I was a history major in college. I love the past. I find ancient cultures fascinating. I find artifacts of past civilizations treasures beyond value.
I mean, just walk around with me at the British Museum. It’s a combination of a kid in a candy store and a pilgrim reaching Rome. Giddy reverence is the best way I can describe it.
Which is why the looting at the National Museum in Iraq is like a gut punch. To read the papers, at least, it ranks right up there with the burning of the Library of Alexandria. How could that happen? What went wrong? Where were the Marines?
As you might guess, I’m not going to downplay the destruction, the cultural loss, not just to Iraq but to the world. But …
… I’m not going to turn around and blame the US military either.
I mean, yeah, it would have been nice to have been able to guard every museum, every hospital, every UN office building in Baghdad. But, um, there’s a war on. People still shooting. Pockets of resistance and snipers and guys strapping on vests full of explosives and ball bearings and driving to checkpoints. To my mind, that rightly took priority over even something like this.
(Cynical side note. I suspect that if the US had flooded Iraq with enough troops to guard every street corner, we would be hearing louder howls of protest over a Military Police State is Being Imposed. I suspect if the US had protected the museum, it would have faced accusations of Cutting Off the Iraqis from Their Cultural Heritage, and Why Aren’t They Protecting Hospitals Instead? And if they had acted with force to stop looters, we would be hearing stories about Massacres of Starving Iraqi Citizenry. But I digress.)
I also note that it wasn’t the Marines doing the looting. It wasn’t the Army, or the Air Force, or a madcap contingent of British troops up from the south.
It was Iraqis.
He said many of the looters appeared to be from the impoverished districts of the city where anger at Mr. Hussein ran at its strongest, but that others were middle-class people who appeared to know exactly what they were looking for.
“Did some of them know the value of what they took?” he said. “Absolutely, they did. They knew what the most valued pieces in our collection were.”
Looters, by and large, are scum. Frankly, if I’d been there with a machine gun, I’d have been still pulling the trigger when the magazine was empty.
And then I’d have been hauled up on war crimes charges myself.
Under the Geneva Conventions, the Coalition troops do have a responsibility to maintain civil order in areas that they’ve occupied. But in mid-war, that’s neither easy nor instantaneous. To consider this all the fault of the Americans is to invest in the cult of victimhood. The poor Iraqis couldn’t help it! They were angry/greedy/brainwashed into disregarding the value of human life and culture by the wicked Saddam regime! US troops should have stopped them. Thus, it’s all the US troops’ fault.
Mr. Muhammad, the archaeologist, directed much of his anger at President Bush. “A country’s identity, its value and civilization resides in its history,” he said. “If a country’s civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation. If we had stayed under the rule of Saddam Hussein, it would have been much better.”
The looting appeared to have its heaviest impact on a security guard at the museum, Abdul Rahman, 57, who said he had tried to stop the first band of looters breaking through to steel gates at the rear of the compound on Thursday morning. He said he gave up when the looters started firing in the air with pistols and rifles. “They were shouting, `There’s no government, there’s no state, and we will do what we like. We will take anything we want.’ They said `Open up, open up, there’s no more Saddam so we can do what we like.’ ”
And, as Andrea notes, what were the curators doing for the last few months? Polishing their glass cases? War’s a-coming, folks. Bombs a-droppin, too. Were they just crossing their fingers that an errant shell or PGM wouldn’t come a tumblin’ in?
Or was there anything left there?
A full accounting of what has been lost may take weeks or months. The museum had been closed during much of the 1990’s, and like many Iraqi institutions, its operations were cloaked in secrecy under Mr. Hussein.
So what officials told journalists today may have to be adjusted as a fuller picture comes to light. It remains unclear whether some of the museum’s priceless gold, silver and copper antiquities, some of its ancient stone and ceramics, and perhaps some of its fabled bronzes and gold-overlaid ivory, had been locked away for safekeeping elsewhere before the looting, or seized for private display in one of Mr. Hussein’s myriad palaces.
