And Now: 'Operation Iraqi Looting'

By FRANK RICH

Let it never be said that our government doesn't give a damn about culture. 
It was on April 10, the same day the sacking of the National Museum in 
Baghdad began, that a subtitled George W. Bush went on TV to tell the Iraqi 
people that they are "the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to 
all humanity." And so what if America stood idly by while much of the 
heritage of that civilization — its artifacts, its artistic treasures, its 
literary riches and written records — was being destroyed as he spoke? It's 
not as if we weren't bringing in some culture of our own to fill that 
unfortunate vacuum. It was on April 10 as well, by happy coincidence, that 
the United States announced the imminent arrival of nightly newscasts from 
Dan Rather, Jim Lehrer and Brit Hume on newly liberated Iraqi TV. Better 
still, the White House let it be known, again on that same day, that it was 
seeking $62 million from Congress for a 24-hour Middle East Television 
Network that would pipe in dubbed versions of prime-time network programming.

Goodbye, dreary old antiquity! Hello, "Friends"!

There is much we don't know about what happened this month at the Baghdad 
museum, at its National Library and archives, at the Mosul museum and the 
rest of that country's gutted cultural institutions. Is it merely the 
greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston 
University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of 
All Souls College, Oxford, who said, "You'd have to go back centuries, to the 
Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale"? Nor do we 
know who did it. Was this a final act of national rape by Saddam loyalists? 
Was it what Philippe de Montebello, of the Metropolitan Museum, calls the 
"pure Hollywood" scenario — a clever scheme commissioned in advance by 
shadowy international art thieves? Was it simple opportunism by an unhinged 
mob? Or some combination thereof?

Whatever the answers to those questions, none of them can mitigate the pieces 
of the damning jigsaw puzzle that have emerged with absolute certainty. The 
Pentagon was repeatedly warned of the possibility of this catastrophe in 
advance of the war, and some of its officials were on the case. But at the 
highest levels at the White House, the Pentagon and central command — where 
the real clout is — no one cared. Just how little they cared was given away 
by our leaders' own self-incriminating statements after disaster struck. 
Rather than immediately admit to error or concede the gravity of what had 
happened on their watch, they all tried to trivialize the significance of the 
looting. Once that gambit failed, they tried to shirk any responsibility for 
it.

"What you are seeing is a reaction to oppression," said Ari Fleischer on 
April 11, arguing that looting, however deplorable, is a way station to 
"liberty and freedom." If only the Johnson administration had thought of this 
moral syllogism, it could have rationalized the urban riots that swept 
America after the assassination of Martin Luther King. "Stuff happens!" said 
Donald Rumsfeld, who likened the looting to the aftermath of soccer games and 
joked to the press that the scale of the crime was a trompe l'oeil effect 
foisted by a TV loop showing "over and over and over . . . the same picture 
of some person walking out of some building with a vase." As Jane Waldbaum, 
president of the Archaeological Institute of America, summed up the defense 
secretary's response to the tragedy, he "basically shrugged and said, `Boys 
will be boys.' " 

