The
Rape of Mesopotamia
By Paul Street
14 April, 2003
"A country's identity,
its value and civilization resides in its history," says
Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammed, an Iraqi archaeologist. "If a country's
civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends. Please
tell this to President Bush," Muhammed asks New York Times reporter
John Burns.
"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," New York Times, 13 April, 2003, A1).
An Interesting Comparison
with the Nazis
The White House is deeply
offended (officially at least) by those who note the chilling parallel
between Nazi foreign policy and the Bush-Wolfowitz doctrine of "preemptive"
(really preventive) war currently being enacted in Iraq. Remembering
that all versions of racist imperialism are not the same, then, let
us note one key difference between the way the Bush gang is proceeding
and how Adolf Hitler's Third Reich would have conquered Baghdad.
The Nazis, we can be sure,
would have made special provision to safeguard, and then of course appropriate,
the monumental treasures of Mesopotamia and ancient Sumerian civilization.
No, not out of any special concern or respect for other peoples' history:
beyond the normal looting instincts of invaders, the Nazis were eager
to identify themselves with selected aspects of past civilizations and
empires and therefore made a special point of cataloguing and preserving
the treasures of occupied territories.
As Lynn Nichols notes in
her award-winning book The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures
in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York, 1994), Hitler's
SS "had an art branch, the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage), which
sponsored archaeological research world wide in the hope of finding
confirmation of early and glorious Germanic cultures." By the late
1930s, "Ancestral Heritage" was "financing exotic projects
abroad," including elaborate, scientifically respectable digs in
South America, "determined to prove that the Germanism of the occupied
territories reached to earliest prehistory." In the immediate aftermath
of Hitler's Polish Blitzkrieg, also sold (like "Operation Iraqi
Freedom") as a "preemptive campaign," Nazi Special Forces
prepared special lists of art works to be found and preserved in a newly
Germanized western Poland. "A certain amount of damage and looting
are inevitable in the heat of war," notes Nichols, but in this
invasion the Germans acted on their "singularly detailed knowledge
of the location of works of art," safeguarding artifacts for careful
confiscation and preservation.
In a perverse and powerful
way, history - both their own and that of conquered nations - mattered
to the masters of European fascism. It would have unthinkable for them
to let the historical artifacts and cultural riches of Iraq slip away
into the hands of anonymous looters.
"History is Bunk"
Things are different with
the new bosses of Baghdad, employed by a onetime C student history major
who couldn't tell the difference between a Mesopotamian fossil and a
Mexican burrito. They represent an insufferably narcissistic nation
(still primarily obsessed with what a military campaign that killed
millions of Vietnamese did to its own national psyche) whose "leaders"
have long painted our their country as the specially chosen, "exceptional,"
and practically timeless answer to the grating past. America, we have
all been asked to believe, is the permanently modern City on a Hill
(John Winthrop). It "stands taller and sees farther" (Madeline
Albright) than the rest of the hopelessly "old" world. A more
recent twist on America's ever-evasive, a-historical sense of itself
and the world sees the "single sustainable model" of societal
evolution represented by the US - supposedly "liberal" mass
consumer capitalism and "representative democracy"
- as the "End of History."
It is the glorious terminal point of serious political contestation
over the nature and meaning of collective human existence. "History,"
according to the iconic American mass-production automobile capitalist
and virulent anti-Semite Henry Ford, "is bunk."
For these and other reasons,
it is not surprising that world history's most powerful military force
couldn't spare so much as a single tank or two soldiers to guard the
National Museum of Iraq during the "war" for Baghdad.
Such a relatively tiny presence
might have prevented the disappearance of more than fifty thousand artifacts
from what the Chicago Tribune calls "the storehouse of civilization's
cradle." And it's not like the White House and Pentagon didn't
know what was in that storehouse: leading experts gave them elaborate
lists of key artifact sites, placing special emphasis on the National
Museum.
"Mesopotamia,"
says Gil Stein, director of the University of Chicago's prestigious
Oriental Institute, "is the world's first civilization. It's the
first place to develop cities, the first place where writing was invented.
And the artifacts from the
excavations from there are the patrimony for our entire civilization
and entirely irreplaceable" (Chicago Tribune,13 April, 2003, p.1).
"Whatever," say
Bush and Rumsfeld. Their imperial arsenal includes helicopters ("Apache,"
"Blackhawk" and "Comanche") named after tribes from
North America's own obliterated ancient civilizations and its genocidal
past. Who really gives a damn, they ask, when you get down to it, about
a bunch of "artey-facts" and fossils and such? That stuff
only matters, they think, to historians, archaeologists, anthropologists
and other assorted "liberal" "eggheads" who wouldn't
even know how to shoot a sword-wielding Arab like Harrison Ford did
in "Indiana Jones." For heaven's sake, as Rumsfeld loves to
say, its just too darn bad if a bunch of "old timey stuff"
(to quote Homer Simpson)
gets lost on the road to paving over Mesopotamia.
After all, we've got a modern
American and Ford-like job to do: benevolently granting those poor Iraqis
the mass-consumer items, pseudo-representative semi-democracy (plutocracy),
and soul-deadening mass culture ("Baywatch Baghdad" is surely
in its planning stages) we know they crave.
A Disturbing Charge
According to one story appearing
in publications around the world, US armed forces actually encouraged
the ransacking. According to Khaled Bayomi, a Middle Eastern political
researcher who witnessed the looting of the National Museum, American
troops inspired the plunder for a very interesting reason. "The
lack of jubilant scenes" of grateful Iraqis greeting American conquerors,
claims Bayomi, meant that US forces "needed pictures of Iraqis
who in different ways demonstrated hatred for Saddam's regime."
It's hard to believe that such encouragement (if that's what took place)
did not occur without high-level approval (See "US Encouraged Ransacking"
at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2842.htm).
The Oil Wells are Safe
Today, the American Empire's
nice cop Colin Powell felt compelled during a press conference to acknowledge
the tragedy of the National Museum. He pledged American assistance in
the effort to recover the lost items (no small job). Global outrage
over the rape of Mesopotamia has reached the front page of his nation's
leading newspapers, making it into Powell's own daily internal briefings.
But whatever the truth (or
falsity) of the charge that Americans cynically encouraged the looting
of the museum and the sincerity (or cynicism) of Powell's statement,
it should be noted that the oil wells of Iraq have been consistently,
well and massively guarded by British and American forces. But of course:
it's important, after all, that the people of the world retain their
greatest imaginable freedom of all at the End of History - the right
to drive around cheaply in ecocidal automobiles to and from glorious
citadels of mass consumption. Henry Ford would certainly approve.
(Paul Street is a writer and former historian in Chicago, Illinois.
He can be contacted at [email protected])