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It's not as if Americans weren't bringing in some culture of their own to fill that unfortunate vacuum. It was on April 10 as well that the government announced the imminent arrival of nightly newscasts from American news anchors 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. Good-bye dreary old antiquity! Hello "Friends"! There is much people don't know about what happened 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 one 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 people 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 in New York, 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 America's leaders' 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," Ari Fleischer, the president's spokesman, said 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." 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," the Central Command spokesman, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, said 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 the government anticipate that the same would happen again? In fact, the government did. The Pentagon held a meeting in late January 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. Last Sunday, The Washington Times uncovered the smoking gun proving that Gibson was right and that 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 museum. American troops cannot be blamed for what happened two weeks 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 one may never learn where. It was "a matter of priorities," said General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Obviously the highest priority is human life. But this wasn't an either/or proposition. If the United States had enough troops to secure the Oil Ministry, it 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, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Instead, America sent the message that Iraq's "great civilization," as the president called it, wasn't worth a single tank for protection. But America also sent the message that Americans don't appreciate the worth of their own culture so terribly much either. For all the news reports of "billions of dollars" of losses, for all the golden objects shown on television, 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 Western 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. 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 the crude Pentagon rhetoric. Karl Rove has been on the phone with de Montebello. FBI 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 Robson of Oxford. "The unsuspecting or the unscrupulous will buy them as novelty Christmas presents or coffee-table pieces." The tragedy for America is not just the loss itself but the naked revelation of its worst instincts at the very dawn of a grandiose project to bring democratic values to the Middle East. By protecting Iraq's oil but not its cultural mother lode, America echoes 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 hoards of kitsch. The Americans may have been unable to protect tablets containing missing pieces of the Gilgamesh epic. But somehow they 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. Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune |