[Mb-civic] The Smash of Civilizations

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

TomDispatch.com - July 8, 2005
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=4710

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 Eurphrates]
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
Park 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 a thousand 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 Marquez, the Venezuelan writer and author of Historia Universal
de La Destruccisn 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] . . . 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 monuments. . . . 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 fagade 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 Marquez, 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.

[This essay is extracted from Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis: The Crisis of
the American Republic, forthcoming from Metropolitan Books in late 2006,
the final volume in the Blowback Trilogy. The first two volumes are
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000) and The
Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
(2004).]

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