The Smash of Civilizations
By Chalmers Johnson
07/08/05 " "TomDispatch.com" - - 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 Márquez, the
Venezuelan writer and author of Historia Universal de La
Destrucción 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 façade 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 Márquez, 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).
