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The smash of
civilizations
By Chalmers
Johnson
Note from Tom
Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch: The World
Monuments Fund has placed Iraq on its list of the
Earth's 100 most endangered sites, the first time
that a whole nation has been listed. The
destruction began as Baghdad fell. First, there
was the looting of the National Museum. That took
care of some of the earliest words on clay,
including, possibly, cuneiform tablets with
missing parts of the epic of Gilgamesh. Soon
after, the great libraries and archives of the
capital went up in flames and books, letters,
government documents, ancient Korans and religious
manuscripts stretching back centuries vanished
forever. What we're talking about, of course, is
the flesh of history. Worse yet, the looting of
antiquity, words and objects not only never ended,
but seems to have accelerated. From well organized
gangs of grave robbers to American engineers
building bases to American soldiers taking
souvenirs, the ancient inheritance not just of
Iraqis but of all of us has simply headed south.
Though less attended to than the human costs of
the war, such crimes against history are no small
matter, as Chalmers Johnson indicates below.
[1]
In the months before he ordered
the invasion of Iraq, President George W 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, Bush and British Prime Minister 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." 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 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.
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."
No other
places in the Bible except for Israel have more
history and prophecy associated with them than
Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer), and Mesopotamia -
different names for the territory that the British
around the time of World War I began to call
"Iraq", using the old Arab term for the lands of
the former Turkish enclave of Mesopotamia (in
Greek: "between the [Tigris and Euphrates]
rivers"). 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, Bush acknowledged that the Iraqi people
were "the heirs of a great civilization that
contributes to all humanity". Only two days later,
under the complacent eyes of the US 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 US 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."
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 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." Yet Rumsfeld compared the looting to
the aftermath of a soccer game and shrugged it off
with the comment, "Freedom's untidy ... Free
people are free to make mistakes and commit
crimes."
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."
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 40 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.
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 US.
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 US 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.
The torching of books and manuscripts in
the Library of Korans and the National Library was
in itself a historical disaster of the first
order. Most of the Ottoman imperial documents and
the old royal archives concerning the creation of
Iraq were reduced to ashes. According to Humberto
Marquez, the Venezuelan writer and author of
Historia Universal de La Destruccion de Los
Libros (2004), about a million books and 10
million documents were destroyed by the fires of
April 14, 2003.
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 US 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.
The Burger King of Ur
Given the black market value of ancient
art objects, US military leaders had been warned
that the looting of all 13 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. 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." Gibson went back
to the Pentagon twice to discuss the dangers, and
he and his colleagues sent several email 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 60 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. 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 US 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. The United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization 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, headed
by Lieutenant General (retired) Jay Garner - the
civil authority the US had set up for the moment
hostilities ceased - sent to all senior US
commanders a list of 16 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
General 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 US 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.
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."
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 US
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 BC and restored by
Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century BC), the
Marines spray-painted their motto, "Semper Fi"
(semper fidelis, always faithful) onto its
walls. The military then made the monument "off
limits" to everyone in order to disguise the
desecration that had occurred there, including the
looting by US 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 US 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
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 servicemen 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."
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."
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".
Other observers say that the
dust stirred up by US helicopters has sandblasted
the fragile brick facade of the palace of
Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562
BC, 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 BC, 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]."
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.
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
dynamiting the monumental third century AD
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.
Note
[1] Johnson, who
produced Blowback, a now classic account of
how we got to September 11, 2001 (though published
well before those attacks occurred), and a
singular study of American militarism, The
Sorrows of Empire, is now working on the third
volume of his Blowback trilogy, Nemesis:
The Crisis of the American Republic. The piece
above offers an early glimpse into that book (not
due to be published until late 2006).
(Copyright 2005 Chalmers Johnson)
(For those who wish to see the extensive
documentation that Chalmers Johnson provided with
this piece, go to Tomdispatch.com, where it
first appeared.)
(Used by permission of Tomdispatch) |
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