What happened to Baghdad’s Museum of Archaeology is a paradigm of the whole disaster that the US-led invasion of 2003 brought down on the heads of the Iraqi people. As triumphant American soldiers pulled down the massive statue of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad, among the looters who ranged far and wide over the city was a gang who headed for the Archaeological Museum and its priceless collection of Mesopotamian artifacts. It is now clear that the people, who looted more than 15,000 items from the museum, including its entire collection of invaluable cylindrical seals, knew precisely what they were doing. They targeted Iraq’s archaeological heritage because they could expect to earn millions of dollars from private collectors around the world. The Americans knew what they were doing as well. The single official facility around which they threw a security cordon immediately after they entered the city was the Iraqi Oil Ministry. They therefore made their priorities clear from the very start. Washington wanted to guard the precious oil field data and perhaps also compromising evidence of covert US help for Saddam even as the US led the long and destructive campaign of economic sanctions. They had come for the oil and it was the oil they were going to protect.
Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s condescending “stuff happens” remarks in 2003 serves as a good summary of the White House’s indifference to the wholesale looting of Iraq’s most priceless treasures. “Freedom’s untidy,” he sniffed. “And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes.”
Indeed, Iraq’s rich historical legacy — a source of pride of its people — was of no real interest to the American occupiers. For days the Americans sat back while looters killed or pistol-whipped despairing museum curators and helped themselves in the biggest archaeological takeaway since Nazi Germany plundered the museums of occupied Europe. Museums and archaeological sites were sacked, leaving behind irreparable damage, especially to archaeological sites, where haphazard looting by thieves amounts to permanently deleting historical data.
Fortunately, not all of this enormous plunder could be hidden successfully. Around 3,000 items, some of them badly damaged, were recovered before they were wh isked out of the country hidden inside the fog of war. Stolen items have long been turning up in the archaeological art market but increasingly they are being advertised on the Internet. The plunder of Iraq’s heritage by unscrupulous Western interests has been so extensive that the market for these artifacts has been flooded, driving down prices. Swiss police this week seized a 4,000-year-old Cuneiform tablet and arrested the person trying to sell it on eBay: for only $360.
It’s perfectly reasonable to believe that the US president was largely unaware of Iraq’s cultural history, since, after all, the Bush family’s interest in the Middle East tends to revolve around one particular kind of treasure buried in the soil: oil.
