Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

When the issue of official torture first arose, Senator John W. Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, promised that everyone culpable would be held accountable, but he failed to follow through, thereby earning himself a place among the seven morons who lost the war. The Washington Post editorialized, “That the affair would end in this way is even more disgraceful for the American political system than the abuses themselves.”¹¹⁵ But there was still one more disgrace to come. In June 2005, the Senate Republican Policy Committee issued a report claiming that the International Committee of the Red Cross, in daring to criticize U.S. treatment of prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay, had “lost its way.” The senators of the ruling party recommended that the Bush administration cut off all U.S. funds for the ICRC’s operations.¹¹⁶

Burton J. Lee III served as a doctor in the Army Medical Corps and, for four years, as presidential physician to George H. W. Bush. He writes, “Today, ... it seems as though our government and the military have slipped into Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’ The widespread reports of torture and ill-treatment—frequently based on military and government documents—defy the claim that this abusive behavior is limited to a few noncommissioned officers at Abu Ghraib or isolated incidents at Guantanamo Bay. When it comes to torture, the military’s traditional leadership and discipline have been severely compromised up and down the chain of command. Why? I fear it is because the military has bowed to errant civilian leadership.”¹¹⁷ I believe it is fair to suggest that this civilian leadership is suffering from the same lapses in thinking that afflicted the German desk murderers of the 1940s.

A third example of the administration’s inability to think can be found in its criminal attitude toward and treatment of Iraq’s greatest cultural treasures. In the months before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and his senior officials spoke of preserving Iraq’s “patrimony” for the Iraqi people. What he meant by patrimony, at a time when talking about Iraqi oil was taboo, was exactly that—Iraqi oil. In their “joint statement on Iraq’s future” of April 8, 2003, George Bush and Tony Blair declared, “We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq’s natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit.”¹¹⁸ In this they were true to their word. Among the few places American soldiers actually did guard during and in the wake of their invasion were that country’s oil fields and the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. The real Iraqi patrimony, that invaluable human inheritance of thousands of years, was another matter. At a time when American pundits were warning of a future “clash of civilizations,” our occupation forces were letting perhaps the greatest of all human patrimonies be looted and smashed.

There have been many dispiriting sights on TV since George Bush launched his ill-starred war on Iraq—the pictures from Abu Ghraib, Fallujah laid waste, American soldiers kicking down the doors of private homes and pointing assault rifles at women and children. But few have reverberated historically like the looting of Baghdad’s National Museum— or been forgotten more quickly in this country.

In archaeological circles, Iraq is known as the “cradle of civilization,” with a record of cultural artifacts going back more than seven thousand years. William R. Polk, the founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, says, “It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that life as we know it today began: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and, above all, developed the skill of writing.”¹¹⁹ No other places in the Bible except for Israel have more history and prophecy associated with them than Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer), and Mesopotamia (which in Greek means “between the [Tigris and Euphrates] rivers”)—different names for parts of the territory that the British around the time of World War I began to call “Iraq.”¹²⁰ Most of the early books of Genesis are set in Iraq (see Genesis 10:10,11:31; also Daniel 1-4; II Kings 24). There was, however, no country of “Iraq” until 1920, when the British combined the three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Mosul, and Baghdad and set up the puppet Faisal dynasty to govern their new domain. Britain dominated Iraqi affairs until 1958, when the last king, Faisal II, was overthrown and executed by Iraqi nationalists.

The best known of the civilizations that make up Iraq’s cultural heritage are the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sassanids, and Muslims. On April 10, 2003, in a television address, President Bush acknowledged that the Iraqi people are “the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity.”¹²¹ Only two days later, under the complacent eyes of the occupying U.S. Army in Baghdad, the Iraqis would begin to lose that heritage in a swirl of looting and burning.

In September 2004, in one of the few self-critical reports to come out of Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense, the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication wrote, “The larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended.”¹²² Nowhere was this failure more apparent than in the indifference—even glee—shown by Rumsfeld and his generals toward the looting on April 11 and 12, 2003, of the National Museum in Baghdad and the burning on April 14, 2003, of the National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Endowments. These events were, according to Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, “the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years.” Eleanor Robson, a specialist in the history of mathematics in the ancient Near East and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, said, “You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale.”¹²³ Yet Secretary Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game and shrugged it off with the comment that “Freedom’s untidy.... Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes.”¹²⁴

The National Museum of Baghdad has long been regarded as perhaps the richest archaeological institution in the Middle East. It is difficult to say with precision what was lost there in those catastrophic April days in 2003 because up-to-date inventories of its holdings, many never even described in archaeological journals, were also destroyed by the looters or remained incomplete thanks to conditions in Baghdad after the Gulf War of 1991. One of the best records, however partial, of its holdings is the catalog of items the museum lent in 1988 to an exhibition held in Japan’s ancient capital of Nara entitled “Silk Road Civilizations.” But as one museum official said to John Burns of the New York Times after the looting, “All gone, all gone. All gone in two days.”¹²⁵

A single, beautifully illustrated, indispensable book edited by Milbry Polk and Angela M. H. Schuster, The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia, represents the heartbreaking attempt of over a dozen archaeological specialists on ancient Iraq to specify what objects were in the museum before the catastrophe, where they had been excavated, and the condition of those few thousand items that have been recovered.

At a conference on art crimes held in London a year after the disaster, the British Museum’s John Curtis reported that at least half of the 40 most important stolen objects had not been retrieved and that, of some 15,000 items looted from the museum’s showcases and storerooms, about 8,000 had yet to be traced. Its entire collection of 5,800 cylinder seals and clay tablets, many containing cuneiform writing and other inscriptions some of which go back to the earliest discovery of writing itself, was stolen.¹²⁶ Since then, as a result of an amnesty for looters, about 4,000 of the artifacts have been recovered in Iraq, and more than 1,000 have been confiscated in the United States.¹²⁷ Curtis noted that random checks of Western soldiers leaving Iraq had led to the discovery of several in illegal possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the United States found more. Officials in Jordan have impounded about 2,000 pieces smuggled from Iraq; in France, 500 pieces; in Italy, 300; in Syria, 300; and in Switzerland, 250. Smaller numbers have been seized in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad.