Even before the war began, the Bush administration swore to protect Iraq's "patrimony" for the Iraqi people. It turns out that the administration's definition of "patrimony" was exceedingly narrow, however. Hence, the military quickly put guards around the Oil Ministry and the intelligence offices in Baghdad, while much of official (and unofficial) Baghdad was looted. As much as anything, a country's patrimony is its past. Imagine, in the wake of a war, looters breaking into the Smithsonian and making off with everything from the documents of the Founding Fathers and the earliest flags to Judy Garland's magic slippers (from the Wizard of Oz), or breaking into the Metropolitan in New York and stripping it bare of a significant part of the human artistic patrimony. Actually, it's unimaginable - and yet that just happened in Baghdad with some of the most precious objects of our most ancient history, objects that stand in for life lived over 5,000 years ago, for where civilization and the city itself began. It's staggering to imagine.
John Burns of the New York Times quotes an Iraqi archaeologist, Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammad, who couldn't get the Marines to post troops at the National Museum of Antiquities as it was being looted this way:
"[He] directed much of his anger at President Bush. 'A country's identity, its value and civilization resides in its history,' he said. 'If a country's civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation.'" (Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its Treasure)
A piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in the Washington Post, 'Our Heritage Is Finished', catches an edge of the sadness of this moment in the words of Nabhal Amin, the museum's deputy director,
"'This was priceless,' she sobbed as she pointed to two seated marble deities from the temple at Harta that had been defaced with a hammer. Later, after observing more damage, she broke down again. 'It feels like all my family has died,' she wept.
"Even storage rooms and workshops were trashed. An old Babylonian wooden harp was broken in two and its gold inlay scraped off. But most inexplicable to her was the destruction of rooms that contained no artifacts, just archaeological records and photographs. 'I cannot understand this,' she said. 'This was crazy. This was our history. Our glorious history. Why should we destroy it?'"
The most unfortunate thing, it turns out, is that all this was imaginable. As John Noble Wilford has written in today's Times (Art Experts Fear Worst In the Plunder of a Museum),
"For weeks before the war, archaeologists and other scholars had alerted military planners to the risks of combat, particularly postwar pillage of the country's antiquities…. Experts reminded the Defense Department that after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, 9 of Iraq's 13 regional museums were plundered. The Baghdad museum was spared then because the end of war had left the government still power and policing the city."
I think we can rest assured that if warnings had come from knowledgeable officials in the oil industry, this administration would have heeded them. So war-making and preserving the money, or rather access to the sea of oil the administration is convinced will make the "reconstruction" of Iraq possible -- that was the "planning" the men of Bush found conceivable. And, as Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis makes clear in his assessment of the three-week war (see below), when it came to destroying the armed forces of a fourth-rate power, we proved unbearably capable. But, he reminds us, as was true of other Western conquering powers in Iraq, "getting into Iraq, like Afghanistan, was easy. The hard part will be getting out." Put another way, by the time, our first week of "planning" for "liberated" Iraq is over and done with, we will have given new meaning to the old Janis Joplin line (as best I remember it), "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."
Some of the difficulties of an Iraqi occupation are laid out in an interesting piece, Now for Nation Change, Law and Order: The Military Doesn't Want to Touch It. Who Will? in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section by former Post bureau chief R. Jeffrey Smith:
"The looting is likely just a new chapter in the mafia state forged by Saddam. As in many other capitals taken over by foreign forces in past decades -- in Africa, Latin America and the Balkans -- opportunistic looting is but a short step away from roving gangs and eventually organized criminal groups that work hand-in-glove with corrupt politicians and ideological extremists. But this also means that Iraq is not a blank slate on which America can readily inscribe Western democratic values; it is instead a "government mafia"-run state… If the West's experience in the Balkans and Haiti is any guide, Iraq's torturers of yesterday will be the organized criminals of tomorrow.… And while U.S. forces have proven they fight superbly against armed Iraqi combatants, they haven't been trained or equipped to battle armed civilians fueled by nationalism and egged on behind the scenes by those who seek to profit from chaos or even to reclaim their power."
Paul Rogers, in his latest Aftermath: Afghan Lessons, Iraqi Futures, for openDemocracy concurs:
"The decision to use… relatively small numbers of ground troops means that forces now in Baghdad are actually thin on the ground and largely concerned with countering such armed resistance that continues… even if they were concerned with public order control, the possible presence of suicide bombers would make their task problematic.
