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I was in the kitchen, sitting at my computer, when I suddenly burst into tears and covered my face with my hands.
“What is it?” Patrick asked from the front room.
I said, “I’m so ashamed—this shouldn’t hit me harder than hearing about people—but—”
“I know exactly which news story you’re looking at,” he said.
Looters have stolen almost everything from the National Museum of Iraq, one of the world’s great museums of antiquities. It’s the national museum of Mesopotamia, for god’s sake:
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 12 — The National Museum of Iraq recorded a history of civilizations that began to flourish in the fertile plains of Mesopotamia more than 7,000 years ago. But once American troops entered Baghdad in sufficient force to topple Saddam Hussein’s government this week, it took only 48 hours for the museum to be destroyed, with at least 170,000 artifacts carried away by looters.The full extent of the disaster that befell the museum only came to light today, after three days of frenzied looting that swept much of the capital.
As fires in a dozen government ministries and agencies began to burn out, and as some of the looters tired of pillaging in the 90-degree heat of the Iraqi spring, museum officials reached the hotels where foreign journalists were staying along the eastern bank of the Tigris River. They brought word of what is likely to be reckoned as one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history.
Why mince words? Call it one of the greatest cultural disasters, period. We and all the generations to come have suffered a terrible loss, and we’ll never get it back. We’re all poorer. You can cap a burning oil well. This is irreparable.
A full accounting of what has been lost may take weeks or months. … What was beyond contest today was that the 28 galleries of the museum and vaults with huge steel doors guarding storage chambers that descend floor after floor into darkness had been completely ransacked.Officials with crumpled spirits fought back tears and anger at American troops, as they ran down an inventory of the most storied items that they said had been carried away by the thousands of looters who poured into the museum after daybreak on Thursday and remained until dusk on Friday, with only one intervention by American troops, lasting about half an hour, at lunchtime on Thursday.
We knew this was going on, but we did nothing. Why? because we don’t have enough troops. There may be enough of them to deal with the fighting in Baghdad and beyond. There aren’t enough of them to maintain civic order.
This is Rumsfeld’s fault, him and Richard Perle and all the others—including Mr. Bush, on whose watch it happened—who repeatedly overruled our own military planners, and insisted on cutting troop allotments to a fraction of what was needed. Rumsfeld didn’t go to war with a serious heart. He went into it looking to buy a reelection campaign on the cheap.
This is the real failure to support our troops. Rumsfeld’s left them in dire straits. Our guys are stretched way too thin, and they’re not in control of the situation. This is why little 19-year-old supply clerks are getting shot to pieces. It’s why our soldiers are having to use inappropriate munitions, and in moments of stress and uncertainty are shooting at civilians. It’s why we can’t spare the manpower to preserve hospitals and museums from looters.
Nothing remained, museum officials said, at least nothing of real value, from a museum that had been regarded by archaeologists and other specialists as perhaps the richest of all such institutions in the Middle East.As examples of what was gone, the officials cited a solid gold harp from the Sumerian era, which began about 3360 B.C. and started to crumble about 2000 B.C. Another item on their list of looted antiquities was a sculptured head of a woman from Uruk, one of the great Sumerian cities, from about the same era, and a collection of gold necklaces, bracelets and earrings, also from the Sumerian dynasties and also at least 4,000 years old.
Old gold is terribly vulnerable. It’s easily identified as long as it stays in its original form. Melt it down, and who’s to say what it used to be or who owned it? It’s yours now.
But an item-by-item inventory of the most valued pieces carried away by the looters hardly seemed to capture the magnitude of what had occurred. More powerful, in its way, was the action of one museum official in hurrying away through the piles of smashed ceramics and torn books and burned-out torches of rags soaked in gasoline that littered the museum’s corridors to find the glossy catalog of an exhibition of “Silk Road Civilizations” that was held in Japan’s ancient capital of Nara in 1988.Turning to 50 pages of items lent by the Iraqi museum for the exhibition, he said that none of the antiquities pictured remained after the looting. They included ancient stone carvings of bulls and kings and princesses; copper shoes and cuneiform tablets; tapestry fragments and ivory figurines of goddesses and women and Nubian porters; friezes of soldiers and ancient seals and tablets on geometry; and ceramic jars and urns and bowls, all at least 2,000 years old, some more than 5,000.
“All gone, all gone,” he said. “All gone in two days.”
An Iraqi archaeologist who has participated in the excavation of some of the country’s 10,000 sites, Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammad, said he had gone into the street in the Karkh district, a short distance from the eastern bank of the Tigris, about 1 p.m. on Thursday to find American troops to quell the looting. By that time, he and other museum officials said, the several acres of museum grounds were overrun…
Muhammad spoke with deep bitterness toward the Americans, as have many Iraqis who have watched looting that began with attacks on government agencies and the palaces and villas of Mr. Hussein, his family and his inner circle broaden into a tidal wave that targeted just about every government institution, even ministries dealing with issues like higher education, trade and agriculture, and hospitals.
American troops have intervened only sporadically, as they did on Friday to halt a crowd of men and boys who were raiding an armory at the edge of the Republican Palace presidential compound and taking brand-new Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons.
I’m sure it breaks our commanders’ hearts that they can’t defend the hospitals and museums and the general civic order. It wouldn’t have taken a lot of men and firepower to keep the museum and the main hospital from being stripped. But they don’t have even that much margin. They can’t afford to pay attention to anything but the fight.
American commanders have said they lack the troops to curb the looting while their focus remains on the battles across Baghdad that are necessary to mop up pockets of resistance from paramilitary troops loyal to Mr. Hussein.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.’ “
Mr. Rahman said he returned to his room and remained there for two days, hiding and heartbroken.
What can any of us say that would console Mr. Muhammed and Mr. Rahman?
And one more thing: Anyone who thinks we’re in control of Baghdad is kidding himself. People who think civil order is going to be reinstated anytime soon don’t loot hospitals. They don’t announce that there’s no government and no state. The American press may be next to useless, but when the guys who are there on the ground think it’s a good idea to lay their hands on hospital supplies now, you’ve got to figure they know something.
"Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, dismissed the chaos as a 'transitional phase, born of 93pent-up frustration94 after 24 years of oppression. He accused newspapers of exaggerating the unrest and said television stations were showing the same footage over and over again 'of some person walking out of a building with a vase.'"
Atrios has a good comment on this, too.
May he live so long that he sees all that he loved as dust and ashes, gauds in the hands of strangers, dross under the feet of armies, trophies of the uncaring; that long, and no longer, before he goes into the dark and leaves not fame nor line nor name behind.
When another conqueror, long ago, burnt the great library of Alexandria, that all within it be lost to the knowledge of men, there is this much that can be said for it, that it was done by choice, after deliberation, as a thing of policy.
Such blind indifferent heedless destruction; oh, may he labour long beside the Styx, so long that he might of his own hands and labour make every brick that ever was in Babylon, once and twice and nine times over.
The gold lost is painful, but it's gold. It's valued because it's gold, it's shiny, it doesn't corrode. It's a loss, but a minor one.
The texts? The cuniform? The history lost here?
What a loss.
"History lost . . ."
. . . mention this to the blinkered ideologues who brought this about, and the arrogant blowhards who support them, and they'll point to a picture of Saddam's statue being pulled down and say something smug and self-righteous about the freedom of a people being more important.
This is a good time to slug them.
How, O how could I keep silent, how, O how could I keep quiet? My friend whom I love has turned to clay: Enkidu my friend whom I love has turned to clay. Am I not like him? Must I lie down too, never to rise, ever again?
Come Nineveh, come Tyre. With any luck some of this will surface on the art market in years to come. But no doubt a great deal of it is lost for good. Bastards.
I heard Rumsfeld on the radio on Friday talking about the rioting. He sounded...peevish. He said that the press only looked at the bad things. Give him a camera and he could show you pictures as bad in any large city in the states. (May I pause here for a moment, and say that if such were true, it would not be a thing to dismiss as inconsequential?) He said that violence happens during riots, and that we should not misuderstand, the United States was in control of Baghdad.
I hadn't heard about the museum, then.
I hate Rumsfeld. I hate him more than I hate Bush. This is his brainchild, his baby, his passion. We _knew_, we discussed in detail the fact that the US was going to have to take over the role of government for a time. Why weren't we prepared? When we saw what was happening in Basra, why didn't we wait a little and rethink our approach to Baghdad? How could people who believe so fundamentally in the depravity of man be so unprepared for a completely predictable consequence of invasion? Idiots! Fools! Vandals! Bastards!
It has always seemed eerie to me to make war on the city of sultans and strange perfumes, beautiful women and cruel cailiffs, magical beasts and evil djinn. Baghdad is a place of fountains and dreams and... It seemed that no one in the news media or the administration ever realised that the war was, in part, against one of the great myths and legends of the world. One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. "It hath reached me, O auspicious king..."
I'm on Ashleigh Brilliant's email list. (He makes his living by publishing 17 word epigrams.) Today, I got this one:
Today's news about the plundering of the Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad should not, I suppose be any more sickening than any of the other reports currently coming out of that country -- but somehow to me it is -- particularly in view of the fact that, while this Museum was apparently left unprotected from local mobs by the nvading forces, a careful guard has (so I understand) been maintained around the headquarters of the Oil Ministry.
Coincidentally, a small but very fine museum here in Santa Barbara called the Karpeles Manuscript Library currently has on display a remarkable artifact from ancient Iraq, which I have just been looking at. It is a clay cone, dating from 2404 B.C., with little lines and symbols baked onto it in the form of writing called cuneiform. Many thousands of such documents survive from the ancient world. But what makes this one remarkable (according to the English text in the display -- I don't have even a smattering of cuneiform) is something that also makes it chillingly ironic today. This little piece of clay is an announcement of the World's First Known Peace Treaty.
How could people who believe so fundamentally in the depravity of man be so unprepared for a completely predictable consequence of invasion? Idiots! Fools! Vandals! Bastards!
I'm sorry Lydy, but you know, if it even occurred them ahead of time, they'd just shrug their shoulders. They don't care. It isn't wealth or even something which could be turned into wealth, not wealth as they understand it. And so they just don't care. I'm with Graydon: may they live long enough to see what they do care about turn to ashes and dust. We must must must throw these bastards out of power in the upcoming election. We must take away their power; shut off the spigot of money flowing to them.
What I'd really like to do is flay them, alive, with a dull knife sprinkling salt and vinegar as I go, but I'm a (mostly) civilized person. So I will channel that fury and revulsion into making Never Again come true.
MKK
It gets worse. The museum at Mosul has also been hit:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/04/12/mosul_falls/index.html
That's Mosul, as in "Nineveh."
I also read in another article that rare manuscripts had been stolen from the University of Basra too.
Hopefully some will surface on the black market, but that jewelry....
I know part of what was in that collection. Those were the jewels from Pu-abi's tomb, from the deathpits of Ur. The oldest known jewelry in the world.
Not all of it, thankfully--it was split up, part going to the University of Philadelphia, part to the British Museum--but the best of the collection would have remained in Iraq.
Bastards. Too cheap, stupid and evil to guard a museum. And Rumsfeld calls it "untidiness."
PNH: Regarding your Rumsfeld quote, I found some better comments on it on HNN.
About the whole situation, I know exactly how you feel. Each new story about the museum looting/destruction kicks me in the gut.
Making matters worse, a recent Guardian article written before these stories came out says: "Apparent lobbying by American art dealers to dismantle Iraq's strict export laws has heightened fears about the looting of the country's antiquities as order breaks down in the last stages of the war."
In other words, our government had advance warning that this might occur! And the notion that our government might look the other way to the advantage of profiteers and the detriment of the world seems all too believable, sadly.
I feel sick. Let's share some more cute squirrel stories or something...
A thousand years from now, this will be remembered. How could we even begin to explain this to Rumsfeld; as if your Liberty Bell, your Constitution, God knows what else were lost. Not even. Things ten times older than America in shards, scattered. What will be his sound bite for history? How will this be remembered...The Nazis stealing art, hell, Napoleon's idiotes shooting the nose off the Sphinx, that at least was comprehensible, but this...I cannot begin to wrap my mind around this. And us all "chicken littles", are we? You smug, arrogant fool, Rumsfeld. Bad enough that you might yet get us all killed, but these should have outlived your new and frightening American century and whatever myriad perversions you would warp America into. Long after the last star fell from the Stars and Stripes, these should have endured.
I am sure you will die peacefully in your sleep, Rumsfeld, dreaming the peaceful dreams of Stalin and all those other zealots who remained convinced of their rightness and infallibility until their last breath. When Kissenger passes on, will he be troubled by the thought that he brought the Khmer Rouge to power? No, of course not.
Tell your children and your grandchildren about what has happened here. Tell them to tell their children and their grandchildren. Let this story never be forgotten, and let the names of those responsible be spat with the venom of centuries.
"General Eric Shinseki, the Chief of Staff of the Army declared that, 'something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably a figure that would be required,' to garrison Iraq after the war was ended. Both Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz responded by attacking General Shinseki and stating that his estimates 'were wildly off the mark.'"
"He [Rumsfeld] was looking at the [Army] Chief [Gen. Eric Shinseki] and waving his hand, saying, 'Are you getting this yet? Are you getting this yet?'"
This is what happens when illiterate thugs take over. I like Graydon's curse, though I can't participate. I will gloat at any bad thing that happens to him, though. For example, if he were to lose the ability to move, speak, see, or hear, but have an intact mind trapped inside, I would hope that he would live a hundred more years in that state.
Those who devote themselves to ignorance should be served with ignorance.
To them it's just, well, why should anyone care about that fag shit?
The callousness and vulgarity of Rumsfeld's comments confirm the worst suspicions. This is from The Guardian:
On one of the bleakest days since the invasion began, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday shrugged off turmoil and looting in Iraq as signs of the people's freedom."It's untidy, and freedom's untidy," he said, jabbing his hand in the air. "Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things."
Mr Rumsfeld insisted that words such as anarchy and lawlessness were unrepresentative of the situation in Iraq and "absolutely" ill-chosen.
"I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it," he said. "I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny - 'The sky is falling'. I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or 10 headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot - one thing after another. It's just unbelievable ..."
In an extraordinary performance reminiscent of the Iraqi information minister who assured the world that all was well even as battles raged visibly around him, Mr Rumsfeld quipped:
"The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?'"
It is worse than killing people, and you are right to grieve more.
