions imposed by the international community banned all trade with Iraq except in humanitarian circumstances. Among many hardships, this made it difficult for artists and sculptors to access materials. One way to get paint, canvas, bronze and stone was to paint pictures or make sculptures of Saddam. If the art was right, the regime would provide. While the Iraqi people suffered under sanctions, Saddam built vast palaces filled with monuments to himself. It is unclear how many statues of himself Saddam put up in this period, though there were hundreds in Baghdad alone.

There was nothing special about the statue of Saddam that was put up in Firdos Square in April 2002 to mark his 65th birthday. Firdos Square is not the most important location in Baghdad, and the statue was unexceptional: a bronze standing figure, 12 metres high, weighing around a tonne. The fact that it was not a big deal may be one reason why, since its destruction, there has been confusion as to who made it.

At least two different sculptors have been credited with creating this statue, with two different narratives. This is characteristic of the story of Saddam's statue in Firdos Square. The boundary between what is real and what is fake would soon disappear altogether.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard defined hyperreality as a state in which you cannot tell the difference between reality and a simulation of reality. In 1991, at the time of the first Gulf war, he wrote three essays touching on this theme, later published together as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Baudrillard argued that the relevant events in the first couple of months of 1991 were not really a war, in the sense that "war" was commonly understood: they were a simulation of a war.