FRIDAY
April 18, 2003
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Washington Merry-Go-Round


By Jack Anderson and Douglas Cohn



    WASHINGTON -- The looting is dying down in Iraq. There is nothing left to take. But there have been no reported incidents of our soldiers looting anything there, a fact that is all the more unusual because no one looks upon it as unusual.
    Unlike so many victorious soldiers throughout history who have behaved otherwise, American and coalition soldiers fighting in Iraq have proven to be both disciplined and honorable. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld blew off the looting that did occur, blaming the "Henny Pennys" in the media for making too much of the long-repressed Iraqis letting off a little steam. The chaos and near anarchy doesn't surprise him, he says. If that's the case, why didn't he have a plan in place to protect vital cultural and historical institutions? Once the coalition forces broke through to Baghdad, U.S. soldiers guarded Baghdad's oil ministry building, making sure looters couldn't enter. But they were ordered to stand by as 170,000 items, by some accounts, were destroyed or removed from Baghdad's National Museum of Antiquities.
    Baghdad is the cradle of civilization, and before the war began archaeologists went to the Bush administration to seek assurances that 7,000 years of history would be shielded from harm's way. The U.S. military is justly proud of its precision bombs, and the Baghdad museum was never in danger of assault from above. What a terrible irony that the liberators who took such care in their war plan would stand down just when their services were needed the most. We human beings are mortal, but our history should live forever. Iraq's proud past -- the world's past -- has now been sacrificed in the name of an uncertain future.
    Burning books and carrying away museum artifacts can't be condoned. Yet that's what happened when American troops were ordered to stand aside and allow this behavior to go on. Maybe the antiquities will show up on eBay, and Rumsfeld will praise the Iraqis for their quick grasp of American-style commerce.
    In making the case that the looting in Iraq is no big deal, Rumsfeld pointed out that we've had riots in American cities that were accompanied by looting, and people regularly get out of hand at soccer games around the world. It's a facile analogy, but the point it makes is not the one that Rumsfeld intended. He argued that law and order is not the job of the U.S. military, and soldiers are not equipped to handle police functions. Yet the response to riots in Los Angeles and Detroit, to mention just two cities, has been to call up the National Guard and send in the troops.
    Even after the outcry over the trashing of the National Museum, the orders to American troops in the field have apparently not changed. Baghdad's National Library was torched and gutted this week, days after the city was liberated. Thousands of Korans (one being among the oldest on record) were destroyed when the Ministry for Religious Affairs and nearby libraries were set ablaze. Some of the books were a thousand years old and had survived Baghdad's fall to the Mongols in 1258.
    The fires that concern this administration are in the oil fields, not the cultural centers. Rumsfeld's callous indifference to the loss of ancient artifacts is an accurate reflection of the administration's priorities. As a war leader, Rumsfeld would benefit from a wider perspective that goes beyond conquest to the subtler signals of respecting a foreign land. The U.S. military did an excellent job of protecting religious sites. Museums and libraries, the repository of a society's intellectual life, should be accorded equal respect.
    When Napoleon's forces invaded Egypt, they shot the nose off the Sphinx. Napoleon remedied the assault with a scientific expedition that discovered the Rosetta Stone, the key to our understanding of hieroglyphics. When the history is written of this Gulf War, the military prowess will get its due. But what will be remembered through the ages is what was lost of 7,000 years of mankind's struggle to gain a civilized hold on life, even in wartime.
    Prediction: Most of what was lost will never be recovered.
   
   

 

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