Regardless of what happened to some of the more valuable (or gaudier) items, this is still doubtless a tragedy (I think of looters in the Brit, and shudder). And, in hindsight, I might have wanted a more concerted effort to stop this sort of looting, though not at the expense of the actual military operation.
But ultimately, the responsibility for what happened at the museum is not on the shoulders of the US military. It’s on the shoulders of those looters — or, if you really want to absolve them of responsibility, then on the repressive regime whose fall was like a cork popping out of a bottle.
Well, except the NYT article that said that the Ministry of Oil has been protected by U.S. troops from any looters…
Exactly. Plus, some US troops stood outside, with a tank, and did nothing.
The fact that the war, itself, is a crime, seems to be missing. If not for the war, thousands of years of history wouldn’t be gone.
Yes, Saddam was bad — no one denies that, but the level of death and destruction of things like the museum wouldn’t have happened if the war hadn’t happened.
One of these days I’ll post my thoughts on what could have worked, short of war.
Not that I haven’t already, mind you. The rush to war was unnecessary. We are at least partly responsible. Arguing otherwise just doesn’t cut it.
And the level of death and destruction *before* the war, brought about by Saddam Hussein himself, could all have been prevented had Saddam’s mother had access to adequate birth control.
And the level of death and destruction before *that* could have all been prevented by the invasion of the planet Earth by peace-loving mutant space monkeys from the planet Xenon.
I swear I don’t even understand the language these people speak anymore.
Stan, I don’t see any reference to the Ministry of Oil in the NYT story.
Scott, the story says that:
Mr. Muhammad said he found an American Abrams tank in Museum Square, about 300 yards away, and that five marines had followed him back into the museum and opened fire above the looters’ heads. This drove several thousand of the marauders out of the museum complex in minutes, he said, but when the tank crewmen left about 30 minutes later, the looters returned.
That’s not quite “outside” (especially since we’re talking about a “several acres of museum grounds”). It’s unclear from the story what the tank was doing at its assigned position, or why the crew left after 30 minutes.
Of course, the destruction of museums takes place when we don’t go to war, either.
From the NYT article
“Abdul Malik, a 36-year-old antiques merchant who is cousin of the dead brothers, drew murmurs of assent from the crowd when he said that America had come to Iraq not to liberate Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, but for oil.
“The cause is not Saddam, the cause is oil,” he said. To press home his point, he contended that American troops who have taken control of much of the city have made no attempt to protect any government building from looters except the Ministry of Oil. “They won’t let the looters go anywhere near it.”
Only a few miles away, looters clambering over the rubble of the Sajida Palace, named for Saddam Hussein’s wife, met every Western reporter who passed them with handshakes, claps on the back, and shouts of `America good!” “Bush good!” and “Down Saddam.”
Death and destruction of things? It’s great to do the post-war what would have worked because we’ll never know. Nothing worked for 12 years, and how many Iraqis died in that time and would have continued to be tortured and killed by Hussein while we tweaked the sanctions and inspections?
Sekimore, I’m with you, I don’t understand this language or thought that blames everyone but the people responsible, that holds U.S. policy to an unreachable standard.
Right now those Buddest artifacts are hot sellers in the trinket world. Both from items currently being smuggled out of out of Afghanistan and from items from Japan (smuggled out during the soviet occupation) being sold off to raise needed cold hard cash.
Art usually suffers first and hardest in a time when there is a political/religious shift.
A good deal of those items should be showing up on Ebay with in the month.
You’re right, Dave. The looters are responsible for their own actions. But “the repressive regime” didn’t cause the looting either.
Ah. A different NYT article.
Digging around, it looks like the Army is securing the intelligence ministry, power plants and utilities, and the Ministry of Oil.
Much has been made of the latter, mostly of the “it’s all about oil” type of thing. And it does kind of look bad, at least at first blush.
