Iraq's Antique Roadshow

In January 1943 a frail, bookish French woman in oversized spectacles walked into the Free French command in London. She had just arrived from Marseilles by way of New York, and she wanted to be a paratrooper. Her name was Simone Weil. No one knew what to do with her, until it was discovered that she could write. The French pressed her into an office job, drafting dispatches and sorting through the piles of proposals that poured in daily for reconstruction projects in post-occupation France. At night, she locked herself in and wrote, producing (among other things) a proposal of her own, a 300-page tome titled The Need for Roots.

The work is remarkable for its content but, more than that, it is remarkable for the spirit in which it was conceived. Weil was unconcerned with rebuilding factories, infrastructure, or government in the conventional sense; what she proposed instead was a program for rebuilding the spirit of the French people. In Weil’s view, human collectivities exist to provide for the needs of the soul which “form, like our physical needs, a necessary condition of our life on this earth.” The Need for Roots, then, became a program for growing the organs in society that could feed a people’s souls—roots. The French, as she saw them, had been uprooted.

Though The Need for Roots was written for a different time and place, Weil’s thought holds special resonance for us today in the particular conditions of the US occupation of Iraq. The souls of the Iraqi people have been starved by dictatorship, genocide, three Gulf wars, and now a foreign occupation. Perhaps “reconstruction” should be geared not only to infrastructure and industry, but also to that which makes public life and nationhood, economy and industry, both possible and necessary—the souls of the people of who inhabit and make the nation. In Iraq, the past itself—its record and its physical traces—is under siege. This has implications not only for the past of Iraq, but also for the heritage of civilization itself. “Of all the soul’s needs,” Weil wrote, “none is more vital than this one for the past.” The past provides the raw materials from which we learn who we are and who we can aspire to be—it provides human beings the tools to create a future, and it offers the sustenance of a thousand generations of experience to deal with the ever-new phenomena of the world.

The range of threats to Iraq’s cultural heritage is vast, and the story goes back far beyond the 2003 invasion. Saddam Hussein’s regime may be best known for its genocidal attacks on the Kurds, but it was also responsible for subtler assaults on Iraq’s Republican past, as well as the intentional environmental destruction of the Fertile Crescent—an effort to ethnically cleanse the Shi’a farmers who inhabited the region by turning their rich marshlands (also a major world habitat for migrating birds and the largest wetland in the Middle East) into a dustbowl. Here, a few examples will have to suffice in outlining the continuing danger to Iraq’s past: the looting and subsequent misuse of Iraq’s museums, the pillaging of historical sites and its destabilizing political impact in the provinces, and the actions of the United States military in establishing bases on sites of cultural significance.

Much ink has been spilled about the looting of Iraq’s National Museum following the capture of Baghdad in March 2003. Approximately 17,000 artifacts were looted, including the 5,000 year-old Sacred Vase of Warka, the oldest surviving example of narrative relief. To date, about 10,000 of those stolen objects have been recovered (Warka Vase included) by means ranging from raids and seizures to voluntary return under amnesty to discovery through Syrian reality television; many still remain missing.

But the National Museum was not the only repository to suffer, although it has received considerably more attention than other institutions. The National Museum benefits from general Western perceptions of the country’s particular historical significance. We think of Iraq as an ancient land, the site of the of old Mesopotamia and the birthplace of world civilization. With news of the museum’s looting came an outpouring of international support and a large-scale effort to recover the stolen artifacts. International concern did not extend to the country’s more recent past and the cultural achievements of later periods, however.

In Modernism and Iraq, Columbia’s Zainab Bahrani, Professor of Near Eastern Art and Archaeology, notes, “This attitude is perhaps the main reason why… the Museum of Modern Art, famous throughout the Middle East for its extensive collection of late 19th and 20th century art, received little attention from the press or international nongovernmental organizations that mobilized so quickly to rescue stolen art and antiquities of the earlier eras of Mesopotamian antiquity.” While it existed, the Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad posed a real challenge to the consistent and pernicious notion that “the fine arts in Mesopotamia or Ottoman Iraq ended just as Modernism began to develop in the West.” With its erasure, the primitivizing myth that Iraq has no modern past edges closer to assuming the mantle of truth not only for outsiders, but also for a new generation of Iraqis growing up in the shadow of the occupation—those who will matter most truly to the nation’s future. Iraq’s modern heritage is one of decolonization, a struggle that cost blood enough in military coups against the Hashemite monarchy and later the Anglo-Iraqi War of 1941. Losing the visual and artistic record of this period is a stunning blow to the process by which both Iraqis and Americans might begin to think about the pitfalls of that first decolonization and what peace ought to entail today (a blow that few in power, Iraqi or American, seem to consider as such).

Even less notice has been taken of Iraq’s National Library and State Archive, so thoroughly wrecked by fire and looting that no plans remain of Baghdad’s infrastructure—its plans for electricity and sewage, to give just a few examples—never mind the documentary history of the nation. As of late 2007, no appreciable funding had been made available to the Library for reconstruction, and none of the major charitable organizations that traditionally take an interest in education had stepped forward (Carnegie, Gates, and MacArthur, for instance).

The National Museum just reopened on February 23, a fact much touted in the press as evidence of Iraq’s “slow return to normalcy” (AP). But a closer look at the museum’s reopening begs the question: for whom was the museum reopened, and for what purpose? "We have ended the black wind (of violence) and have started the reconstruction process," President Nouri al-Maliki declared at the opening gala with an almost brazen optimism. That optimistic front recalls the last time the National Museum was opened, under the auspices of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and Presidential Envoy L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer. On July 3, 2003, the museum exhibited a selection of 616 pieces known as the Nimrud Gold, an Assyrian treasure horde that stands as one of the museum’s centerpieces. The exhibit, ordered on short notice, opened and closed in a single day, because the CPA feared the treasure horde would be stolen if it remained in the museum. This publicity stunt, organized on a rushed schedule, was a conservator’s nightmare that endangered the safety of the artifacts. Nonetheless, it was hailed as a signal of stability and renewed sovereignty in Iraq. In reality, civil conflict in the country was kicking into overdrive. Not surprisingly, the gold soon embarked on a world publicity tour.

Al-Maliki seems to have learned an ugly lesson from the occupying powers. On a far grander scale—one that posed dangers of serious damage to far more of the collection—the grand opening of the museum on February 29 worked in the same way as the Nimrud gold exhibition. The decision to reopen the museum was taken sometime in early February, and it quickly sparked a wave of reaction in the archaeological community. (The National Museum, once controlled by the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, is now administered by the Ministry of Tourism—a detail telling enough in and of itself.) An open letter to al-Maliki drafted and signed by international archaeologists, art historians, archaeologists, curators and preservationists on February 8 pled the case succinctly:

Opening a museum is not simply unlocking a door. Preparing a museum collection for opening usually requires at least one year of careful work, even in the best of circumstances. From a curatorial perspective, it takes many months to do this in a professional and responsible manner. The plan to open one of the world’s most important museums in a period of two weeks displays a remarkable unawareness of cultural heritage management. The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities seems to be unaware that there are internationally acknowledged standards and disciplines of museology and cultural heritage management…The museums and historical sites of Iraq should not fall victim to the political whim of the moment, and be sacrificed for the sake of a public relations campaign on behalf of government. They do not belong to the government but to the people of Iraq.

Their plea fell on deaf ears, as the triumphal headlines made clear, and the house of Iraq’s ancient museum again became a propaganda instrument. It reveals how Nouri al-Maliki’s government thinks about the museum’s collection—as primarily a propaganda tool and economic resource, no longer an integral part of the nation’s past.

But cultural destruction in Iraq was not bounded to museums and institutions in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. Throughout the Fertile Crescent, looting has become a full-fledged industry. As in other countries with significant ancient sites, Iraq’s hundreds of archaeological locations were protected by armed guards before the war. When L. Paul Bremer dissolved the armed forces with CPA Executive Order Number 2 in April 2003, those guards went home. Looters moved in immediately, for reasons easy to understand.

The looters in Mesopotamia are the area’s farmers, impoverished by conditions of both the old regime and the current occupation. Much of their land was destroyed by Saddam’s reclamation policies of the 80s and 90s, and today their products can no longer find a market, since occupation forces and international contractors do not purchase Iraqi produce. These men do not conceive of themselves as looters. In their minds, they “are lords of this land,” and as a direct result, the owners of all its possessions, according to Joann Farchakh Bajjaly in “Will Mesopotamia Survive the War?” He writes, “In the same way, if they had been able, these people would not have hesitated to take control of the oil wells, because this is ‘their land.’” (Significantly, oil facilities were the only ones prioritized by the CPA for protection by American forces.) As one looter described them to Bajjaly, “These are fields full of pottery that we come and dig up whenever we are broke…Perhaps we will find something with writings on it, and it’s still intact, and that will be sold very fast for USA dollars.”

Yet, the looting industry disturbs more than the material past. The antiquities dealers are becoming a major political force, controlling certain areas and acting as go-betweens between ethnic and religious groups. They provide protection and livelihood to the tribes and villages of the region, and they protect their interests with deadly force. When authorities have attempted to curb the looting, the results have been horrific. In 2005, eight customs agents were ambushed and murdered, their bodies burned and dumped in the desert, after they had seized a cache of artifacts and arrested several artifact hunters.

“How would it be possible to save the history of the world from the hands of looters?” Bajjaly asks. It is a good question, though her answer should give us pause. “Strict laws, economic alternatives and political approval and cooperation of the tribal leaders provide the only possible solution to this dilemma,” Bajjaly writes. “Farming could provide a solution, particularly given that the majority of the looters are themselves farmers…Farming and industrial dairy products might replace the illicit excavation of antiquities as a major source of income for much of the rural population in Iraq.” There is something dangerously naïve in championing a return to farming coupled with a stern law-and-order approach, as though Pandora’s box could be closed so simply, and as though law enforcement in Iraq had the power to break the antiquities syndicates.

Perhaps there is another alternative that has so far escaped consideration. As Bajjaly notes, “By now, [the looters] know how to outline the walls of buried buildings and break directly into rooms and tombs where the objects, so prized on the world’s antiquities markets, are to be found.” The looters have become de facto archaeologists with real practical knowledge. If an economic incentive spurred them to work in excavating and preserving instead of looting and selling, this would not only preserve the treasures of Mesopotamia for the world, but also give the region’s farmers a chance to see their own land as a real inheritance, not simply a meal ticket. Such a change would entail more than just innovative policy; it would require that archeological and academic communities begin to think of antiquities and artifacts as indissociable from the people on whose land they reside—cultural property that should benefit the people who possess it and for which reverence must be cultivated. It would mean that the past would cease to be an amalgamation of objects in our eyes and become, instead, a sustaining organ of the people—their economic and spiritual roots.

There continue to be many mysteries about American conduct during the war and occupation with respect to sites of cultural significance. The looting of Baghdad’s museums, ministries and cultural institutions is one of the most infamous. Coalition manpower shortages of course played a part but, as Ambassador Barbara Bodine explained when interviewed for the film No End in Sight, “the word came from Washington that…we’re not going to stop the looting, we’re not doing police work, that’s not what we’re here for.” There is at least some logic here, though it tends to fall apart when one considers that the Bush Administration was warned repeatedly and publicly before the war by top military commanders, notably General Eric Shinseki in a 2003 Congressional testimony, that “several hundred thousand men” would be needed to secure the peace in Iraq. The invasion force ultimately comprised a paltry 160,000 troops, and even this was a substantial increase over what Rumsfeld had originally conceived under his rubric of ‘maneuver warfare.’ Quite simply, from the earliest stages of planning, US policy—whether by deliberate choice or sheer hubris and naïveté—promoted an atmosphere in which much of Iraq’s past could be ground into dust, or broken up and sold for a quick buck.

More egregious, destructive and seemingly deliberate actions by the military have also endangered Iraq’s cultural heritage. Take the ancient city of Babylon. The American military established its largest base in southern Iraq in the heart of Babylon’s ruins in April 2003, immediately following the invasion. There, it built facilities and infrastructure for 2,000 soldiers, including a helicopter-landing pad blacktopped between the temple of Alexander the Great and the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar. Extensive site damage, including bulldozing, went largely unreported in the media, with the exception of Britain’s Guardian newspaper. The damage is not only shocking but needless; the Army has never been able to articulate a reason why Babylon was chosen as a major base to begin with. Such explanations as have occasionally been offered prove flimsy, including the notion that occupation of the site effectively protected it from looters—a job that might have required a dozen men with guns, not 2,000 with bulldozers.

The base was finally closed at the end of 2004, but the damage had been done. The United States, wittingly or not, has written itself into the history of the world’s oldest places. When the people of the world visit the place of the world’s birth, they will see its aborted offspring, industrial warfare, rotting upon it.

Under the most charitable interpretation, what happened at Babylon (and Ur, and half a dozen other sites in Iraq) was a prime case of American uprootedness in action, a total blindness to the importance of the past in building a future. At worst, it amounts to holding Iraq’s culture hostage against the insurgency, in clear violation of the Hague Convention to which the United States is a signatory.

When Professor Bahrani visited Babylon and other important cultural sites in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, the frequent answer to her protests concerning American treatment of historic locations was: “Do you want us to risk the lives of soldiers to protect this site?” Arguments for ‘practical military necessity’ colluded with many of the most foolish decisions of the period, including torture at Abu Ghraib. According to its own spokesman, the CPA “ranked protecting cultural property as priority number three,” again in the name of practical military necessity. The myopia of such a position is shattering—a people deprived of their past has little reason to hope for its future, and too many reasons to turn to terrorism and insurgent warfare. In the short run, lives may be saved by leveling a mosque, or putting a sniper in a minaret, or building a base in an ancient ruin. But the damage done to those sites persists before the eyes of the people, and the vacuum it leaves saps the spirit of the people and fuels the insurgency. In the long term, it costs more in blood and treasure to destroy these places than to protect them. Quite simply, practical military necessity has been and continues to be an excuse to commit atrocities and degradations that only further endanger the people they are intended to protect—the occupying soldiers.

In a peculiar way, Iraq particularly needs an ancient past because of its strange political history as a constructed nation. The British Protectorate of Iraq was cobbled together in 1920 out of the detritus of the Ottoman Empire, a political unit with no precedent in the previous past of the region. It incorporated Kurds, Bedouin tribes, and Sunni and Shi’a Arabs into a nation whose borders were drawn largely to serve the strategic purposes of the European powers through the endgame of their colonial chess match. Rebellion broke out in 1921, and violent power struggles dogged the Protectorate (the Hashemite Monarchy that was granted independence in 1932) and the Republic (as the subsequent military government was called), resulting finally in Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist near-totalitarianism. To the extent that Iraq has been able to search for national unity, its people have had to forge it from the beauty and majesty of their land and the stunning achievements of the past. Without some change in the way both Americans and Iraqis handle that cultural heritage—both environmental and archaeological—that slender resource will not be available to the spirits of the people as they struggle through what amounts to a second decolonization.

Uprootedness is a chilling spectre for Iraq’s future, but the state of our souls, as the uprooters, also need to be tended. As Weil observed of the strange mechanics of rootless people, “Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed, for it is a self-propagating one. [Uprooted nations] hurl themselves into some form of activity necessarily designed to uproot, often by the most violent methods, those who are not yet uprooted, or only partly so.” This is no riddle, for only without the benefit of the past’s nurture could one nation declare that it was seeking to bring freedom to another. Freedom is a practice of the spirit—it cannot be given, bought, or sold, and it never blossoms from the barrel of a gun. Restless and immature, cut loose from the political heritage to which we are heirs, we have fallen victim to a way of thinking divorced from the wisdom of experience, from our roots.