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I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history. But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?

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The Sack of Baghdad

Is Iraq's culture being deliberately erased so it can be replaced with ArabDisney and the Coca-Cola culture?

To the second question, well, c'mon. You really think the Iraqis are different then their "liberators?"

In similar circumstances you think Americans would give their museums, libraries and art galleries a pass during their looting?

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In similar circumstances you think Americans would give their museums, libraries and art galleries a pass during their looting?

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Seems to me that in the post-Rodney King looting, the popular targets were electronics stores and clothing stores. Did a museum get it too? I also remember most of the looting being, well, looting. "Property redistribution" if you will. Nobody was torching a warehouse full of stereos just to watch it burn.

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And surely if the Americans could find the resources to protect the Interior Ministry and the Oil Ministry they could have protected important cultural sights.

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Woulda, coulda, shoulda. It's a tragedy beyond belief, but the shock barely had time to register before the opportunistic finger pointing began.

[ 15 April 2003: Message edited by: WingNut ]

See this thread: scroll down to writer's second post.

But they were. Curators of the museums and European and American archaeologists requested, before the sack of Baghdad, that these buildings be protected.

Is making the request in 2002 early enough warning?

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If war is likely to endanger the cultural heritage, the aftermath could be much worse, say archaeologists. In the absence of a functioning government, looters move in.

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Here's another link

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"They've known the importance of this museum, I showed them where it was. There's no reason this should be looted," said McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago, one of the world's top Mesopotamia scholars...Gibson, who has traveled more than 30 times to Iraq, said he met repeatedly in January with Pentagon officials to map Iraq's museum and excavation sites. The meetings were to assure that the sites were spared from coalition bombing. Post-war looting was always the bigger concern, Gibson and others said.

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Here's another

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In the months leading up to the Iraq war, U.S. scholars repeatedly urged the Defense Department to protect Iraq's priceless archaeological heritage from looters, and warned specifically that the National Museum of Antiquities was the single most important site in the country.

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[ 15 April 2003: Message edited by: al-Qa'bong ]

How could it have been stopped? It appears the only way would be to place troops in every building, store, and museum.

I guess my question though is motivation. Did they destroy priceless artuifacts because the were resisting the coalition, or was an expression of hatred toward Saddam and anything he came in contact with? Or, more simply, was it a case of I'm finally getting mine?

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This isn't a case of coulda,shoudla,woulda this is a case of criminal negligience.

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I don't believe a culture can survive entirely on pure inertia and an ahistorical understanding of itself. The United States is a prime example of a culture attempting to do just this - its population, unfortunately, is treated to an often ahistorical explanation of current world events, and has a distorted understanding of its own history - such common flaws as not remembering that the first President of the USA would not have been George Washington as the Republic as presently constituted was not set up until 1783 or 1787 (?).... and see, there I go again. Even *I* can't remember entirely that extra tidbit about the US's history.

Now this is not to say the US lacks its museums and libraries; it has a lot of them. But what do you expect would happen if all of them just disappeared? They are the collective store of the knowledge of the country, by and large. The loss of the nation's history and historiography, if you wish, would be.. well, nearly incalculable.

We are only beginning to calculate the impact of the loss of the artifacts of the first known civilization to exist in the Iraqi area that used some sort of writing. A large library in Baghdad also reportedly went up in flames.

To destroy a people, you must destroy their culture and history. The Americans, and us, have had over 200 years of practice at this, including using the members of the targetted people to do the dirty work for us.

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We are only beginning to calculate the impact of the loss of the artifacts of the first known civilization to exist in the Iraqi area that used some sort of writing.

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It's the Library of Alexandria all over again, and humanity is poorer for it.

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And no, if anarchy overtook Ontario I would NOT be down at the ROM setting fire to priceless treasures.

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The Pentagon was well aware of the requirement of securing cultural assets both as a matter of service to humanity and in order to not violate the Geneva Convention. One tank in front of each Ministry building and museum would probably have deterred looting of the governmental apparatus and the all-important artifacts that should be preserved until the situation settles down.

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Is Iraq's culture being deliberately erased so it can be replaced with ArabDisney and the Coca-Cola culture?

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Sure.
It wasn't a question of failing or forgetting or being unable to protect the library and museum; it was a question of shooting the doors down with a tank and telling people to go for it. Some did; some stood by helplessly. (I just read this in a heart-breaking eye-witness report, which probably has already been quoted on another forum.)
It's no secret that the Bush administration does not revere Islamic texts of whatever age.
I don't know whether they've picked the food and video franchisees yet, but i'm sure American culture will figure largely in the 'reconstruction'.

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Can it survive this cultural genocide?

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It's no secret that the Bush administration does not revere Islamic texts of whatever age.

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I'd say they wouldn't mind anything older than 6000 years disapearing.

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Seems to me that in the post-Rodney King looting, the popular targets were electronics stores and clothing stores. Did a museum get it too?

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Lame comparison. Although there were riots, there was likely still tight security over banks and museums and places like that. During the US riots of recent memory, there wasn't an entire collapse of all civil authority and all political systems.

As for shooting people to protect property - get real. No one wanted the US troops to shoot people. If they had parked a few tanks near the entrances and provided security and therefore a disincentive to the looters, that likely would have been good enough.

This idea that somehow the Iraqis are savages who would commit such atrocities while we are more "civilized" and would never do such a thing is total bullshit. There are lots of people in our society who would loot museums for priceless goods if they were completely open for the taking. Maybe we're not among those numbers of people - but then, lots of Iraqis weren't among those numbers either. Lots of them, as mentioned above, stood by helpless and despairing, watching as their history was pillaged by opportunists.

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If you propose that soldiers guard museum pieces you must be willing to sanction killing people to protect historical artifacts. Unless you are ready to sign off on killing people to protect property, soldiers are unsuited to guarding it. If you don't expect them to kill for that purpose, then by default you've chosen to to wait for the follow-up of military policing units, which are rather farther back in the order of battle. In the interim, looting happens.
My impression has been that the Coalition army is reluctant to shoot unarmed civilians to protect property. I find no fault with this.

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You are unlikely to change your mind, but your assertion that the US was "...hell-bent..." on discouraging United Nations participation is demonstrably false. The US spent a large number of months trying to get the UN to join in enforcing their own resolutions, to do something other than pontificate. In fact, the Coalition accepted any nation willing to join.

Secondly, your faith in the efficacy of U.N. peacekeepers is likewise out of touch with reality. The U.N. let the Rwanda butchery happen, and would have likewise let the Serbian government murder Muslims in the hundreds of thousands, had not the US-led NATO made the Serbs stop with methods that actually worked.

Oh, that's GOOD, bakunin... Goooooooood.

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...staged in order to create the appearance of a nation whose people are too concerned with grabbing anything that isn't nailed down, although to what purpose I can't imagine.

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