LONDON, 27 April 2003 — We won’t know for a while yet how many Iraqi civilians were killed or injured in the second Gulf War. But although there have been terrible tragedies affecting many innocent people, the final casualty figures will probably be very low in relation to the number of bombs and missiles the coalition has rained on Iraqi cities.
The Americans seem, on the whole, to have taken seriously their commitment to keeping civilian casualties to a minimum, helped by the uncanny accuracy of their guided weapons. And they have taken other praiseworthy precautions against wanton war damage, such as securing Iraq’s oil wells and disarming its Scud missiles before they could be fired at Israel. So why on earth have they permitted the destruction of an ancient culture on a scale without parallel in modern times and unequalled in Iraq since the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258? In a three-day rampage at the Iraqi National Museum, looters took up to 170,000 statues, clay tablets, pieces of pottery and jewelry, dating back more than 5,000 years to the first stirrings of civilization. And the victorious Americans did nothing to stop them. How can this have been possible?
Military spokesmen have answered this with relaxed talk about it being a matter of priorities in time of war. But Donald Rumsfeld was not relaxed when asked the same question last week: He seemed genuinely angry at any suggestion of US negligence. “We didn’t allow it to happen,” he said. “It happened.”
But it is not only in the Arab world that this cultural catastrophe has aroused deep indignation and suspicion toward the US government. Three members of President Bush’s advisory committee on cultural property tendered their resignations because of this “wanton and preventable destruction”. And some US archaeologists even suggested that the failure to protect the collection could amount to a war crime under the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property.
The US administration’s line has been to suggest that the disaster was not foreseeable. “I don’t think anyone anticipated that the riches of Iraq would be looted by the Iraqi people,” said one complacent general. But, in fact, it had every reason to think that something of the kind might happen — during uprisings in Iraq after the first Gulf War, 13 museums were ransacked. And the US government was well aware of the great value of both the National Museum and the National Library (which went up in flames in an arson attack), since it had put both buildings on a “no strike list” of sites to be spared during the “Shock and Awe” bombing of Baghdad.
The inevitable conclusion to which one is drawn is that Rumsfeld and his friends in the Pentagon simply didn’t care enough about Iraq’s cultural and artistic heritage to make any effort to protect it. And they cannot even say they are sorry or take any blame for its destruction, because they cannot admit to any flaws in their battle plan.”To try to pass off the fact of that unfortunate activity to a deficit in the war plan strikes me as a stretch,” Rumsfeld said when asked if the looting reflected a military mistake. But there seems no doubt that, if it had wanted to, the military could have spared the men to stand guard over Baghdad’s great cultural institutions.
Professor McGuire Gibson, an American expert on Mesopotamian archaeology, pointed out that American soldiers had been made available to chip away an insulting mural of Bush in Baghdad’s Al-Rashid hotel. None, however, could be spared to protect the treasures in the National Museum while they were being looted up the road at the same time.
Here is one area in which the Americans have proved themselves less sensitive than even Saddam Hussein, who showed a keen interest in his country’s archaeological legacy. Since he was also a brutal dictator, he went so far as to make the smuggling of antiquities punishable by death.
The US government, on the other hand, is suspected by the Arabs of being in league with art smugglers, since it is being claimed that some of the most valuable items in the museum were stolen to order. Such rumors may not be true, but they are an inevitable consequence of this huge American cock-up, which will turn out to have been the greatest public relations disaster of the war and a major defeat in the battle for Arab hearts and minds.