"More generally, there is the question of US military culture. US troops have very little experience of peacekeeping or even of post-conflict stabilisation. The common view is that this kind of work is "not proper soldiering" and should be left to the Scandinavians and others of a similar bent. The United States has had minimal engagement in UN peacekeeping operations in the past fifty years, and its activities in Kosovo and elsewhere have been characterised by the establishment of heavily protected encampments and the use of mobile patrols based on armoured vehicles with a minimal involvement of local populations."
Here's the irony. It wasn't so long ago that right-wing Republicans were criticizing the Clinton administration for "mission creep," for trying to turn the military into an organization devoted to endless previously nonmilitary, "humanitarian, or nation-building" tasks. But that's all over now, as St. Petersburg Times book editor Margo Hammond (The military's silent takeover of U.S. diplomacy,) reports in reviewing Dana Priests new book The Mission. The military, with a budget the size of the moon, now outweighs any combination of U.S. and foreign civilian agencies, just as it outweighs the militaries of any combination of other states. Its commanders, like Tommy Franks in the Gulf, are in effect the proconsuls of vast imperial realms. As Hammond puts it, "Even more influential are the regional "CinCs" (pronounced "sinks") who rule their fiefdoms like proconsuls to the Roman Empire."
Of course, Iraq, dominating so many front pages today, may like Afghanistan be deep inside our papers and off our TV screens soon enough, if the next country enters our sniper-scopes in the near future. Perhaps it already has, for threats aimed at Syria from neocons in and out of the administration are already swarming out of Washington. A piece by Timothy Phelps in Newsday this week (Hawks in U.S. Eyeing Syria As Next Target) had a particularly chilling paragraph: "One intelligence source with good access to Pentagon civilian authorities said that [Defense Secretary] Rumsfeld last week ordered the drawing up of contingency plans for a possible invasion of Syria and that Defense undersecretary Douglas Feith is working on a policy paper highlighting how Syria's support of terrorist groups is a threat to the region."
If accurate this is quite important. After all, we know from Bob Woodward's book, Bush at War, that immediately in the wake of the attacks of September 11th Rumsfeld launched similar planning for "regime change" in Iraq.
Of course, Syria, a country smaller than Iraq and now sandwiched by U.S. and Israeli forces, wasn't even included in the President's Axis of Evil, though it's long been right at the top of Israel's (drop North Korea and you get the Israeli version). Already we're hearing the claims that those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction still evidently to be uncovered in Iraq may have been transferred to Syria, and so on. Recent polls show that Americans, by vast majorities, aren't ready for the "next" war. A campaign of fear and threat would be necessary. But continuing chaos in Iraq, counter-intuitively, might make for a rush to the Syrian front more likely. It is yet again a perilous moment. I include below along with Margolis, the reliable Ed Vulliamy's most recent Observer piece on the rush to take out Syria. Tom
Air power makes U.S. almost invincible
By Eric Margolis, Contributing Foreign Editor
The Toronto Sun
April 13, 2003
SAN FRANCISCO -- In February, I wrote a pre-war analysis of how the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq would develop. My tactical and strategic predictions were fairly accurate, but my timing was off. The war, I estimated would take 10-15 days. In fact, it took 21.
The Second Oil War has been a brilliant and intimidating display of U.S. military technology, now an entire generation ahead of Europe, China and Russia, and two generations (30 years) ahead of Iraq's obsolete, run-down forces. The Iraq campaign is now being hailed by what a reader aptly terms the "Monica Lewinsky" media as one of the greatest military campaigns in history.
To read more Margolis click here
Syria could be next, warns Washington
By Ed Vulliamy
The Observer
April 13, 2003
The United States has pledged to tackle the Syrian-backed Hizbollah group in the next phase of its 'war on terror' in a move which could threaten military action against President Bashar Assad's regime in Damascus.
The move is part of Washington's efforts to persuade Israel to support a new peace settlement with the Palestinians. Washington has promised Israel that it will take 'all effective action' to cut off Syria's support for Hizbollah - implying a military strike if necessary, sources in the Bush administration have told The Observer .
Hizbollah is a Shia Muslim organisation based in Lebanon, whose fighters have attacked northern Israeli settlements and harassed occupying Israeli troops to the point of forcing an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon three years ago.
To read more Vulliamy click here