When you kill a person, you snuff out the whole universe that is in their head, who they are, what they know, and all the potential of what they could be and do. But they will, eventually, die anyway: everyone dies. You've killed them and made that happen sooner. It's a terrible thing, but it's within the way things happen.
When you destroy history like that, you destroy something that should never had died. You destroy what a multiplicity of people, dead already, have left behind them, what they have cared to preserve, our remembrance of them, of our ancestor cultures. You destroy cultural context and continuity of place, and something that belongs to all humanity and to all our descendants. You take context and meaning away from our ancestors and you take it entirely out of human history. It's gone. Some of it may be recovered, but if you break a five thousand year old cuneiform tablet it's broken. It could have lasted forever. It could have gone on touring exhibitions to the stars.
"Cursing is the puffery of the weak", as Marge Piercy puts it. And they won't care what we think of them. They will laugh that we think this an unforgiveable barbarism. But what can we do?
It makes me feel like Gildas, despairing that we have come to the end of our civilization in our lifetime, and being reduced to calling on tyrants to repent.
And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.
Babylon is suddenly fallen and destroyed: howl for her; take balm for her pain, if so be she may be healed.
And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.
And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.
Erik said The gold lost is painful, but it's gold. It's valued because it's gold, it's shiny, it doesn't corrode. It's a loss, but a minor one.
The texts? The cuniform? The history lost here?
What a loss.
I respectfully submit that you're mistaken, Erik.
The gold is equivalent to the paper, the clay. The artifact made of gold is the craftmanship, the culture...someone thousands of years ago made that thing that endured.
I cry just as hard for the gold as for the clay and stone. Because the value to human knowledge was not in the cost of the raw materials.
Bush has been calling such wanton destruction "high sprits."
Stealing Saddam's horses is one thing. Pilaging his palace is certainly acceptable too. But to not try to save the hospitals, museums and libraries is hideously short-sighted. In short, a typical behavior of our current administration.
Sure, they might not have enough troops to really keep the peace in Iraq, but to completely ignore places like hospitals and libraries...gaak...
The identification of the Rowena's art, though, was the best laugh I've had in a while!
Seven billion dollars to cap nonexistent well fires.
Not a penny for the cradle of civilization.
Jesus wept.
Destroying a museum isn't worse than killing a person--there's no museum that I would save instead of a baby--but I understand the sentiment. In this case, it was hardly as if anyone had to choose between a human's life and a culture's. I read--I think in one of the online Arab papers--that the US did secure one building, the Ministry of Oil. Now, I have no idea if there's even such a thing as a Ministry of Oil. But I do know that when you send in troops and you have maps of the place you're sending them, you decide what you're going to secure. The notion that you don't secure the cultural history of the world is-- I want to say "ludicrous," I want to say "tragic," I want to just walk away shaking my head.
Will
I dislike Mr. Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld, et al. as much as any here. And it's already clear they arrogantly risked American and Iraqi lives, as well as what Rumsfeld dismisses as Iraqi "vases," by leaving military police and sufficient reserves out of the force component to make political points.
But come on: almost 20 posts and not one word of rebuke for the Iraqi people who did the actual looting? As if they were all children or savages who didn't know any better? Let's acknowledge that, out of a city of 4.8 million, at least a few thousand are thugs and barbarians who have committed a great crime against history and civilization -- not taking a human life, but taking away some of our shared humanity.
(A faint hope: that a few of those looters were actually art-lovers or museum employees, wrapping a precious cuneiform in their shirts to hide under the bed for awhile until the madness returns to normal levels. I'd love to hear about some real heroes rising from this invasion.)
This said, let's return to our regular program, adding these new counts to lengthy charges of criminal negligence against our Frat Boy King and his court.
And on another angle: was going to bring up the parallel with Alexandria, but Graydon beat me to it.
However, it's worth pursuing even further. Look at the eerie echo of Teresa's point about not bringing enough troops, from a site at http://home.hio.no/~tord/20blog/alex01.htm
"[T]here was a fire -- and it did destroy large parts of the collection. But the person behind the fire was Julius Ce6sar, the year was 48 BC, and the damage was probably not intended.
"In 48 BC, Egypt had been a client kingdom under Rome for several generations. In Alexandria, two late Ptolemies, a brother and a sister, were fighting each other. The brother was Ptolemy XIII. The sister was Cleopatra VII (2). Ce6sar intervened in the quarrel.
"In this power struggle, Ce6sar supported Cleopatra. But Ce6sar had only brought a small force to Alexandria: 3200 foot soldiers and 800 cavalry. For several months he was surrounded in the royal palace by the much larger army of Ptolemy XIII -- about 20000 men. At one point -- we do not know the details -- he used fire as a defence. And the library was badly damaged.
"This fire was, in any case, not the end of the library. It was still active 150 years later."
All I can think, Teresa and friends, is that folly has many fathers. And great great great grandfathers ...
I'm going to notify the people I work with at the visual resources dept. here (the slide library) and see if we have images of these things, or can get images of them, before they are entirely lost to time and memory.
I was in sixth grade when I first learned about Mesopotamia, and I remember thinking that it would have been really neat to live there.
I am sure you will die peacefully in your sleep, Rumsfeld, dreaming the peaceful dreams of Stalin and all those other zealots who remained convinced of their rightness and infallibility until their last breath.
I understand Stalin died thrashing, unable to call for help, alone in his room, because everyone was too afraid of him to burst in when they heard what turned out to be his death agony.
Sic Semper Tyrannis!
Bob, the library was burned later, systematically and deliberately, by a Moslem general whose recorded reasoning was "If it's in the Qur'an, it's redundant; if not, it's blasphemous." This is not in the usual character of the Islamic world, I'm told...it's not a coincidence that words like algebra, alchemy, alcohol, and alkaline are all from Arabic roots, not to mention al oud, both the word (which became a lute in English) and the object (which became the guitar in Spain).
That particular guy, though? Like others here, I wish I believed in Hell because of guys like him.
Bob --
Y'know, technically, if you punch me in the nose, I'm supposed to un-ass the area and make a complaint to a peace officer, rather than slugging you myself.
I don't think anyone would think too highly of the need to note that I really ought ot have un-assed, etc., rather than slugging you in that circumstance, and in this circumstance, yup, the Iraqis engaged in looting ought not to have done so.
O'course, we saw clear statements that one fo the reasons for the whole war was to rescue them from a tyranny so terrible that it has dissolved the bonds of civil society, and so on, and so forth; either that was yet another line of bullshit, or the current US government had a responsibility to plan for the entirely predictable consequences of removing that regieme.
The knowledge of peace is shrinking; that is not, in any way at all, a good thing.
The growth of ignorance is the constriction of hope.
Anyone, anywhere, who is for that increase in ignorance is the enemy, part of the precipitate, however you want to put it. Time to stop being wishy-washy about this, I think.
This is horrible. A terrible, terrible tragedy in the classic sense, brought upon humanity by some within their ranks having the audacity to crush history and science under their barbarian heels.
There are organizations that try to take as detailed a record of artifacts and pieces of art as possible -- the same thing Cassandra was saying above, only on a larger/systematic scale. When we've all taken a few deep breaths and had some time to get over it, those groups could be good people to support with spare pennies.
