[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [ALACOUN:9410] NYTimes.com Article: And Now: 'Operation Iraqi Looting'

[Alfred Kagan]

>Sender: owner-alacoun at ala1.ala.org
>Reply-To: freedman at wlsmail.org
>From: freedman at wlsmail.org
>To: ALA Council List <alacoun at ala1.ala.org>
>Subject: [ALACOUN:9410] NYTimes.com Article: And Now: 'Operation 
>Iraqi Looting'
>Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:26:09 -0400 (EDT)
>X-MailScanner: Found to be clean, Found to be clean
>X-Sender: articles-email at ms1.lga2.nytimes.com
>X-Spam-Status: No, hits=2.2 required=5.0
>	tests=NO_REAL_NAME,SPAM_PHRASE_00_01,US_DOLLARS_2
>	version=2.43
>X-Spam-Level: **
>
>This article from NYTimes.com
>has been sent to you by freedman at wlsmail.org.
>
>
>/-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\
>
>Explore more of Starbucks at Starbucks.com.
>http://www.starbucks.com/default.asp?ci=1015
>\----------------------------------------------------------/
>
>And Now: 'Operation Iraqi Looting'
>
>April 27, 2003
>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.
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/arts/27RICH.html?ex=1052460769&ei=1&en=b9a3867eb7812d87
>
>
>
>HOW TO ADVERTISE
>---------------------------------
>For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters
>or other creative advertising opportunities with The
>New York Times on the Web, please contact
>onlinesales at nytimes.com or visit our online media
>kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo
>
>For general information about NYTimes.com, write to
>help at nytimes.com. 
>
>Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company


-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu