BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Bodies for art

32 comments on Bodies for art

Bodies for art
: As a friend of my said, if the biggest hubub coming out of Iraq these days is over a looted musuem, that’s good news.

Hey, I’m sorry that antiquities got lifted. I’m sorry Iraqi museums didn’t have better locks. I’m sure Tommy Franks is sorry he didn’t have an extra tank to park in front of that museum.

But let’s check our priorities, people. This is a war. In a war, you’re a bit busy worrying about things other than the priorities an NPR audience would set.

Get a load of this question from today’s Doha briefing from an AP Radio reporter:

I had two questions. One was getting back to the antiquities issue. Asking people to return things now is kind of like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. Why did the coalition, when it went to great lengths to protect oil facilities not go to any lengths at all apparently to protect some of the museums in Baghdad that had great antiquities?…

GEN. BROOKS: …The efforts to secure antiquities. First, as we entered Baghdad, we were involved in very intense combat, and our focus was the combat actions necessary to remove the regime and any of its appendages. In removing the regime, there is a vacuum that is created — that certainly did occur — and the vacuum will be filled as time goes on. I don’t think that anyone anticipated that the riches of Iraq would be looted by the Iraqi people, and indeed it happened in some places. So while it may now be after the fact that that looting has occurred, it’s still important to try to restore it as much as possible. It’s simply not useful to speculate as to why we did, did not, what could we have done differently. We did what we did, and our operations were focused on objectives at hand at the time. And we believe that as time goes on we will be able to sort out this issue as well.

I’m just waiting for that story on Alternet saying that this proves the war was for oil: We protected oil wells before we protected sculpture! Philistines!

Jeesh. We knew they had a habit of blowing up oil wells. We didn’t know they had a habit of looting antiquities.

But let’s look at this another way: Pull together the parents of a bunch of Marines and ask them: Is it worth your child’s life to protect Iraqi antiquities? That’s no smart-assed question (well, it is, but it’s also legit) for with a limited number of troops, putting some of them at the museum would have taken them away from protecting people elsewhere. Dead stone heads or live breathing humans? Easy choice.

: Glenn Reynolds says this is all about the U.S. being caught in the “impotence/omnipotence double bind” — hell if we do, hell if we don’t.

32 responses to “Bodies for art”

  1. Jackie D Avatar
    Jackie D

    You’d think so, Jeff. There’s a debate going on here, though, where more than one person is saying they’d choose antiquities over human beings — their own child, if necessary.
    I guess I’m coldhearted, but I really can’t relate with this sort of mindset. For all I care, you can rip the original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to shreds, smash the Liberty Bell to smithereens and incinerate the contents of every museum in America — if it’s a choice between saving those or saving actual liberty, actual democracy and actual human beings. It’d be a shame, but I’d cry many more tears for the loss of freedom and human life.
    Not everyone feels the same. I’m still trying to figure them out.

  2. Pyecraft Avatar
    Pyecraft

    Great link, Jackie.
    If there’s no Arabic word for “shame”, they sure better invent one. This latest looting episode is a sad exposure of that region’s values. It is a peoples’ civic responsibility to protect its heritage, throughout whatever political system prevails. Yet seeing how much value they put on a human life, the Iraqi citizen’s disinterest in protecting its own past should not surprise.
    Blaming the results of these character failings on the troops is simply an immoral convenience. Ironic then, that the greatest proof of that area’s past achievements, now lies in the more appreciated, more valued museums of the infidels’ decadent cities of London and New York.
    It becomes increasingly hard to believe then, that the ancestors of these toads, once brought about the birth of all civilization. The present inhabitants seem hell-bent on causing its death.

  3. skimble Avatar
    skimble

    Is it worth your child’s life to protect Halliburton’s $7 billion no-bid contract?
    The antiquities issue was well-known by the Pentagon, because they repeatedly discussed it with invited experts for months before the invasion:
    Washington Post link

  4. Floyd McWilliams Avatar
    Floyd McWilliams

    Whatever form the reconstruction takes, if Iraq turns into a free country with a market economy it will become rich. Someone in the US will make a lot of money off Iraqi business. To object to US enrichment by way of Iraq is to object to Iraqis becoming free.