When the outrage over the story refused to go away after the looting 
subsided, a cover-up began. "I don't think that anyone anticipated that the 
riches of Iraq would be looted by the Iraqi people," said the Centcom 
spokesman, Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, on April 15, days after the museum 
had been sacked, the library burned. But even the public record makes this 
assertion laughable. In the 1991 war, nine of Iraq's 13 regional museums were 
looted, flooding the antiquities market with the booty for years. Why 
wouldn't we anticipate that the same would happen again? 
In fact, we did. The Pentagon held a late January meeting with American 
experts on Iraq's cultural bounty, opening a conversation that continued in 
the weeks before the war. "I had thought they were aware of the importance of 
the museum," said McGuire Gibson, of the University of Chicago's Oriental 
Institute, who was among the Pentagon meeting participants I interviewed last 
week. Last Sunday The Washington Times uncovered the smoking gun proving that 
Professor Gibson was right and that General Brooks's claim of ignorance was 
(at best) misinformed: a March 26 Pentagon memo to the coalition command 
listing, in order of importance, 16 sites that were crucial to protect in 
Baghdad. No. 2 on the list was the Baghdad museum.Our troops cannot be blamed 
for what happened 10 days after that memo was sent. The failure to deploy any 
of them to guard the museum and its sister institutions happened somewhere 
within the command, and we may never learn where. It was "a matter of 
priorities," said Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. 
Obviously the highest priority is human life, including that of our own 
forces. But this wasn't an either/or proposition. If we had enough troops to 
secure the oil ministry, we surely had the very few needed to ward off 
looters at the museum. "America would have scored a coup in Europe, the 
Middle East and the Muslim world if it protected the museum," says Vartan 
Gregorian, the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Instead we 
sent the message that Iraqi's "great civilization," as the president called 
it, wasn't worth a single tank for protection.But we also sent the message 
that we don't appreciate the worth of our own culture so terribly much 
either. For all the news reports of "billions of dollars" of losses, for all 
the golden objects shown on TV, the most devastating crime may have been the 
pillaging of cuneiform clay tablets and other glitter-free objects that tell 
us of the birth of writing, cities and legal codes in what was the former 
Mesopotamia. This land was the cradle of our civilization, too, long before 
there was Islam. Most of the early chapters of Genesis are believed to have 
been set in what only recently has been known as Iraq.If this history was 
forgotten or ignored by our ostentatiously Bible-minded administration, so 
was much more recent American history. In 1943, American armed forces fielded 
a monuments, fine arts and archives section to try to protect cultural 
treasures as we prosecuted the war in Europe. Lynn H. Nicholas, who wrote the 
definitive account of that story in "The Rape of Europa," told me that she 
had been invited to give lectures "to reserve units doing serious study on 
the securing of cultural artifacts" in recent years. "They were being 
prepared for the eventuality of something like this," she says. "Why weren't 
they deployed?" According to Mr. Rumsfeld, it would be "a stretch" to say our 
failure to take such measures was "a defect in the war plan." Rather, he 
said, the looting is just a reminder that freedom is "untidy" — or, in this 
case, literally just another word for nothing left to lose.Now that the 
pillaging of the Baghdad museum has become more of a symbol of Baghdad's fall 
than the toppling of a less exalted artistic asset, the Saddam statue, all 
the president's men are trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. 
Colin Powell was once again suited up to counter crude Pentagon rhetoric. 
Karl Rove has been on the phone with Mr. de Montebello. F.B.I. agents are on 
the case. But even if all such efforts, from Unesco's to that of the 
mobilized museum world, disable the black market for the major loot, nothing 
is going to restore the priceless library that is now ash or reconstitute the 
countless relics that have modest individual monetary value but collectively 
would have helped scholars reconstruct mankind's deepest past. "These items 
will appear for sale for $50 or $100 in antique stores all over the Middle 
East, Europe and North America or on eBay," said Oxford's Professor Robson. 
"The unsuspecting or the unscrupulous will buy them as novelty Christmas 
presents or coffee-table pieces." It's hard to put a loss this big in 
perspective. I asked Mahrukh Tarapor, the associate director for exhibitions 
at the Met, to try. Ms. Tarapor has spent the past six years seeking 
Mesopotamian holdings from museums throughout the world for "Art of the First 
Cities," an all too timely exhibition that by coincidence is opening on May 
8. "It's almost a new emotion," she said, noting that she has felt it only 
once before, when the Taliban destroyed the Great Buddhas of Bamiyan in 
central Afghanistan two years ago. "One is almost conditioned to accept even 
human death as part of life. The destruction of art — of our heritage — goes 
very deep in our unconscious. To a museum person, the worst thing you can 
experience is damage to an object on your watch. For the magnitude of what 
happened in Iraq, you have no words. You lose faith in your fellow man.
"The tragedy for America is not just the loss itself but the naked revelation 
of our worst instincts at the very dawn of our grandiose project to bring 
democratic values to the Middle East. By protecting Iraq's oil but not its 
cultural motherlode, we echo the values of no one more than Saddam, who in 
1995 cut off funds to the Baghdad museum, pleading the impact of sanctions, 
yet nonetheless found plenty of money to pour into his own palaces and their 
opulent hordes of kitsch. We may have been unable to protect tablets 
containing missing pieces of the Gilgamesh epic. But somehow we did manage to 
secure the lavish homes of Saddam's hierarchy, where the cultural gems ranged 
from videos of old James Bond movies to the collected novels of Danielle 
Steel. 

    
    


    
    

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