Philistine Forces

Donald Rumsfeld may be Goliath, with the Pentagon as his Philistine palace, yet judging from their recent complaints about lost Iraqi artifacts, I find the humanities intellectuals much scarier.

Bold brigands and ordinary opportunists raided museums, banks and stores in the lawless days following Baghdad’s collapse. They stole ancient treasures from the city’s famous museums where some of the most impressive archaeological finds of the past century had been preserved. Among the missing artifacts were thousands of ancient cuneiform tablets, the 5,000-year-old Vase of Uruk and the Harp of Ur. This enormous cultural loss is a profound blow to Iraq and the world.

But the accusations hurled at the Coalition’s military planners are in many ways more disgusting than the rampant looting of Iraq’s cultural legacy, for they reveal the callousness of the “cultured” toward human suffering. Donny George, the head of the National Archaeological Museum in Baghdad, told reporters that the US troops’ failure to protect artifacts was “the crime of the century because it is really affecting the heritage of mankind.”

It hardly matters whether he means the 20th Century—with genocides in Europe, Russia, Cambodia, and Rwanda—or the 29 months of this century. This looting was not even the crime of the week. (That dubious award might go to the slaughter of three hundred and fifty people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.) Hundreds of Iraqi civilians died in the invasion of Iraq, not to mention the thousands who disappeared under Saddam Hussein’s despotic rule. Crime of the century? There is nothing poetic about this hyperbole; it is an outright insult to humanity.

Other eminent gripers, realizing the pitfalls of such comparisons, instead took a more practical tack, blaming the misalignment of American interests. Like McGuire Gibson, a professor at the University of Chicago and head of the American Association for Research in Baghdad, these complainers sound hopelessly out of touch with the dangers of a war zone. Gibson blames the Coalition not just for allowing looting in the capital, but also for letting the pesky ground war spoil archaeological sites. He said, “Obviously, the priorities did not include cultural sites.”

That’s right, there were indeed other priorities in the war against Iraq. Top among the Coalition’s priorities was defeating Saddam’s army, while keeping American and civilian casualties to a minimum. Once forces entered Baghdad, military planners had to contend with the threat of chemical or biological strikes and the promise that an army of suicide bombers would defend the city to the last man. These concerns, along with the responsibility of bringing food and water to desperate Iraqi civilians rightfully eclipsed the preservation of cultural objects.

Maybe this whole debate is simply a measure of the war’s success. Instead of talking about tens of thousands of Iraqis and Americans slaughtered in a grisly showdown over Baghdad, we’re focusing on the destruction of artwork. But people seem to have forgotten that the fall of Baghdad could very easily have been a horrific battle. Our perfect hindsight makes it easy to criticize the Coalition for not sprinkling a tank here and there to protect important museums; after all, a counter-attack never materialized. Yet these are not realistic demands, for isolated and charged with murky rules of engagement (is it okay to machine-gun a looter?), these tanks would have been too vulnerable to justify deploying them so precariously.

And even if we pretend for a moment that the military should have done more to protect Iraqi artifacts, the furor over the looting is quite disturbing in itself. Let’s be honest here. The outrage over lost artwork is based on the wicked premise that future generations will miss these artifacts much more than they’ll miss the thousands of people who died—or could have died—in this war. After all, there is only one Harp of Ur, but ordinary Iraqis and Americans are replaceable.

This same type of humanities hypocrisy appeared back in 2001 when the Taliban began destroying all statues in Afghanistan. There was a groundswell of international support to save the two massive Bamiyan Buddhas, which were cut into a cliff more than 1,500 years ago. The Metropolitan Museum and others even offered to pay the Taliban for the safe removal of the statues. Where were the offers to help the people of Afghanistan escape the torture of Taliban rule? No one cared enough at the time, for, quite simply, the art was more precious than the people. (Incidentally, now that the people of Afghanistan are free from the Taliban, the reconstruction of one of the Bamiyan Buddhas is underway.)

Likewise, in occupation-era France, citizens, such as those in the Lorrainian town of Jarny, went to great lengths to remove and hide stained-glass windows from their churches. Proud as this legacy makes them, it should also be a source of shame, for while France hid its stained glass from the Nazis, it gave up tens of thousands of its Jews.

In all of these examples, it would have been better if the people and the art had been protected. But that wasn’t the case, and that is a shame. But even worse, the prominent wails over art from so many refined people demean the true victims, both Iraqi and American.

At a time when so many problems threaten not Iraq’s past, but its present, its future and its people, we cannot allow this obsession with high culture to obscure the real tragedies in Iraq, or the real challenges facing the Iraqi nation.

Jonathan P. Abel ’05 is a history concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.