unknown
2008-08-27 17:40:45 UTC
Looking Back at Five Years of Bush's Wreckage in Iraq
By Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com. Posted August 26, 2008.
Bush's supporters see the global war on terrorism as a "clash of
civilizations" -- yet the civilization we are destroying in Iraq is part of
our own.
On April 11, 12, 13, and 14, 2003, the United States Army and United States
Marine Corps disgraced themselves and the country they represent in Baghdad,
Iraq's capital city. Having invaded Iraq and accepted the status of a
military occupying power, they sat in their tanks and Humvees, watching as
unarmed civilians looted the Iraqi National Museum and burned down the Iraqi
National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans of the
Ministry of Religious Endowments. Their behavior was in violation of their
orders, international law, and the civilized values of the United States.
Far from apologizing for these atrocities or attempting to make amends, the
United States government has in the past five years added insult to injury.
Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense and the official responsible for
the actions of the troops, repeatedly attempted to trivialize what had
occurred with inane public statements like "democracy is messy" and "stuff
happens."
On December 2, 2004, President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, to General Tommy Franks, the
overall military commander in Iraq at that time, for his meritorious service
to the country. (He gave the same award to L. Paul Bremer III, the highest
ranking civilian official in Iraq, and to George Tenet, director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, which had provided false information about
Saddam Hussein and Iraq to Congress and the people.)
In the five years since the initial looting and pillaging of the Iraqi
capital, thieves have stolen at least 32,000 items from some 12,000
archaeological sites across Iraq with no interference whatsoever from the
occupying power. No funds have been appropriated by the American or Iraqi
governments to protect the most valuable and vulnerable historical sites on
Earth, even though experience has shown that just a daily helicopter
overflight usually scares off looters. In 2006, the World Monuments Fund
took the unprecedented step of putting the entire country of Iraq on its
list of the most endangered sites. All of this occurred on George W. Bush's
watch and impugned any moral authority he might have claimed.
The United States government seems never to have understood that, when it
began the occupation of Iraq on March 19, 2003, it became legally
responsible for what happened to the country's cultural inheritance. After
all, the only legal justification for its presence in Iraq is U.N. Security
Council Resolution 1483 of May 22, 2003. Both the United States and the
United Kingdom voted for this resolution in which they formally acknowledged
their status and obligations as occupying powers in Iraq. Among those
obligations, specified in the Preamble to the resolution, was: "The need for
respect for the archaeological, historical, cultural, and religious heritage
of Iraq, and for the continued protection of archaeological, historical,
cultural, and religious sites, museums, libraries, and monuments." Every
politically sentient observer on Earth is aware of the Bush administration's
contempt for international law and its routine scofflaw behavior since it
came to power, but this clause remains an ironclad obligation that will
stand up in an international or a domestic U.S. court. On this issue, the
United States is an outlaw, waiting to be brought to justice.
In 1258 AD the Mongols descended on Baghdad and pillaged its magnificent
libraries. A well-known adage states that the Tigris River ran black from
the ink of the countless texts the Mongols trashed, while the streets ran
red with the blood of the city's slaughtered inhabitants. The world has
never forgotten that medieval act of barbarism, just as it will never forget
what the U.S. military unleashed on the defenseless city in 2003 and in
subsequent years. There is simply no excuse for what has happened in Baghdad
at the hands of the Americans. Chalmers Johnson, August, 2008
The Smash of Civilizations
By Chalmers Johnson
In the months before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and his
senior officials spoke of preserving Iraq's "patrimony" for the Iraqi
people. At a time when talking about Iraqi oil was taboo, what he meant by
patrimony was exactly that -- Iraqi oil. In their "joint statement on Iraq's
future" of April 8, 2003, George Bush and Tony Blair declared, "We reaffirm
our commitment to protect Iraq's natural resources, as the patrimony of the
people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit."[1] In this
they were true to their word. Among the few places American soldiers
actually did guard during and in the wake of their invasion were oil fields
and the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. But the real Iraqi patrimony, that
invaluable human inheritance of thousands of years, was another matter. At a
time when American pundits were warning of a future "clash of
civilizations," our occupation forces were letting perhaps the greatest of
all human patrimonies be looted and smashed.
There have been many dispiriting sights on TV since George Bush launched his
ill-starred war on Iraq -- the pictures from Abu Ghraib, Fallujah laid
waste, American soldiers kicking down the doors of private homes and
pointing assault rifles at women and children. But few have reverberated
historically like the looting of Baghdad's museum -- or been forgotten more
quickly in this country.
Teaching the Iraqis about the Untidiness of History
In archaeological circles, Iraq is known as "the cradle of civilization,"
with a record of culture going back more than 7,000 years. William R. Polk,
the founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of
Chicago, says, "It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that
life as we know it today began: there people first began to speculate on
philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made
ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and, above all developed the skill of
writing."[2] No other places in the Bible except for Israel have more
history and prophecy associated with them than Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer),
and Mesopotamia -- different names for the territory that the British around
the time of World War I began to call "Iraq," using the old Arab term for
the lands of the former Turkish enclave of Mesopotamia (in Greek: "between
the [Tigris and Euphrates] rivers").[3] Most of the early books of Genesis
are set in Iraq (see, for instance, Genesis 10:10, 11:31; also Daniel 1-4;
II Kings 24).
The best-known of the civilizations that make up Iraq's cultural heritage
are the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians,
Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sassanids, and Muslims. On April 10, 2003, in a
television address, President Bush acknowledged that the Iraqi people are
"the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity."[4.]
Only two days later, under the complacent eyes of the U.S. Army, the Iraqis
would begin to lose that heritage in a swirl of looting and burning.
In September 2004, in one of the few self-critical reports to come out of
Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, the Defense Science Board Task
Force on Strategic Communication wrote: "The larger goals of U.S. strategy
depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the
radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only
failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what
they intended."[5] Nowhere was this failure more apparent than in the
indifference -- even the glee -- shown by Rumsfeld and his generals toward
the looting on April 11 and 12, 2003, of the National Museum in Baghdad and
the burning on April 14, 2003, of the National Library and Archives as well
as the Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowments. These
events were, according to Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist,
"the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years." Eleanor Robson of
All Souls College, Oxford, said, "You'd have to go back centuries, to the
Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale."[6] Yet
Secretary Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game
and shrugged it off with the comment that "Freedom's untidy. . . . Free
people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes."[7]
The Baghdad archaeological museum has long been regarded as perhaps the
richest of all such institutions in the Middle East. It is difficult to say
with precision what was lost there in those catastrophic April days in 2003
because up-to-date inventories of its holdings, many never even described in
archaeological journals, were also destroyed by the looters or were
incomplete thanks to conditions in Baghdad after the Gulf War of 1991. One
of the best records, however partial, of its holdings is the catalog of
items the museum lent in 1988 to an exhibition held in Japan's ancient
capital of Nara entitled Silk Road Civilizations. But, as one museum
official said to John Burns of the New York Times after the looting, "All
gone, all gone. All gone in two days."[8]
A single, beautifully illustrated, indispensable book edited by Milbry Polk
and Angela M.H. Schuster, The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost
Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), represents
the heartbreaking attempt of over a dozen archaeological specialists on
ancient Iraq to specify what was in the museum before the catastrophe, where
those objects had been excavated, and the condition of those few thousand
items that have been recovered. The editors and authors have dedicated a
portion of the royalties from this book to the Iraqi State Board of
Antiquities and Heritage.
At a conference on art crimes held in London a year after the disaster, the
British Museum's John Curtis reported that at least half of the forty most
important stolen objects had not been retrieved and that of some 15,000
items looted from the museum's showcases and storerooms about 8,000 had yet
to be traced. Its entire collection of 5,800 cylinder seals and clay
tablets, many containing cuneiform writing and other inscriptions some of
which go back to the earliest discoveries of writing itself, was stolen.[9]
Since then, as a result of an amnesty for looters, about 4,000 of the
artifacts have been recovered in Iraq, and over 1,000 have been confiscated
in the United States.[10] Curtis noted that random checks of Western
soldiers leaving Iraq had led to the discovery of several in illegal
possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the U.S. then found more.
Officials in Jordan have impounded about 2,000 pieces smuggled in from Iraq;
in France, 500 pieces; in Italy, 300; in Syria, 300; and in Switzerland,
250. Lesser numbers have been seized in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and
Turkey. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad.
The 616 pieces that form the famous collection of "Nimrud gold," excavated
by the Iraqis in the late 1980s from the tombs of the Assyrian queens at
Nimrud, a few miles southeast of Mosul, were saved, but only because the
museum had secretly moved them to the subterranean vaults of the Central
Bank of Iraq at the time of the first Gulf War. By the time the Americans
got around to protecting the bank in 2003, its building was a burnt-out
shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all
nine floors under it. Nonetheless, the underground compartments and their
contents survived undamaged. On July 3, 2003, a small portion of the Nimrud
holdings was put on display for a few hours, allowing a handful of Iraqi
officials to see them for the first time since 1990.[11]
The torching of books and manuscripts in the Library of Korans and the
National Library was in itself a historical disaster of the first order.
Most of the Ottoman imperial documents and the old royal archives concerning
the creation of Iraq were reduced to ashes. According to Humberto Mrquez,
the Venezuelan writer and author of Historia Universal de La Destruccin de
Los Libros (2004), about a million books and ten million documents were
destroyed by the fires of April 14, 2003.[12] Robert Fisk, the veteran
Middle East correspondent of the Independent of London, was in Baghdad the
day of the fires. He rushed to the offices of the U.S. Marines' Civil
Affairs Bureau and gave the officer on duty precise map locations for the
two archives and their names in Arabic and English, and pointed out that the
smoke could be seen from three miles away. The officer shouted to a
colleague, "This guy says some biblical library is on fire," but the
Americans did nothing to try to put out the flames.[13]
The Burger King of Ur
Given the black market value of ancient art objects, U.S. military leaders
had been warned that the looting of all thirteen national museums throughout
the country would be a particularly grave danger in the days after they
captured Baghdad and took control of Iraq. In the chaos that followed the
Gulf War of 1991, vandals had stolen about 4,000 objects from nine different
regional museums. In monetary terms, the illegal trade in antiquities is the
third most lucrative form of international trade globally, exceeded only by
drug smuggling and arms sales.[14] Given the richness of Iraq's past, there
are also over 10,000 significant archaeological sites scattered across the
country, only some 1,500 of which have been studied. Following the Gulf War,
a number of them were illegally excavated and their artifacts sold to
unscrupulous international collectors in Western countries and Japan. All
this was known to American commanders.
In January 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, an American delegation
of scholars, museum directors, art collectors, and antiquities dealers met
with officials at the Pentagon to discuss the forthcoming invasion. They
specifically warned that Baghdad's National Museum was the single most
important site in the country. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago's
Oriental Institute said, "I thought I was given assurances that sites and
museums would be protected."[15] Gibson went back to the Pentagon twice to
discuss the dangers, and he and his colleagues sent several e-mail reminders
to military officers in the weeks before the war began. However, a more
ominous indicator of things to come was reported in the April 14, 2003,
London Guardian: Rich American collectors with connections to the White
House were busy "persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects
Iraq's heritage by prevention of sales abroad." On January 24, 2003, some
sixty New York-based collectors and dealers organized themselves into a new
group called the American Council for Cultural Policy and met with Bush
administration and Pentagon officials to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq
should have relaxed antiquities laws.[16] Opening up private trade in Iraqi
artifacts, they suggested, would offer such items better security than they
could receive in Iraq.
The main international legal safeguard for historically and humanistically
important institutions and sites is the Hague Convention for the Protection
of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, signed on May 14, 1954.
The U.S. is not a party to that convention, primarily because, during the
Cold War, it feared that the treaty might restrict its freedom to engage in
nuclear war; but during the 1991 Gulf War the elder Bush's administration
accepted the convention's rules and abided by a "no-fire target list" of
places where valuable cultural items were known to exist.[17] UNESCO and
other guardians of cultural artifacts expected the younger Bush's
administration to follow the same procedures in the 2003 war.
Moreover, on March 26, 2003, the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), headed by Lt. Gen. (ret.) Jay Garner -- the
civil authority the U.S. had set up for the moment hostilities ceased --
sent to all senior U.S. commanders a list of sixteen institutions that
"merit securing as soon as possible to prevent further damage, destruction,
and/or pilferage of records and assets." The five-page memo dispatched two
weeks before the fall of Baghdad also said, "Coalition forces must secure
these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable
loss of cultural treasures" and that "looters should be arrested/detained."
First on Gen. Garner's list of places to protect was the Iraqi Central Bank,
which is now a ruin; second was the Museum of Antiquities. Sixteenth was the
Oil Ministry, the only place that U.S. forces occupying Baghdad actually
defended. Martin Sullivan, chair of the President's Advisory Committee on
Cultural Property for the previous eight years, and Gary Vikan, director of
the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and a member of the committee, both
resigned to protest the failure of CENTCOM to obey orders. Sullivan said it
was "inexcusable" that the museum should not have had the same priority as
the Oil Ministry.[18]
As we now know, the American forces made no effort to prevent the looting of
the great cultural institutions of Iraq, its soldiers simply watching
vandals enter and torch the buildings. Said Arjomand, an editor of the
journal Studies on Persianate Societies and a professor of sociology at the
State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote, "Our troops, who have
been proudly guarding the Oil Ministry, where no window is broken,
deliberately condoned these horrendous events."[19] American commanders
claim that, to the contrary, they were too busy fighting and had too few
troops to protect the museum and libraries. However, this seems to be an
unlikely explanation. During the battle for Baghdad, the U.S. military was
perfectly willing to dispatch some 2,000 troops to secure northern Iraq's
oilfields, and their record on antiquities did not improve when the fighting
subsided. At the 6,000-year-old Sumerian city of Ur with its massive
ziggurat, or stepped temple-tower (built in the period 2112 - 2095 B.C. and
restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century B.C.), the Marines
spray-painted their motto, "Semper Fi" (semper fidelis, always faithful)
onto its walls.[20] The military then made the monument "off limits" to
everyone in order to disguise the desecration that had occurred there,
including the looting by U.S. soldiers of clay bricks used in the
construction of the ancient buildings.
Until April 2003, the area around Ur, in the environs of Nasiriyah, was
remote and sacrosanct. However, the U.S. military chose the land immediately
adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base with two runways
measuring 12,000 and 9,700 feet respectively and four satellite camps. In
the process, military engineers moved more than 9,500 truckloads of dirt in
order to build 350,000 square feet of hangars and other facilities for
aircraft and Predator unmanned drones. They completely ruined the area, the
literal heartland of human civilization, for any further archaeological
research or future tourism. On October 24, 2003, according to the Global
Security Organization, the Army and Air Force built its own modern ziggurat.
It "opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility, co-located
with [a]Â…. Pizza Hut, provides another Burger King restaurant so that more
service men and women serving in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget
about the task at hand in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent
that takes them back home."[21]
The great British archaeologist, Sir Max Mallowan (husband of Agatha
Christie), who pioneered the excavations at Ur, Nineveh, and Nimrud, quotes
some classical advice that the Americans might have been wise to heed:
"There was danger in disturbing ancient monumentsÂ…. It was both wise and
historically important to reverence the legacies of ancient times. Ur was a
city infested with ghosts of the past and it was prudent to appease
them."[22]
The American record elsewhere in Iraq is no better. At Babylon, American and
Polish forces built a military depot, despite objections from
archaeologists. John Curtis, the British Museum's authority on Iraq's many
archaeological sites, reported on a visit in December 2004 that he saw
"cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks
forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate" and a "2,600-year-old brick
pavement crushed by military vehicles."[23] Other observers say that the
dust stirred up by U.S. helicopters has sandblasted the fragile brick faade
of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 B.C.[24]
The archaeologist Zainab Bahrani reports, "Between May and August 2004, the
wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both of the
sixth century B.C., collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters.
Nearby, heavy machines and vehicles stand parked on the remains of a Greek
theater from the era of Alexander of Macedon [Alexander the Great]."[25]
And none of this even begins to deal with the massive, ongoing looting of
historical sites across Iraq by freelance grave and antiquities robbers,
preparing to stock the living rooms of western collectors. The unceasing
chaos and lack of security brought to Iraq in the wake of our invasion have
meant that a future peaceful Iraq may hardly have a patrimony to display. It
is no small accomplishment of the Bush administration to have plunged the
cradle of the human past into the same sort of chaos and lack of security as
the Iraqi present. If amnesia is bliss, then the fate of Iraq's antiquities
represents a kind of modern paradise.
President Bush's supporters have talked endlessly about his global war on
terrorism as a "clash of civilizations." But the civilization we are in the
process of destroying in Iraq is part of our own heritage. It is also part
of the world's patrimony. Before our invasion of Afghanistan, we condemned
the Taliban for their dynamiting of the monumental third century A.D.
Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in March, 2001. Those were two gigantic statues
of remarkable historical value and the barbarism involved in their
destruction blazed in headlines and horrified commentaries in our country.
Today, our own government is guilty of far greater crimes when it comes to
the destruction of a whole universe of antiquity, and few here, when they
consider Iraqi attitudes toward the American occupation, even take that into
consideration. But what we do not care to remember, others may recall all
too well.
NOTES
[1.] American Embassy, London, " Visit of President Bush to Northern
Ireland, April 7-8, 2003."
[2.] William R. Polk, "Introduction," Milbry Polk and Angela M. H. Schuster,
eds., The Looting of the Iraq Museum: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), p. 5. Also see Suzanne Muchnic,
"Spotlight on Iraq's Plundered Past," Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2005.
[3.] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire
and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Owl Books, 1989,
2001), p. 450.
[4.] George Bush's address to the Iraqi people, broadcast on "Towards
Freedom TV," April 10, 2003.
[5.] Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology,
and Logistics, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic
Communication (Washington, D.C.: September 2004), pp. 39-40.
[6.] See Frank Rich, "And Now: 'Operation Iraqi Looting,'" New York Times,
April 27, 2003.
[7.] Robert Scheer, "It's U.S. Policy that's 'Untidy,'" Los Angeles Times,
April 15, 2003; reprinted in Books in Flames, Tomdispatch, April 15, 2003.
[8.] John F. Burns, "Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its Treasures," New
York Times, April 13, 2003; Piotr Michalowski (University of Michigan), The
Ransacking of the Baghdad Museum is a Disgrace, History News Network, April
14, 2003.
[9.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit, pp. 209-210.
[10.] Mark Wilkinson, Looting of Ancient Sites Threatens Iraqi Heritage,
Reuters, June 29, 2005.
[11.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit., pp. 23, 212-13; Louise Jury, "At Least
8,000 Treasures Looted from Iraq Museum Still Untraced," Independent, May
24, 2005; Stephen Fidler, "'The Looters Knew What They Wanted. It Looks Like
Vandalism, but Organized Crime May be Behind It,'" Financial Times, May 23,
2003; Rod Liddle, The Day of the Jackals, Spectator, April 19, 2003.
[12.] Humberto Mrquez, Iraq Invasion the 'Biggest Cultural Disaster Since
1258,' Antiwar.com, February 16, 2005.
[13.] Robert Fisk, "Library Books, Letters, and Priceless Documents are Set
Ablaze in Final Chapter of the Sacking of Baghdad," Independent, April 15,
2003.
[14.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 10.
[15.] Guy Gugliotta, "Pentagon Was Told of Risk to Museums; U.S. Urged to
Save Iraq's Historic Artifacts," Washington Post, April 14, 2003; McGuire
Gibson, "Cultural Tragedy In Iraq: A Report On the Looting of Museums,
Archives, and Sites," International Foundation for Art Research.
[16.] Rod Liddle, op. cit.; Oliver Burkeman, Ancient Archive Lost in Baghdad
Blaze, Guardian, April 15, 2003.
[17.] See James A. R. Nafziger, Art Loss in Iraq: Protection of Cultural
Heritage in Time of War and Its Aftermath, International Foundation for Art
Research.
[18.] Paul Martin, Ed Vulliamy, and Gaby Hinsliff, U.S. Army was Told to
Protect Looted Museum, Observer, April 20, 2003; Frank Rich, op. cit.; Paul
Martin, "Troops Were Told to Guard Treasures," Washington Times, April 20,
2003.
[19.] Said Arjomand, Under the Eyes of U.S. Forces and This Happened?,
History News Network, April 14, 2003.
[20.] Ed Vulliamy, Troops 'Vandalize' Ancient City of Ur, Observer, May 18,
2003; Paul Johnson, Art: A New History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp.
18, 35; Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 99, fig. 25.
[21.] Tallil Air Base, GlobalSecurity.org.
[22.] Max Mallowan, Mallowan's Memoirs (London: Collins, 1977), p. 61.
[23.] Rory McCarthy and Maev Kennedy, Babylon Wrecked by War, Guardian,
January 15, 2005.
[24.] Owen Bowcott, Archaeologists Fight to Save Iraqi Sites, Guardian, June
20, 2005.
[25.] Zainab Bahrani, "The Fall of Babylon," in Polk and Schuster, op. cit.,
p. 214.
Copyright 2005 & 2008 Chalmers Johnson
Chalmers Johnson's latest book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American
Republic, now available in a Holt Paperback. It is the third volume of his
Blowback Trilogy. This piece, originally posted on July 7, 2005, at
TomDispatch.com, has also been collected in The World According to
TomDispatch, America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008)
By Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com. Posted August 26, 2008.
Bush's supporters see the global war on terrorism as a "clash of
civilizations" -- yet the civilization we are destroying in Iraq is part of
our own.
On April 11, 12, 13, and 14, 2003, the United States Army and United States
Marine Corps disgraced themselves and the country they represent in Baghdad,
Iraq's capital city. Having invaded Iraq and accepted the status of a
military occupying power, they sat in their tanks and Humvees, watching as
unarmed civilians looted the Iraqi National Museum and burned down the Iraqi
National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans of the
Ministry of Religious Endowments. Their behavior was in violation of their
orders, international law, and the civilized values of the United States.
Far from apologizing for these atrocities or attempting to make amends, the
United States government has in the past five years added insult to injury.
Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense and the official responsible for
the actions of the troops, repeatedly attempted to trivialize what had
occurred with inane public statements like "democracy is messy" and "stuff
happens."
On December 2, 2004, President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, to General Tommy Franks, the
overall military commander in Iraq at that time, for his meritorious service
to the country. (He gave the same award to L. Paul Bremer III, the highest
ranking civilian official in Iraq, and to George Tenet, director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, which had provided false information about
Saddam Hussein and Iraq to Congress and the people.)
In the five years since the initial looting and pillaging of the Iraqi
capital, thieves have stolen at least 32,000 items from some 12,000
archaeological sites across Iraq with no interference whatsoever from the
occupying power. No funds have been appropriated by the American or Iraqi
governments to protect the most valuable and vulnerable historical sites on
Earth, even though experience has shown that just a daily helicopter
overflight usually scares off looters. In 2006, the World Monuments Fund
took the unprecedented step of putting the entire country of Iraq on its
list of the most endangered sites. All of this occurred on George W. Bush's
watch and impugned any moral authority he might have claimed.
The United States government seems never to have understood that, when it
began the occupation of Iraq on March 19, 2003, it became legally
responsible for what happened to the country's cultural inheritance. After
all, the only legal justification for its presence in Iraq is U.N. Security
Council Resolution 1483 of May 22, 2003. Both the United States and the
United Kingdom voted for this resolution in which they formally acknowledged
their status and obligations as occupying powers in Iraq. Among those
obligations, specified in the Preamble to the resolution, was: "The need for
respect for the archaeological, historical, cultural, and religious heritage
of Iraq, and for the continued protection of archaeological, historical,
cultural, and religious sites, museums, libraries, and monuments." Every
politically sentient observer on Earth is aware of the Bush administration's
contempt for international law and its routine scofflaw behavior since it
came to power, but this clause remains an ironclad obligation that will
stand up in an international or a domestic U.S. court. On this issue, the
United States is an outlaw, waiting to be brought to justice.
In 1258 AD the Mongols descended on Baghdad and pillaged its magnificent
libraries. A well-known adage states that the Tigris River ran black from
the ink of the countless texts the Mongols trashed, while the streets ran
red with the blood of the city's slaughtered inhabitants. The world has
never forgotten that medieval act of barbarism, just as it will never forget
what the U.S. military unleashed on the defenseless city in 2003 and in
subsequent years. There is simply no excuse for what has happened in Baghdad
at the hands of the Americans. Chalmers Johnson, August, 2008
The Smash of Civilizations
By Chalmers Johnson
In the months before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and his
senior officials spoke of preserving Iraq's "patrimony" for the Iraqi
people. At a time when talking about Iraqi oil was taboo, what he meant by
patrimony was exactly that -- Iraqi oil. In their "joint statement on Iraq's
future" of April 8, 2003, George Bush and Tony Blair declared, "We reaffirm
our commitment to protect Iraq's natural resources, as the patrimony of the
people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit."[1] In this
they were true to their word. Among the few places American soldiers
actually did guard during and in the wake of their invasion were oil fields
and the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. But the real Iraqi patrimony, that
invaluable human inheritance of thousands of years, was another matter. At a
time when American pundits were warning of a future "clash of
civilizations," our occupation forces were letting perhaps the greatest of
all human patrimonies be looted and smashed.
There have been many dispiriting sights on TV since George Bush launched his
ill-starred war on Iraq -- the pictures from Abu Ghraib, Fallujah laid
waste, American soldiers kicking down the doors of private homes and
pointing assault rifles at women and children. But few have reverberated
historically like the looting of Baghdad's museum -- or been forgotten more
quickly in this country.
Teaching the Iraqis about the Untidiness of History
In archaeological circles, Iraq is known as "the cradle of civilization,"
with a record of culture going back more than 7,000 years. William R. Polk,
the founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of
Chicago, says, "It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that
life as we know it today began: there people first began to speculate on
philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made
ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and, above all developed the skill of
writing."[2] No other places in the Bible except for Israel have more
history and prophecy associated with them than Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer),
and Mesopotamia -- different names for the territory that the British around
the time of World War I began to call "Iraq," using the old Arab term for
the lands of the former Turkish enclave of Mesopotamia (in Greek: "between
the [Tigris and Euphrates] rivers").[3] Most of the early books of Genesis
are set in Iraq (see, for instance, Genesis 10:10, 11:31; also Daniel 1-4;
II Kings 24).
The best-known of the civilizations that make up Iraq's cultural heritage
are the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians,
Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sassanids, and Muslims. On April 10, 2003, in a
television address, President Bush acknowledged that the Iraqi people are
"the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity."[4.]
Only two days later, under the complacent eyes of the U.S. Army, the Iraqis
would begin to lose that heritage in a swirl of looting and burning.
In September 2004, in one of the few self-critical reports to come out of
Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, the Defense Science Board Task
Force on Strategic Communication wrote: "The larger goals of U.S. strategy
depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the
radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only
failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what
they intended."[5] Nowhere was this failure more apparent than in the
indifference -- even the glee -- shown by Rumsfeld and his generals toward
the looting on April 11 and 12, 2003, of the National Museum in Baghdad and
the burning on April 14, 2003, of the National Library and Archives as well
as the Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowments. These
events were, according to Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist,
"the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years." Eleanor Robson of
All Souls College, Oxford, said, "You'd have to go back centuries, to the
Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale."[6] Yet
Secretary Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game
and shrugged it off with the comment that "Freedom's untidy. . . . Free
people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes."[7]
The Baghdad archaeological museum has long been regarded as perhaps the
richest of all such institutions in the Middle East. It is difficult to say
with precision what was lost there in those catastrophic April days in 2003
because up-to-date inventories of its holdings, many never even described in
archaeological journals, were also destroyed by the looters or were
incomplete thanks to conditions in Baghdad after the Gulf War of 1991. One
of the best records, however partial, of its holdings is the catalog of
items the museum lent in 1988 to an exhibition held in Japan's ancient
capital of Nara entitled Silk Road Civilizations. But, as one museum
official said to John Burns of the New York Times after the looting, "All
gone, all gone. All gone in two days."[8]
A single, beautifully illustrated, indispensable book edited by Milbry Polk
and Angela M.H. Schuster, The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost
Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), represents
the heartbreaking attempt of over a dozen archaeological specialists on
ancient Iraq to specify what was in the museum before the catastrophe, where
those objects had been excavated, and the condition of those few thousand
items that have been recovered. The editors and authors have dedicated a
portion of the royalties from this book to the Iraqi State Board of
Antiquities and Heritage.
At a conference on art crimes held in London a year after the disaster, the
British Museum's John Curtis reported that at least half of the forty most
important stolen objects had not been retrieved and that of some 15,000
items looted from the museum's showcases and storerooms about 8,000 had yet
to be traced. Its entire collection of 5,800 cylinder seals and clay
tablets, many containing cuneiform writing and other inscriptions some of
which go back to the earliest discoveries of writing itself, was stolen.[9]
Since then, as a result of an amnesty for looters, about 4,000 of the
artifacts have been recovered in Iraq, and over 1,000 have been confiscated
in the United States.[10] Curtis noted that random checks of Western
soldiers leaving Iraq had led to the discovery of several in illegal
possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the U.S. then found more.
Officials in Jordan have impounded about 2,000 pieces smuggled in from Iraq;
in France, 500 pieces; in Italy, 300; in Syria, 300; and in Switzerland,
250. Lesser numbers have been seized in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and
Turkey. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad.
The 616 pieces that form the famous collection of "Nimrud gold," excavated
by the Iraqis in the late 1980s from the tombs of the Assyrian queens at
Nimrud, a few miles southeast of Mosul, were saved, but only because the
museum had secretly moved them to the subterranean vaults of the Central
Bank of Iraq at the time of the first Gulf War. By the time the Americans
got around to protecting the bank in 2003, its building was a burnt-out
shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all
nine floors under it. Nonetheless, the underground compartments and their
contents survived undamaged. On July 3, 2003, a small portion of the Nimrud
holdings was put on display for a few hours, allowing a handful of Iraqi
officials to see them for the first time since 1990.[11]
The torching of books and manuscripts in the Library of Korans and the
National Library was in itself a historical disaster of the first order.
Most of the Ottoman imperial documents and the old royal archives concerning
the creation of Iraq were reduced to ashes. According to Humberto Mrquez,
the Venezuelan writer and author of Historia Universal de La Destruccin de
Los Libros (2004), about a million books and ten million documents were
destroyed by the fires of April 14, 2003.[12] Robert Fisk, the veteran
Middle East correspondent of the Independent of London, was in Baghdad the
day of the fires. He rushed to the offices of the U.S. Marines' Civil
Affairs Bureau and gave the officer on duty precise map locations for the
two archives and their names in Arabic and English, and pointed out that the
smoke could be seen from three miles away. The officer shouted to a
colleague, "This guy says some biblical library is on fire," but the
Americans did nothing to try to put out the flames.[13]
The Burger King of Ur
Given the black market value of ancient art objects, U.S. military leaders
had been warned that the looting of all thirteen national museums throughout
the country would be a particularly grave danger in the days after they
captured Baghdad and took control of Iraq. In the chaos that followed the
Gulf War of 1991, vandals had stolen about 4,000 objects from nine different
regional museums. In monetary terms, the illegal trade in antiquities is the
third most lucrative form of international trade globally, exceeded only by
drug smuggling and arms sales.[14] Given the richness of Iraq's past, there
are also over 10,000 significant archaeological sites scattered across the
country, only some 1,500 of which have been studied. Following the Gulf War,
a number of them were illegally excavated and their artifacts sold to
unscrupulous international collectors in Western countries and Japan. All
this was known to American commanders.
In January 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, an American delegation
of scholars, museum directors, art collectors, and antiquities dealers met
with officials at the Pentagon to discuss the forthcoming invasion. They
specifically warned that Baghdad's National Museum was the single most
important site in the country. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago's
Oriental Institute said, "I thought I was given assurances that sites and
museums would be protected."[15] Gibson went back to the Pentagon twice to
discuss the dangers, and he and his colleagues sent several e-mail reminders
to military officers in the weeks before the war began. However, a more
ominous indicator of things to come was reported in the April 14, 2003,
London Guardian: Rich American collectors with connections to the White
House were busy "persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects
Iraq's heritage by prevention of sales abroad." On January 24, 2003, some
sixty New York-based collectors and dealers organized themselves into a new
group called the American Council for Cultural Policy and met with Bush
administration and Pentagon officials to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq
should have relaxed antiquities laws.[16] Opening up private trade in Iraqi
artifacts, they suggested, would offer such items better security than they
could receive in Iraq.
The main international legal safeguard for historically and humanistically
important institutions and sites is the Hague Convention for the Protection
of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, signed on May 14, 1954.
The U.S. is not a party to that convention, primarily because, during the
Cold War, it feared that the treaty might restrict its freedom to engage in
nuclear war; but during the 1991 Gulf War the elder Bush's administration
accepted the convention's rules and abided by a "no-fire target list" of
places where valuable cultural items were known to exist.[17] UNESCO and
other guardians of cultural artifacts expected the younger Bush's
administration to follow the same procedures in the 2003 war.
Moreover, on March 26, 2003, the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), headed by Lt. Gen. (ret.) Jay Garner -- the
civil authority the U.S. had set up for the moment hostilities ceased --
sent to all senior U.S. commanders a list of sixteen institutions that
"merit securing as soon as possible to prevent further damage, destruction,
and/or pilferage of records and assets." The five-page memo dispatched two
weeks before the fall of Baghdad also said, "Coalition forces must secure
these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable
loss of cultural treasures" and that "looters should be arrested/detained."
First on Gen. Garner's list of places to protect was the Iraqi Central Bank,
which is now a ruin; second was the Museum of Antiquities. Sixteenth was the
Oil Ministry, the only place that U.S. forces occupying Baghdad actually
defended. Martin Sullivan, chair of the President's Advisory Committee on
Cultural Property for the previous eight years, and Gary Vikan, director of
the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and a member of the committee, both
resigned to protest the failure of CENTCOM to obey orders. Sullivan said it
was "inexcusable" that the museum should not have had the same priority as
the Oil Ministry.[18]
As we now know, the American forces made no effort to prevent the looting of
the great cultural institutions of Iraq, its soldiers simply watching
vandals enter and torch the buildings. Said Arjomand, an editor of the
journal Studies on Persianate Societies and a professor of sociology at the
State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote, "Our troops, who have
been proudly guarding the Oil Ministry, where no window is broken,
deliberately condoned these horrendous events."[19] American commanders
claim that, to the contrary, they were too busy fighting and had too few
troops to protect the museum and libraries. However, this seems to be an
unlikely explanation. During the battle for Baghdad, the U.S. military was
perfectly willing to dispatch some 2,000 troops to secure northern Iraq's
oilfields, and their record on antiquities did not improve when the fighting
subsided. At the 6,000-year-old Sumerian city of Ur with its massive
ziggurat, or stepped temple-tower (built in the period 2112 - 2095 B.C. and
restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century B.C.), the Marines
spray-painted their motto, "Semper Fi" (semper fidelis, always faithful)
onto its walls.[20] The military then made the monument "off limits" to
everyone in order to disguise the desecration that had occurred there,
including the looting by U.S. soldiers of clay bricks used in the
construction of the ancient buildings.
Until April 2003, the area around Ur, in the environs of Nasiriyah, was
remote and sacrosanct. However, the U.S. military chose the land immediately
adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base with two runways
measuring 12,000 and 9,700 feet respectively and four satellite camps. In
the process, military engineers moved more than 9,500 truckloads of dirt in
order to build 350,000 square feet of hangars and other facilities for
aircraft and Predator unmanned drones. They completely ruined the area, the
literal heartland of human civilization, for any further archaeological
research or future tourism. On October 24, 2003, according to the Global
Security Organization, the Army and Air Force built its own modern ziggurat.
It "opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility, co-located
with [a]Â…. Pizza Hut, provides another Burger King restaurant so that more
service men and women serving in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget
about the task at hand in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent
that takes them back home."[21]
The great British archaeologist, Sir Max Mallowan (husband of Agatha
Christie), who pioneered the excavations at Ur, Nineveh, and Nimrud, quotes
some classical advice that the Americans might have been wise to heed:
"There was danger in disturbing ancient monumentsÂ…. It was both wise and
historically important to reverence the legacies of ancient times. Ur was a
city infested with ghosts of the past and it was prudent to appease
them."[22]
The American record elsewhere in Iraq is no better. At Babylon, American and
Polish forces built a military depot, despite objections from
archaeologists. John Curtis, the British Museum's authority on Iraq's many
archaeological sites, reported on a visit in December 2004 that he saw
"cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks
forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate" and a "2,600-year-old brick
pavement crushed by military vehicles."[23] Other observers say that the
dust stirred up by U.S. helicopters has sandblasted the fragile brick faade
of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 B.C.[24]
The archaeologist Zainab Bahrani reports, "Between May and August 2004, the
wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both of the
sixth century B.C., collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters.