On the other hand, much of Iraq’s future does depend on oil — both short-term as far of the Oil for Food program, and longer-term. Not that museums, or other ministries, or hospitals aren’t important, but in terms of strategically valuable records for the Iraqi people, and a future Iraqi regime, it’s hard to argue that the MoO isn’timportant.
Adam, I agree. I was using that as hyperbole for those folks who want to find someone to blame other than the Iraqis who are doing the looting.
I agree with Sekimori — I am having trouble understanding certain people too. And it looks as if they are having trouble understanding us — for instance, Scott seems to have skipped the part where Dave pointed out that US troops would really have gotten flack if they had “done anything” to stop the looters. (Just how long do you suppose “firing over their heads” but not into them would have worked? And it was only one tank crew of what, five guys, against a mob? And like it or not, they were not there at the behest of the museum guy, and they were not under his orders.) And he also seemed to have missed the part where Dave repeated my question about just what were the museum directors doing all the months preceding the war, not to mention days — and the fact that this may have been an insider operation, at least in part. So it’s a lot more complicated than “it’s all America’s fault!” Besides, we know that Hussein and his cronies have been looting “the treasures of civilization” for months and years. People are acting as if the artifacts had been safe in the museum before all of this. Shyeah, right. God only knows what has already vanished from Iraq in order to pay for his weapons- and palace-buildings. We sure know he didn’t use any precious antiquities to decorate his love shack.
The Times article quote the curator as saying there were “thousands” of looter that fled (temporarily) when a tank came by for a short time and some soldiers fired in the air. I agree it’s unlikely that on an acres-wide site, one tank and a couple of soldiers would have held order long against thousands of looters.
There was reference in a couple of the articles to artifacts being in storage in “bank-like vaults” below the museum — presumably to protect against theft or against bombing. Either these guys were armed with more than guns and rocks, or else they forced people to open those vaults (not mentioned), or else the vaults were empty.
I think this is another story where the dust needs to settle some. I do think that, regardless of the pillaging that the Hussein regime may have done, there was probably a tragic amount of loss at the museum. But, again, the primarily responsibility is on the Iraqis doing it, not on the troops that were assigned elsewhere.
Last night on the Local news (Denver 4 KCNC). They had a story about several people that managed to kill themselves blowing a hole into a bank vault (a little to much explosive in a small tunnel). So I would guess that the Iraqi general public have access to all sorts of things other then guns right now.
From the WaPo:
Sensing its treasures could be in peril, museum curators secretly removed antiquities from their display cases before the war and placed them into storage vaults – but to no avail. The doors of the vaults were opened or smashed, and everything was taken, museum workers said. That lead one museum employee to suspect that others familiar with the museum may have participated in the theft.
“The fact that the vaults were opened suggests that employees of the museum may have been involved,” said the employee, who declined to be identified. “To ordinarily people, these are just stones. Only the educated know the value of these pieces.”
I dunno. We’ll have to see.
And Today the Libraries (the 1800 hour report). Even though the conservative types seem to hate Fisk his article on the subject is worth reading.
Also this is a good article on the subject.
I’ve not been particularly pleased with Rumsfeld’s responses on this. Powell, at least, seems to be taking things more seriously (or diplomatically).
On the other hand, this response is just goofy. I will be charitable and chalk it up to grief, or the same myopic nostalgia you find among Russian Stalinists.
Raid Abdel–rida Mohammed, an archaelogist, said: “They just came in and occupied the country and they didn’t know what they were doing. We‘d have been better off keeping Saddam Hussein – at least people were scared of him.
“People would never have done this when he was in power. I’m saying this before God and history. After this you might as well shoot me.”
And Saddam would have. But the US Army won’t.
“Better living through terror.”
Well, yes…
A tyranny is always “safer” and with a lesser degree of crime than a free and open society.
And sometimes the trains run on schedule, too. Or else the engineers get shot.