I know, I know, there's never a shortage of good people to support with spare pennies. But if you think of how hard this is hitting you, and if you think of how little you trust governments (and, heck, natural disaster) not to let it happen again...wouldn't it be nice to do what you can to keep other stuff like this around in some form?
Regarding the contention that coalition forces guarded the oil ministry only: via Max Sawicky, we see this Washington Post story that says they guarded the ministries of oil, irrigation, and the interior.
But come on: almost 20 posts and not one word of rebuke for the Iraqi people who did the actual looting?
My thoughts exactly, although it doesn't absolve Bush, Rumsfeld and Company.
I'm reminded of people ridiculing Dan Quayle's comments on the riots in L.A.: "Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame." Even a blind pig sometimes finds an acorn.
Actually, I just had a slightly optimistic thought on all this:
Thanks goodness for the British Museum
They probably have lots of stuff from the "bad old days" of imperialist countries raiding "the colonies."
I remember seeing many interesting cunieform tablets there.
Cassandra, if a site with some of that information on what was lost, especially if there are images, is put up, please, please, make it known. It was my first thought. Well, after incoherent grief and
Well.
And Trinker, thank you for saying, about the gold. Yes. What you said. Exactly. And those gold artifacts carry so much information about what was valued, what was sacred, what was beautiful, how people worked their most precious materials into lasting expressions of what was important to them.
The learning is worth innumerable times the value of the gold itself. It's not like these were lumps or bricks. They were communications, if you will. What messages about your heart, your spirit, your society, would you entrust to a metal that is incorruptible by rust and time?
And Bob, I make no assumptions about who did what looting, and I excuse no one. It's just that I grieve the loss of our common heritage, when the leaders who allegedly represent me and work for me could have done something about it, and instead they spit on the photos of the comfortably far-off wreckage and call it nothing. I am ashamed for the way the leaders of my country are acting, and I cannot expunge the stain on my honor by looking for somebody else to point fingers at real quick. Please do not mistake this for excusing someone else's crimes. It's just that I have my hands full being outraged and griefstricken about the ones done with my money and in my name, and those are the ones I have to see to first, before I can hold my head up and point fingers at anyone else.
That's how my father, a staunch Republican, raised me. It rather shocks me that his views would be apparently considered out of step with his party just now. Perhaps I should call and discuss this with him. I suspect it might be a fascinating conversation. He will certainly mourn for all the Biblical-related history lost, at the very least, too.
Just talked with Juan, who told me that he heard an interview on the Beeb with an expert from Chicago on Mesopotamian culture. Juan said the expert claimed to have been talking with the Pentagon about this danger since January.
Since
January.
My God.
What's the point of stating the obvious? It's hardly like the thought didn't occur to me, but come on. Wishing them suffering seems a little bit redundant, don't you think? I suspect that most of those who did this are far more likely to suffer or have suffered some kind of consequence (one way or another) for their actions than Rumsfeld and his ilk.
If the sheriff stands aside and lets the lynch mob come and hang the innocent man, yes, the mob are criminals. But how much worse the failure of the man who could have stopped them and didn't?
Elise, a March article in the Philadelphia Inquirer talks about some of the pre-war efforts to save the antiquities.
I just noticed this warning before the war, not only talking about the risks of bomb damage, but saying "the situation after the war will be even more dangerous if the Museum is not managed properly"
They knew. They were warned. They stood by and did nothing.
I feel ill.
If our government was run by decent human beings, its immediate reaction would have been to offer massive, no-strings-attached cash awards to anyone returning stolen artifacts. But, of course, that's a pipe dream. Still, why aren't there private philanthropists doing that very thing right now?
Two quick responses to responses to my post (hey cool, we've got a real dialog going):
Xopher, nice point about Stalin's uneasy sleep ... But that story about the Moslem general's burning the Alexandrian library has been debunked regularly since the 1700s, by worthies from Edward Gibbon to everybody's current favorite Western scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis. Google around: there's some fog of history about the destruction, certainly, but the Caliph Umar story looks by far the LEAST likely to have any credibility. Julius Caesar smells awfully guilty, and is right on Teresa's original point. Sound familiar: an invading Western general for whom destroying the library was an untidy (read: criminally careless) bit of collateral damage? Lewis has a capsule history of the subject in a 1990 letter to the New York Review of Books: www.nybooks.com/articles/3517
Graydon, I stand by the feeling that, on seeing rioters gutting a museum, my first thought is, "Damn those rioters." My second, certainly closely allied thought is, "Where are the damned police?" You agree that "the Iraqis engaged in looting ought not to have done so." Would you be satisfied merely murmuring "the Administration engaged in permitting looting ought not to have done so"? Thought not; me neither. I say, let's hope without the faintest trace of "wishy-washiness": Damn both sets of yahoos with all the curses you put so beautifully in your original post, brother.
Bob, the New York Times reports that when an archaeologist arrived and discovered looting, he sought out troops and police to protect the museum. They scared off some of the looters, but then left, despite repeated requests to stay. Within a half-hour of the troops leaving, the looters were back.
And, looking through Google News, I'm finding numerous articles over the last month with warnings about the risk of looting after the war. Besides the example of what happened after the last Gulf War, the DoD & Pentagon were notified, a House Resolution was filed in Congress, scholars signed public declarations...
They received every form of warning short of somebody painting himself purple and dancing naked on a harpsicord pointing and singing "they're going to loot the museums!"
Xopher, well pointed out about Stalin. I guess dying of old age isn't all that peaceful sometimes. Yet it still seems better than he deserved.
I understand your deep sense of grief at the loss to mankind. I suspect some of your tears, like mine, are about the human tragedy that is taking place before us. In the end (no matter how valuable to mankind) it was just stuff. There is reason to morn its passing, but there is another emotion to feel as well, compassion.
Rather than follow the first rush of anger, have compassion for the sad fools that perpetrated this deed: the thoughtless that attacked what really was not a symbol of Saddam, but became one in the moment; the greedy organized thieves, that have no clue, or just don't care of what the destruction meant, in the end it is their loss as well; and have compassion for the morons that organized this entire mess. "... forgive them because they know not what they do".
Our leaders obviously have no clue. They are highly educated and extremely ignorant. Maybe in the next election we will have better luck.
What sad circumstances led those people to do what they did? Perhaps we will never know because there will never be that much pain in our lives. And that is something to be greatful for.
Compassion and gratitude are worth more than any objects ever can be. Just a thought. Respectfully yours, rob.
Robert Fisk points out that under the rules of the Geneva Convention, we are responsible for controlling the situation, including stopping the pillaging:
Even as tape of the pillage in Basra was being beamed around the world, there was Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Blackman of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards cheerfully telling the BBC that "it' s absolutely not my business to get in the way." But of course it is Colonel Blackman's business to "get in the way". Pillage merits a specific prevention clause in the Geneva Conventions, just as it did in the 1907 Hague Convention upon which the Geneva delegates based their "rules of war". "Pillage is prohibited," the 1949 Geneva Conventions say, and Colonel Blackman and Mr Hoon should glance at Crimes of War, published in conjunction with the City University Journalism Department 96 page 276 is the most dramatic 96 to understand what this means. When an occupying power takes over another country' s territory, it automatically becomes responsible for the protection of its civilians, their property and institutions. Thus the American troops in Nasiriyah became automatically responsible for the driver who was murdered for his car in the first day of that city's "liberation". The Americans in Baghdad were responsible for the German and Slovak embassies that were looted by hundreds of Iraqis on Thursday, and for the French Cultural Center, which was attacked, and for the Central Bank of Iraq, which was torched yesterday afternoon.
But the British and Americans have simply discarded this notion, based though it is upon conventions and international law. And we journalists have allowed them to do so. We clapped our hands like children when the Americans "assisted" the Iraqis in bringing down the statue of Saddam Hussein in front of the television cameras this week, and yet we went on talking about the "liberation" of Baghdad as if the majority of civilians there were garlanding the soldiers with flowers instead of queuing with anxiety at checkpoints and watching the looting of their capital.
"If I can't have her, no one can" is a sadly common cause of murders here in the US and elsewhere. "If I'm going down, I'm going down in a big way" also not an unknown thought process seen with individuals or criminal groups.
Why, then, did Rumsfield dismiss- or not even think about- that some looting was sabotage? When you can set your old office on fire, burning up incriminating documents, and the US just dismisses it with a "don't worry, must be drunk with the first taste of freedom"- that's clever. If you tried to blow up a hospital or power plant- if you're caught you'd be tried as a war criminal. If instead you loot, or instigate looting, so that the building is unusable- again, Rumsfield forgives you.
And if you've snatched, smashed and burned the photo album of 250 generations of humanity? Someone put Rumsfield on the organ transplant list- he is obviously missing his heart.
Does anyone remember Kitty Genovese? She was repeatedly stabbed in front of her apartment building while her neighbors looked on. No one called the police. Her attacker _came back_ and stabbed her again, and still no one rendered her assistance, or called the police.
Who killed Kitty Genovese? Her murderer, the guy with the knife.
Who should be tried, convicted, and put in prison? Same guy. (Actually, he got the death penalty, come to think of it.)
Are the 38 people who did nothing entirely innocent? What do you call their role? If nothing else, isn't it a sin of omission?
Who looted the museums? A number of Iraqis, all men as far as I know, and all unidentified, as far as I know. Some of them were almost certainly Baathists, or other adherents of Saddam Hussein. Some of them were guys that got caught up in the frenzy. Some were people who'd been poor so long that any chance to get something was too tempting to pass up. How do we judge them? Individually.
However, that said, the grief here isn't a matter making moral judgments. It's grief over real losses, things that will never be seen again, priceless artifacts of our personal history. The anger against Rumsfeld isn't an attempt to blame him for other people's actions, but to blame him for his own. He didn't do anything. Doing nothing can be doing something, and in this case, it was.
As a couple of final awful notes--and I feel like crying, though I'm not:
Oh, god. I have stuff due on Monday. How can I work?
More than once in my life, I've grieved for the Library at Alexandria.
I cried too Theresa, I just took 100 6th graders to our local art museum last week. It was so inspiring and reaafirming to hear them discuss which of the "ten cultural universals" a given artifact represented, how interesting it all was to them, and new. We had several conversations earlier in the semester about Iraq and Mesopotamia, contrasting the popular beliefs about the modern middle east with the knowledge that writing, the wheel for goodness sake, were invented there. Gone, all gone. How can I face them on Monday and tell them about it? There is a video on art restoration that I show my kids each semester, during the video a small sculpture being cleaned is cracked, eventually destroyed. Every semester as I watch the sculpture crumble I cry. Every time. To image so much of early art and culture melted down...
What Lydia said, times two!
The Independent and The Observer both cover this story in depth. I'm sure you can find the web sites. My reaction was the same as Teresa's: somehow this got to me even where the story of the little boy who lost his arms did not. This was not just about cultural relics older than America as someone says above: this was about the *oldest civilisations we have*. I wept too, or as near as you could on a packed plane from Oslo.
Anyway the Indy says the museum people consulted with the Pentagon back in Jan and had the museum (s) in question put on military databases specifically so they wouldn't be bombed - and had the most valuable items moved off public view to vaults. But the mob tore down the security in their way and mostly smashed rather than looted (the reports I read spoke mostly of text and pottery, not gold). I think what we are seeing is simple anger: not sense, not even poverty, just "we have lived in fear and now we can do ANYTHING". And this will not be popular, but I do not blame the looters for that, or not very much. I blame Saddam's regime, yes, but I also blame our own complicity in 10 years of sanctions which did their best to impoverish this country. And our own folly in being interested only in securing the gold that is oil, not (as is said evocatively above) "fag stuff" like the oldest relics of human city culture we have. How could they not have predicted this mob rule would break out once Saddam had gone? How can one not assume the callous decision was made that once the PR winning of the war had been accomplished, the actual welfare of Baghdad and its cultural artifacts and hospitals mattered not a damn? Stupidity or conspiracy? A wonderful choice.
Anyway.
Lilian
And now our unelected president and his cronies are turning their gimle eyes towards Iran, Syria, and . . .
I have sent one letter already about impeachment. I think it's time to send another.
Jane
WRKO, Boston's right-wing talk radio station, was raving about how "nobody cares" that the museum had been destroyed and that the New York Times was unpatriotic, despicable - Oh, God, I don't have the words - because the destruction was the front page story rather that the return of Jessica Lynch. They went on about "Jessica's" treatment by the Iraqis - the 18 year old virginal blonde in the hands of those evil greasy wogs - and it was clear that they got aroused by the thought of her being raped.
Meanwhile, Bush threatened Syria again, because they supposedly have chemical weapons. How many weeks will it be?
It took a six year war of the entire world against Germany plus years of reconstruction before the poison was drained out of that society. Is that what we need here?
And where are those defenders of Western culture, Lynne Cheney and William Bennett, now?
rob,
You do not understand my "deep sense of grief at the loss to mankind." You dismiss it in one sentence, going on to bemoan lives lost, and then into platitudes of love and compassion.
Love and compassion do not keep people from doing something ever again, and are not why the bumper stickers on my car read KEEP THE BOOKS--BURN THE CENSORS and THEY GOT THE LIBRARY AT ALEXANDRIA--THEY'RE NOT GETTING MINE.
I am not going to forgive Rumsfeld. I'm going to curse him the same as I curse Herostratus for burning the Temple of Diana at Epheseus, Caesar for the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, and the Vatican for the burning of the great libraries of the Aztecs.
Actually, I take that back: I'm going to curse Rumsfeld and the Vatican more than I curse Herostratus and Caesar, because the first two are still around and it may still do some good. "Good" here meaning concrete benefit for this and future generations in the form of preserved wisdom and knowledge, not airy-fairy nonsense about thinking nice thoughts about bad people because thinking nice thoughts will save the world. Tinkerbelle is dead, and if she'd been a real fairy, she would have chosen Option C: Feed the poison to Captain Hook.
Yes, of course, I'm all for saving the people, but this wasn't a case of save-the-people-or-save-the-museum. It was tear-down-the-ugly-statue-for-a-photo-op-or-save-the-museum.
Rumsfeld also made tearing down the statue a higher priority than guarding the hospitals, come to think of it, and that's equally unforgivable. Even if the photo op was necessary for PR purposes, a single mortar round at Saddam's crotch would have taken the statue down and made for just as good of a picture, and you could have left the populace to beat his head with their slippers while you guarded the hospital or museum.
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The looting of the museum was completely predictable--completely predicted--and nothing was done to stop it.
I don't see anyone here claiming that it would be better to have let some, many, all humans die to protect the museum, or that the deaths of humans are unimportant. I see people decrying the short-sighted and arrogant monsters who knew this crime would occur as a result of their actions and failed to take steps to prevent it.
The people who robbed the museum are criminals, and if they are found, they should be punished. The people who saw to it that there could be no police to stop the robbery are also criminals; they should be punished.
I have been in a state of shock and fury all day about this, trying not to let the full magnitude of the loss in past my defenses. When I came here and read this thread, I couldn't deny it any more. I broke down and sobbed. Mesopotamia. Nineveh.
How could they not have planned for this? Shallow, shallow men. Petty, spiteful, greedy, blind, selfish. I cannot curse them as they should be cursed, though Graydon came near.
There will be no impeachment. Don't hope for it; it won't happen, not the way your system is set up. These execrable men, who let this occur, will keep unchecked power until January 2005. Please don't let them keep it after that.
"Sekimori" writes:
"Perhaps you nice folks can take a moment or two to explain this your reasoning to me...the looting of a museum by a people who've been repressed, starved, tortured and murdered for the past several decades is somehow worse than the killing of same people?"
You appear to have posted to the wrong weblog. There doesn't appear to be anyone here who's asserted that "the looting of a museum by a people who've been repressed, starved, tortured and murdered for the past several decades is somehow worse than the killing of same people."
Perhaps you have some kind of technical problem. I'd look into it if I were you.
My practical and realizable curse: May the members of the current administration be forced to finance their retirements giving speeches over rubber-chicken Rotary Club dinners.
Sekimori, do you have a stopwatch? Hit the "start" button now and keep reloading the comments thread.
I feel the loss of antiquities, too, but I have trouble believing a lot of the comments here.
"...they'll point to a picture of Saddam's statue being pulled down and say something smug and self-righteous about the freedom of a people being more important."
It's not? Stop and think about it -- you prefer the museum collection's integrity to the lives an freedom of Iraqis?
"In this case, it was hardly as if anyone had to choose between a human's life and a culture's."
That's precisely the choice they'd have to make. There's real, honest-to-goodness, life-and-death fighting still going on in Baghdad. The sooner that ends, the sooner people will stop dying. Human lives are more important that museums.
"This is horrible. A terrible, terrible tragedy in the classic sense, brought upon humanity by some within their ranks having the audacity to crush history and science under their barbarian heels."
Crush history and science? Science? Deep breaths, please. Also, I suspect you're accusing the Bush administration, here, but reread what you wrote -- doesn't it apply much more aptly to the looters?
"And if you've snatched, smashed and burned the photo album of 250 generations of humanity?"
Again, who did the snatching, smashing, and burning? Don't infantilize the Iraqi looters.
"It took a six year war of the entire world against Germany plus years of reconstruction before the poison was drained out of that society. Is that what we need here?"
I had to read this twice before I figured out you were comparing the US to Germany, and not Iraq (or perhaps Syria, given the context). I have trouble expressing how wrong-headed that is. Oppression is real, not just a rhetorical pose, in those countries.
"I don't see anyone here claiming that it would be better to have let some, many, all humans die to protect the museum, or that the deaths of humans are unimportant."
As best I can tell, that's exactly what people here are saying. The troops should have stayed at the museum and protected it, rather than rooting out the pockets of resistance, remember? Not that that would have quieted the criticisms here -- then you'd be accusing the Bush administration of looting the antiquities like the conquering army you *insist* it must be. Wouldn't you? Be honest with yourselves.
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Be honest with myself? Why not. Sure.
Park a tank on the steps of the museum. Station soldiers around it as guards. Take the embedded reporter and put him with a couple guards inside the museum and keep a 24/7 CNN/Fox/MSNBC feed going while he interviews the currators, talking about how they're keeping the world's cultural treasures safe from the chaos outside. The live news feed would be pretty good proof that the Bush administration isn't looting any of the treasures. So, for that matter, would the currators giving a tour of the museum after the war and showing that the entire catalog of materials was there.
Rooting out resistance in the rest of the city? So some holdouts wait in a house for a couple extra days waiting for US tanks to finally show up. It's not like Saddam's troops were shooting at the regular citizens.
"Comrade Ogilvy"'s declared email address is "iprefer@anonymity.com". Quite the profile in courage, there.
That said, I'm comfortable with what I've said. Despite the impression you might get from the hysterics of certain right-wing cheerleaders, I supported the invasion of Afghanistan. I'm not a pacifist. And I don't think US power is inherently evil. So you can put that set of Tinkertoy assertions into your hat.
The point is that, first, coalition forces weren't just forced into an uncomfortable choice between saving lives and stopping looting. Encouraging looting was a deliberate policy. Note where that report comes from: the conservative, Murdoch-owned, pro-war London Times.
Second, as noted above, war planners had plenty of warning that the museum might be looted.
Third, if you think this sort of thing is good for the long-term prospects of the US in the Middle East, you're nuts. I don't know about you, but as a patriotic American, I want the US to do well in the world. You may feel differently. Indeed, evidently you do.
Fourth, if this war hadn't been undermanned and fought on the cheap, we could probably have saved lives and protected infrastructure at the same time.
Anyway, I suspect you know all this already, and that the main point is to try to make me waste time refuting your shit. Nice try.
"I don't see anyone here claiming that it would be better to have let some, many, all humans die to protect the museum, or that the deaths of humans are unimportant."
As best I can tell, that's exactly what people here are saying. The troops should have stayed at the museum and protected it, rather than rooting out the pockets of resistance, remember? Not that that would have quieted the criticisms here -- then you'd be accusing the Bush administration of looting the antiquities like the conquering army you *insist* it must be. Wouldn't you? Be honest with yourselves.
No, lad, we're saying that the culpable negligence and poor planning of Rumsfeld et al. put too few troops into theatre to both fight a war and protect the citizens/infrastructure/culture.
We're saying that Rumsfeld and his cronies were warned, repeatedly, by many folks including by his own generals, and he decided to do it his way, with the utterly predictable results that we've seen.
Some people might even say that this war, at this time, was unnecessary. That's a different argument for a different time.
Who knows what people's motives are?
What I can tell you is that Rumsfeld and his pals knew, or should have known, that five thousand years of art was in danger of being destroyed, and decided not to send enough troops to make sure it didn't happen. That the complete civilian infrastructure was in danger of being destroyed, and didn't send enough troops to stop it. Intent is the difference between manslaughter and murder, but the victim is just as dead.
Patrick, I don't think it's really that complicated. Comrade Ogilvy is a wuss, that's all.
It's not that I don't appreciate your excellent rebuttals. Do please continue. The arguments are interesting where he is not. But I truly believe that his advent here can be summarized thus:
Ogilvy: I am a wuss.Populace: You are a wuss.
Ogilvy: You weren't supposed to think that.
First of all, this event was tragic and U.S. forces should have intervened. With that said, Iraqi civilians should have intervened as well. This is from the NYtimes article(the curator speaking):
I asked them to bring their tank inside the museum grounds," he said. "But they refused and left. About half an hour later, the looters were back, and they threatened to kill me, or to tell the Americans that I am a spy for Saddam Hussein's intelligence, so that the Americans would kill me. So I was frightened, and I went home."
The guy ran off. The place is a war zone. There are undoubtedly weapons all over the place there. If the curator knew what was going to happen to his museum, why didn't he organize some people to protect it? Did he expect the U.S. to protect it immediately? Why should he have thought that? Did we tell him we would?
Again, we should have helped out here, and I am embarrassed that we didn't. But I don't believe that the Iraqi people are completely helpless. This guy, as soon as the looting began, should have rounded up some people, himself included, to go and defend his museum.
KC, if you read the paragraph above what you quoted, notice it said "the several acres of museum grounds were overrun by thousands of men, women and children, many of them armed with rifles, pistols, axes, knives and clubs, as well as pieces of metal torn from the suspensions of wrecked cars."
How many volunteer civilians will it take to hold off such a mob? How much more impressive is a tank and some uniformed members of the organized military at keeping the peace?
The Christian Science Monitor mentions somebody at the museum when the mob arrived:
"I took my white underpants off and put them on a stick and ran up the street to the US Marines," says archaeologist Mohsin Kadun. "I asked them - no, begged them - to help me preserve our treasures, but they would not drive down the street."
Museum workers had taken precautions, moving artifacts into vaults that were supposed to be secure. And the first day of looting, those were still safe. But requested protection still didn't show, and over the next days looters broke into those as well.
Priceless cultural artifacts vs. 24 million people freed from a generation of tyranny, oppression, and brutality. You're having a hard time convincing me the latter isn't vastly more important than the former.
Lis, I don't disagree with what you say, except that if this truly is one of the greatest museums in the world and a bastion of the region's culture, then I would expect that there would be a lot of people willing to protect it. All I am really saying is that I don't think that the archaeologist (I called him the curator earlier) did as much as he could have.
There are clearly not enough troops there to police everything. However, while we are there to help, the Iraqi people must realize that they must take action as well to restore order to their country. Also, I don't think that anyone realized how quickly Baghdad was falling. It was suppposed to be the last stand of the regime.
Fortunately, no one is trying to convince you of any such thing.
What did Teresa write? She wrote:
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What did you wrote? You wrote:
"Priceless cultural artifacts vs. 24 million people freed from a generation of tyranny, oppression, and brutality. You're having a hard time convincing me the latter isn't vastly more important than the former."
In other words, you're straight-out lying about what Teresa said. You should be more than ashamed; you should be embarrassed.
Consider this: U.S. Troops help to destroy statue. See the sequel.
I can't begin to get into the heads of the looters, but it seems that if an oppressed people rise up against the state, they might not be all that particular in choosing which part they take down. I'm sure that there were many motives behind the museum looting, and the mentality of the mob. I remember watching the L.A. riots after the Rodney King trial, speechless. Watching Reginald Denny beaten near to death and some kid crowing about it, uncomprehending. But those riots and looting had a different genesis then Iraq's. The behavior is the same and totally deplorable, and, yes, wrong, but the reasons behind it, why it happened, how it happened, those are vastly different.
Could the police have done much in L.A.? Maybe, maybe not. Could the U.S. military have done anything in Iraq? Yes. Why didn't they, then?
Because they do not have the manpower, the organization, or the plans. Ruthless dictators have a tendency to destroy power centers within their feifdom. The more ruthless, the more rivals are destroyed. When those dictators are violently removed, a power vacuum is created. Those culpable in that removal should be aware of these consequences, and in a supposedly law based society, should take actions in anticipation of a power shortage. Indeed, as others have noted, they would be legally bound to provide for the care and feeding of the civilian population, and the society as a whole.
Looting of hospitals, hospitals fer chrissakes, museums, government offices, should have been dealt with before it occured. How many top secret papers were destroyed in government offices, how many lists for score settling, for power fights were created on those days? And to think that the museum for the cradle of civilization has been ransacked for want of a platoon of troops and a tank or two, well that just boggles my mind.
For those who say that a life is more valuable than a piece of history, I point out the vast number of people killed over the Wailing Wall, the Dome of the Rock, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Life is a tapestry, full of many threads, from family, history, cultural values, likes, dislikes, icons, devils, shared experience, shared loves, friendships, good tastes, bad tastes. It is sometimes hard to place any particular thread over another, especially from person to person. Life just isn't that simple and "tidy."
Those that are culpable (I like that word, don't you?) are those that created this mess in the first place. And especially culpable are those who took actions to initiate this particular course of action. That would be bush and rummy and powell and cheney and perle and wolfowitz and rice and the rest of 'em.
We lost history this week, we lost some of our past. It's hard to quantify, or, better yet, put a dollar sign on it, but it is a loss, and one that will be remembered for quite some time. I just hope that those who created this situation will renumerate all those who feel this loss.
Damn them!
I realize that I am new here, and that no one knows me yet. I posted over on the saints discussion earlier today, responding to something Xtopher said. I'm a former ICU RN with a MSN in Community Health, but right now I'm going to Memphis College of Art, so I'm looking at this situation from two different angles:
On the one hand, the thought of losing irreplacable parts of the record of humanity to this kind of vandalism just crushes my heart. But on the other, we were losing actual *humans* to Hussein's vandalism.
I wish the Iraqi people had not done this to their museum. I don't understand why they did it, because it was their heritage, their culture. It was theirs to guard, to show the roots of their civilization. Why would the coalition troops need to protect something priceless to the people from the people it was priceless to?
I'm going to agree with my husband (and Robin) on this one: the past is very important, but the future is more important.
So what would everyone's response be if the headline had read "Coalition troops open fire on angry civilians" instead of "Looters raid museum"? I think that's the most likely result under the present circumstances, and, as much as I abhore the loss of real historical treasures such as these, I've got to thank the soldiers for not turning military weapons on an angry mob.
The thing about police is, when they say "stop or I'll shoot", sometimes they have to shoot. How many lives were these museums worth?
-j
I agree with Teresa that the immediate cause of the looting of the Museum is the shortage of troops, due to Rumsfeld's idiotic strategy.
I would say the problem with the Bushites is not simply criminal ignorance and indifference to history, but tunnel history, a focus on *their* warped view of history. I think the Bush admin may be ideologically biased against ancient Near Eastern civilizations and cultures that weren't Jewish. The Old Testament provides mainly a negative view of the non-Jewish Near Eastern peoples. The ancient Israelites viewed these others as idol worshippers and were defeated and oppressed by them (e.g. the Babylonian Captivity). The Bush administration contains and caters to Christian and Jewish fanatics (Bush himself is born-again).
Their focus on "democracy" and "human rights" (sickening in its ironies) also has a historical dimension: the ancient Mesopotamian kingdoms were not "democracies" (in contrast with classical Greece) and hence the Bushites could care less about them.
Food for thought: http://www.sfmuseum.net/1906.2/killproc.html
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I really really want to scream at some of you people. Listen here to what we are saying. THERE DIDN'T HAVE TO BE A CHOICE BETWEEN PEOPLE AND ARTIFACTS. Rumsfeld chose, for his own venial reasons, to understaff this this war in a serious way. Had he listened to what he was told, and cared about more than his power and his future plans to invade the rest of the Middle East he wouldn't have sent too few people to take care of the job and no choices would have to be made. THIS DIDN'T HAVE TO HAPPEN.
My head hurts.
MKK
"The point is that, first, coalition forces weren't just forced into an uncomfortable choice between saving lives and stopping looting. Encouraging looting was a deliberate policy."
The article you link to here says British forces encouraged people to loot Iraqi Army and Baath Party buildings, not museums.
"Looting of hospitals, hospitals fer chrissakes, museums, government offices, should have been dealt with before it occured."
How? In the NY Times article, the American soldiers scared the looters once by shooting over their heads, but how long would that have held them at bay? How would you be responding if coalition forces had had to start shooting looters? I don't think there's any action that U.S. and British forces could have taken that would satisfy you. An oppressed nation is (fingers crossed) liberated, and your reaction is to complain about (hopefully temporary) disorder after the regime falls? You complain when U.S. forces *don't* shoot looters and *don't* swoop in and secure the booty?
It's also worth noting that the Times article says that the contents of the museum were stolen, not destroyed. Hopefully, the looters plan to sell the treasures they stole. If that's true, many of them may not be lost to history, they just need to be recovered or bought back.
Aside:
""Comrade Ogilvy"'s declared email address is "iprefer@anonymity.com". Quite the profile in courage, there."
"Patrick, I don't think it's really that complicated. Comrade Ogilvy is a wuss, that's all."
I'm nobody you have heard of, I expect -- including my name and email address would not have added any weight to what I had to say. And I realize my opinions are out of step with most of the posts here. I certainly didn't intend to intrude. I've been reading Electrolite and Making Light, even though I don't agree with everything that's said in them, because I respected Patrick and Teresa, having read their posts for years on rec.arts.sf.written -- I wanted to read what they had to say, because I wanted to hear the other side from someone with whom I thought I had some common ground. I never imagined that the response I'd get would be name-calling. Was my original post insulting? I suppose I suggested that the posters here hadn't thought the issue through. I have to say that the responses here haven't given me reason to change my mind.
If I'm not welcome, just say the word, and I'll go away.
I like Sara's comment best: Bush and co. don't care about the trashed museum because they're all born-again Christians and they prefer Jews! My mind = boggled.
Anyway -- the phrase "the Iraqi people" in reference to the museum looters interests me. Because after all, it was not "the Iraqi people," en masse, who looted anything, but certain Iraqi persons. Individual human beings, not a force of evil orcs. What were their motives, beyond "revenge" for "oppression"? I am thinking good old filthy lucre, but what do I know. Also, I am wondering why the museum directors and other involved parties, if they were so concerned about the possibility of this happening that they were bugging the Pentagon about it months ago, didn't take steps of their own to insure the safety of the artifacts. Don't museums have vaults? And if they couldn't put the stuff away for safekeeping because they were afraid that Saddam and his cronies would kill them for doing so, then the fault for all of this goes right back to the elephant in the room no one wants to blame: Saddan Hussein himself.
Note: disemvowel away, but I'll just repost it on my blog.
It needs to be remembered that the failure to protect that museum undermines all our future policy-making in the region. The Iraqi are aware of, and proud of, their land's history. The US failure to protect it is going to make forming any government in Iraq much harder. Beyond that, it's given the Islamic radicals a powerful argument.
I wish no lives had been risked in this stupid war. But, yes, in war lives are risked on things as well as people.
Hey, what the hell! Some stuff gets stolen (and from a museum of all places). It's not like it's disappeared into a black hole. It'll all reappear; on the black market, at eBay, Christie's auctions, all those trendy little art boutiques you people visit hoping you'll find a priceless artifact that everyone else has overlooked.
Which is more than anyone can say about any SINGLE person killed by Saddam's thugs. None of them will pop up on eBAy.
Or what? You see them too when you're out scouting antique shops when you travel overseas.
Less complaining, people. Less false tears. If you're really concerned, save your money, buy a stolen Iraqi treasure and donate it back to the new national museum.
Seriously though, we didn't drop an H-bomb here. I think some of you are overeacting a little bit. What happened is definitely bad, but man, let's have a little perspective.
"Comrade Oglivy"
It's a common tactic of trolls to invent a silly, fictitious handle (such as "Empress Mau-Mau" or "Comrade Oglivy") and then, on top of it, give a false email address.
If you didn't mean to intrude, why did you post? If you're not ashamed of what you've posted, why the silly mask and the wussy fake email address?
Andrea--
Read the articles. The museum curators put all of the pieces in vaults. The mobs took two days to break into the vaults.
Preston & KC--
You obviously don't remember the story of the Hope Diamond. That it was originally the jewel in some Indian idol's forehead that was stolen, then recut for smuggling purposes, finally made into a necklace.
What's it now? A valuable Victorian necklace, not an ancient Indian artifact.
Pu-abi's jewels and the gold harp are probably never going to be seen again, at least not in their current, historically important form.
Recut or melted? They're no different than any other jewels or gold being currently mined.
When you make a choice, you acquire some responsibility.
Just like 'he made me do it' isn't a good answer when one's specific artillery or airstrike targetting is called into question, it's not a good answer when you don't live up to your obligations under the laws of war to prevent local chaos, looting, and violence, and it's not a good answer when you permit the destruction of irreplaceable cultural treasures. It's just generally not ever a good answer.
The patriarch Abraham came from one of those cities in Summeria, long, long ago. A third of the people in the world are in a culture that looks back to that.
What really makes me cry is thinking of the The Ark of the Covenant wasting away in that government warehouse forever, after Indiana Jones worked so hard to find it.
Comrade O and Preston- Do you have no suspicions that *some* of the looters could have been motivated by sabotage? Do you have no worries that the black market in stolen museum goods might be a way for groups we don't like to launder money? (i.e. that the $1000 someone pays to get a tablet back will be $1000 not in the pocket of an ordinary Iraqi but $1000 for an ex-Baath member (or worse)?). You said my statement on destroying a 250-generation old photo album (which the museum was) would "infantilize the Iraqi looters". Do you not find some insult in Rumsfield's 'Newly freed boys will be newly freed boys' treatment of Iraqi looters?
Certainly I can understand the looting of palaces and offices by ordinary Iraqis. Heck, when the Linux Jihad rolls around I'll certainly be tempted by Bill G.'s fine mansions and plasma TVs: I've paid for them in a hundred blue screens of death.
However, I'm very suspicious of this idea that the looting of critical infrastructure- economic or cultural- was done by the same people. I've read that some power stations and hospitals were stripped to nonfunctionality, that buildings were set on fire, that museum pieces were smashed- to me this isn't looting, this is Baathists throwing infrastructure onto the pyre of their dead government.
To me the false dichotomy of "museums or lives" is like saying "housing or lives." We usually don't ask people to make that decision- we try to save both their lives and the quality of their lives.
If I see a family that was rescued from a house fire, that their lives were saved doesn't mean I can't imagine or empathize with the secondary loss of non-replaceable photos, videos, etc. Here, imagine that the family had a well known book collection. Yes, the family will be grateful knowing the fire department did all it can. But what if we and they learned that the fire department had not done all they could? That they only sent firefighters- no trucks, hoses or other ways to fight the fire- so they could only rescue the people? And that this lack of service was a choice by the department.
Do you think that if we'd announced that critical infrastructure was taboo for looting, with a few tanks pa
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