Nearby, heavy machines and vehicles stand parked on the remains of a Greek
theater from the era of Alexander of Macedon [Alexander the Great]."[25]
And none of this even begins to deal with the massive, ongoing looting of
historical sites across Iraq by freelance grave and antiquities robbers,
preparing to stock the living rooms of western collectors. The unceasing
chaos and lack of security brought to Iraq in the wake of our invasion have
meant that a future peaceful Iraq may hardly have a patrimony to display. It
is no small accomplishment of the Bush administration to have plunged the
cradle of the human past into the same sort of chaos and lack of security as
the Iraqi present. If amnesia is bliss, then the fate of Iraq's antiquities
represents a kind of modern paradise.
President Bush's supporters have talked endlessly about his global war on
terrorism as a "clash of civilizations." But the civilization we are in the
process of destroying in Iraq is part of our own heritage. It is also part
of the world's patrimony. Before our invasion of Afghanistan, we condemned
the Taliban for their dynamiting of the monumental third century A.D.
Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in March, 2001. Those were two gigantic statues
of remarkable historical value and the barbarism involved in their
destruction blazed in headlines and horrified commentaries in our country.
Today, our own government is guilty of far greater crimes when it comes to
the destruction of a whole universe of antiquity, and few here, when they
consider Iraqi attitudes toward the American occupation, even take that into
consideration. But what we do not care to remember, others may recall all
too well.
NOTES
[1.] American Embassy, London, " Visit of President Bush to Northern
Ireland, April 7-8, 2003."
[2.] William R. Polk, "Introduction," Milbry Polk and Angela M. H. Schuster,
eds., The Looting of the Iraq Museum: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), p. 5. Also see Suzanne Muchnic,
"Spotlight on Iraq's Plundered Past," Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2005.
[3.] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire
and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Owl Books, 1989,
2001), p. 450.
[4.] George Bush's address to the Iraqi people, broadcast on "Towards
Freedom TV," April 10, 2003.
[5.] Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology,
and Logistics, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic
Communication (Washington, D.C.: September 2004), pp. 39-40.
[6.] See Frank Rich, "And Now: 'Operation Iraqi Looting,'" New York Times,
April 27, 2003.
[7.] Robert Scheer, "It's U.S. Policy that's 'Untidy,'" Los Angeles Times,
April 15, 2003; reprinted in Books in Flames, Tomdispatch, April 15, 2003.
[8.] John F. Burns, "Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its Treasures," New
York Times, April 13, 2003; Piotr Michalowski (University of Michigan), The
Ransacking of the Baghdad Museum is a Disgrace, History News Network, April
14, 2003.
[9.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit, pp. 209-210.
[10.] Mark Wilkinson, Looting of Ancient Sites Threatens Iraqi Heritage,
Reuters, June 29, 2005.
[11.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit., pp. 23, 212-13; Louise Jury, "At Least
8,000 Treasures Looted from Iraq Museum Still Untraced," Independent, May
24, 2005; Stephen Fidler, "'The Looters Knew What They Wanted. It Looks Like
Vandalism, but Organized Crime May be Behind It,'" Financial Times, May 23,
2003; Rod Liddle, The Day of the Jackals, Spectator, April 19, 2003.
[12.] Humberto Mrquez, Iraq Invasion the 'Biggest Cultural Disaster Since
1258,' Antiwar.com, February 16, 2005.
[13.] Robert Fisk, "Library Books, Letters, and Priceless Documents are Set
Ablaze in Final Chapter of the Sacking of Baghdad," Independent, April 15,
2003.
[14.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 10.
[15.] Guy Gugliotta, "Pentagon Was Told of Risk to Museums; U.S. Urged to
Save Iraq's Historic Artifacts," Washington Post, April 14, 2003; McGuire
Gibson, "Cultural Tragedy In Iraq: A Report On the Looting of Museums,
Archives, and Sites," International Foundation for Art Research.
[16.] Rod Liddle, op. cit.; Oliver Burkeman, Ancient Archive Lost in Baghdad
Blaze, Guardian, April 15, 2003.
[17.] See James A. R. Nafziger, Art Loss in Iraq: Protection of Cultural
Heritage in Time of War and Its Aftermath, International Foundation for Art
Research.
[18.] Paul Martin, Ed Vulliamy, and Gaby Hinsliff, U.S. Army was Told to
Protect Looted Museum, Observer, April 20, 2003; Frank Rich, op. cit.; Paul
Martin, "Troops Were Told to Guard Treasures," Washington Times, April 20,
2003.
[19.] Said Arjomand, Under the Eyes of U.S. Forces and This Happened?,
History News Network, April 14, 2003.
[20.] Ed Vulliamy, Troops 'Vandalize' Ancient City of Ur, Observer, May 18,
2003; Paul Johnson, Art: A New History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp.
18, 35; Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 99, fig. 25.
[21.] Tallil Air Base, GlobalSecurity.org.
[22.] Max Mallowan, Mallowan's Memoirs (London: Collins, 1977), p. 61.
[23.] Rory McCarthy and Maev Kennedy, Babylon Wrecked by War, Guardian,
January 15, 2005.
[24.] Owen Bowcott, Archaeologists Fight to Save Iraqi Sites, Guardian, June
20, 2005.
[25.] Zainab Bahrani, "The Fall of Babylon," in Polk and Schuster, op. cit.,
p. 214.
Copyright 2005 & 2008 Chalmers Johnson
Chalmers Johnson's latest book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American
Republic, now available in a Holt Paperback. It is the third volume of his
Blowback Trilogy. This piece, originally posted on July 7, 2005, at
TomDispatch.com, has also been collected in The World According to
TomDispatch, America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008)