The end of civilization

The sacking of Iraq's museums is like a "lobotomy" of an entire culture, say art experts. And they warned the Pentagon repeatedly of this potential catastrophe months before the war.

By Louise Witt

April 17, 2003 | On Jan. 24 at the Pentagon, a small group of accomplished archaeologists and art curators met with Joseph Collins, who reports directly to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and four other Pentagon officials to talk about how the U.S. military could protect Iraq's cultural and archaeological sites from damage and destruction during the impending war in that country. McGuire Gibson, a professor at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, gave the officials a list of 5,000 cultural and archaeological sites. First on the list: the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad.

Gibson recalls he talked to the group about the importance of safeguarding the museum from bomb damage -- and from looting after the military conflict ended. "I pointed to the museum's location on a map of Baghdad and said: 'It's right here,'" he recalled in an interview. "I asked them to make assurances that they'd make efforts to prevent looting and they said they would. I thought we had assurances, but they didn't pan out."

On April 10, a day after Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed and Baghdad was in the hands of U.S. military forces, the National Museum of Iraq was ransacked. In a matter of hours, thousands of Iraqis, some thought to be working for art dealers, clambered into the museum that had been closed to the public for years. After two days of looting, almost all of the museum's 170,000 artifacts were either stolen or damaged. Ancient vases were smashed. Statues were beheaded. In the museum's collection were items from Ur and Uruk, the first city-states, settled around 4000 B.C., including art, jewelry and clay tablets containing cuneiform, considered to be the first examples of writing. The museum also housed giant alabaster and limestone carvings taken from palaces of ancient kings.

"It's catastrophic," says Gibson, who is also head of the American Association for Research in Baghdad, a consortium of about 30 U.S. museums and universities. "It's a lot like a lobotomy. The deep memory of an entire culture, a culture that has continued for thousands of years, has been removed. There was 5,000 years of written records, even Egyptian records don't go back that far. It's an incredible crime."

In the aftermath of a looting spree that stripped museums in Baghdad and Mosul, left the National Library a smoldering ruin and turned thousands of ancient Qurans at the Ministry for Religious Affairs to ashes, archaeologists and museum curators from around the world are racing today to assess the damage and, where possible, to recover what has not been destroyed. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has called an emergency meeting Thursday in Paris to review the disaster. Even the U.S. government has pledged an aggressive effort to help recover Iraq's stolen historical treasures.

Gibson, who will attend the UNESCO meeting, and other experts in archaeology and ancient art are hardly mollified by that pledge. In a series of interviews with Salon, they offered a detailed account of warnings given to U.S. war planners beginning last fall, and continuing up to the days before the war -- warnings which were all but ignored.

"It's extraordinary," says Joan Aruz, curator in charge of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "It's of the utmost significance, not only for the cultural heritage of Iraq, but also for the rest of the world. The museum contained the greatest work of art created in the first cities. The loss is just outstanding. I haven't gotten over the shock."

Aruz, who's in charge of the Met's upcoming exhibition about ancient Iraq, says one of her favorite pieces in the museum's collection is a figure of a man with a beard referred to as "The Priest King." Another is a carved face of a sensitive-looking young woman. The combined value of the artifacts could be in the billions of dollars.

Some archaeological and art experts think that the sack of Baghdad may be a result of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's decision not commit more ground forces. Instead, he opted for a "rolling start" invasion where troops would be deployed to Iraq as needed. Other generals, including Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army's chief of staff, criticized Rumsfeld's decision. One unnamed general even called it a "war on the cheap."

The U.S. and Britain deployed almost 300,000 troops to the Persian Gulf region. In contrast, during the Operation Desert Storm in 1991, allied forces numbered closer to 500,000. "Now, we're seeing the consequences of that decision," says Scott Silliman, who was the senior attorney for the U.S. Air Force's Tactical Air Command during the first Gulf War. Silliman worked with archaeologists at that time to make sure the Air Force took precautions not to destroy or harm Iraq's cultural and ancient sites.

Coalition forces are trying to restore civil order in Baghdad, a city of 4.5 million, and the looting has almost ended. However, the pandemonium and destruction that occurred have cost the Bush administration credibility and trust in Iraq and across the Arab world. Silliman, who's now a law professor at Duke University and executive director of the Center for Law, Ethics and National Security, says the coalition forces may have violated the Fourth Geneva Convention, which calls for an occupying force to protect cultural property. Even if the coalition forces didn't intentionally breach the Geneva Conventions, he says, "the effect [of the looting] will be more in world opinion, than in legal sanctions."

After the first reports of looting at Iraq's museums -- and the first questions were raised about the failure of U.S. forces to intervene -- Rumsfeld's initial comments signaled that the U.S. didn't think that protection of antiquities and art was a priority. At a news conference last Friday, he blamed press coverage for inflating the problem. "The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over," he said, "and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?'"

That outraged archaeologists, historians and others around the world. The Archaeological Institute of America, a Boston-based group with 9,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, had contacted government agencies as far as back as January about the danger of looting of Iraqs cultural sites. Institute President Jane Waldbaum said she was outraged first by the unchecked looting, and then by Rumsfeld's response. "Donald Rumsfeld in his speech basically shrugged and said, 'Boys will be boys. What's a little looting?'" she said. "Freedom is messy, but freedom doesn't mean you have the freedom to commit crimes. This loss is almost immeasurable."

In the past few days, the U.S. Central Command in Qatar has tried softening Rumsfeld's off-the-cuff remarks. "I don't think anyone anticipated the riches of Iraq would be looted by the Iraqi people," Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said Tuesday. In fact, however, the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House had been warned repeatedly, for months.

On Oct. 15, Ashton Hawkins, president of the American Council for Cultural Policy, a not-for-profit group formed to promote issues relating to art collecting, sent a letter to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice asking what steps the government and the military were taking to secure Iraq's antiquities. Copies of the letter were also sent to various officials in the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies.

Hawkins, a former general counsel at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, received no response.

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