  5. Daniel J. Callaghan Avatar
    Daniel J. Callaghan

    skimble-
    Thanks for adding something intelligent to the discussion by casting out bogus accusations. I’m sure you’re just tickled with yourself for typing that snappy line about Halliburton. Never mind that our Soldiers and Marines on the ground have risked everything to make sure that there’s as little damage as possible in Iraq that will require reconstruction. Less reconstruction activity = less war profiteering, no?
    Oh, and since Halliburton isn’t even in the running for a reconstruction contract you must be referring to the sole-source emergency firefighting contract which it turns out is going to be worth a lot less than $7 billion because our military prevented the regime’s thugs from torching their own oil fields.
    Regarding the WaPo article, you pretty much validate Jeff’s opinion as expressed in his post. Let’s check our priorities people. I’m willing to bet the world’s top museum curators have a viewpoint that’s just a teensy bit more narrow than that of the Defense Secretary. While they’re worried about pottery, our nation’s leadership is concerned about a spectrum of potential risks that few of us can possibly comprehend.
    Ask yourself this – if the items contained in the Iraqi National Museum were so important to the cultural heritage of the country why did the Iraqis themselves plunder them at the first opportunity? When is someone going to cast blame on the citizenry for essentially raping themselves? I’ve yet to hear a single commentator make that observation.
    It’s simply easier to blame the U.S. military for everything.

  6. skimble Avatar
    skimble

    Halliburton has indeed made its intentions known that it is interested in reconstruction contracts

  7. Lawrence Haws Avatar
    Lawrence Haws

    Maybe if Turkey hadn’t blocked the 4th ID from getting into Iraq there would’ve been enough boots on the ground for a commander to post some troops at the museum? The loss is tragic, but it’s still way down on the list of military priorities. Listening to people complain about it, you’d think American G.I.s were the ones doing the looting.

  8. A Berman Avatar
    A Berman

    Let’s stop rationalizing a big failure, OK?
    People are paid to risk their lives to protect property every day. That’s a big part of the job of cops and firefighters. The principle of ownership is a big one, and defending that principle has always been judged to be worth the lives of our children.
    And this was and is more than just property. High school textbooks talk about the burning of the library of Alexandria, over 2000 years ago. 2000 years from now, they’ll be talking about the looting of the Baghdad Museum.
    Furthermore, the military themselves disagree with you. Protecting the antiquities was publically accepted by the military to be a key part of the mission. That part of the mission failed spectacularly.

  9. Cronaca Avatar
    Cronaca

    I was as shocked as anyone to hear about the looting of the museums, but I’m also enough of a historian (and humanist, I hope) to keep things in perspective. In particular, there’s still a lot we don’t know about what happened: were the vaults looted beforehand by Saddam’s people, and the mobs allowed to rampage to cover their tracks? Why were the vaults so easily opened, or were the reports of their strength exaggerated? Above all, we don’t have full information on what resources were available to the military commanders at the time the looting took place — but seeing that the battle for Baghdad was still very much hot at the time, with constant risk of counterattack, guerrilla ambushes, and suicide bombings, it is certain that the limited manpower available was, not surprisingly, allocated to the most urgent tasks.

  10. Moira Avatar
    Moira

    The loss of antiquities is great, but I don’t blame the US troops. In 1991 during the aftermath of the first Gulf War when the Kurds and Shia rose up against Saddam, widespread looting ensued and several regional museums in northern and southern Iraq were looted of about 4,000 objects. The Baghdad museum staff had every reason to expect the same (more reason, given the value of the items), and they had months to prepare for it. The Baghdad blogger Salem Pax wrote back in February and early March that merchants were removing the contents of their stores and placing them in home basements in anticipation of looting, which leads me to believe that refrigerator salesmen in Baghdad have more sense than museum curators. Why didn’t the museum personnel move all transportable objects ahead of time to safe locations and hire armed guards and barricade the doors and windows? They surely knew that the museum would be a “high value target” for looters, and evidence suggests that it was partly an inside job. Glass cutters not sold in Iraq were found in the wreckage. Copies of items of originals that were on loan around the world were passed over, but originals were taken. Someone opened a number of the steel vaults because they showed no sign of forced entry or picked locks. And the timing was highly suspicious–the statue of Saddam in the traffic circle fell just before 7 PM on Wednesday, and the looters were at the museum door before dawn on Thursday.
    Blame for the ransacking of the museum starts with the Baathists, curse them, who would have protected the museum contents if they cared about the country enough to protect its history and the patrimony of the Iraqi people, but of course they didn’t. They didn’t care about Iraqi cultural property any more than the Iraqis cared about Kuwaiti cultural properties when they occupied Kuwait. The museums of Kuwait were looted, and out of malice the thugs burned what they couldn’t haul away, including the museum buildings. The US had worked with historians for months before the war and added thousands of historical sites to the Pentagon database to insure that no bombs would drop near protected sites and they didn’t drop any bombs near those sites.
    One museum employee complained that only five US troops would have saved the museum, but if that’s true, couldn’t five Baghdad policemen or five armed guards have done the same? And had the staff put heavy barricades in place in addition to hiring armed guards, wouldn’t the antiquities, in the main if not completely, have been saved? When I consider the looting of the museum, what strikes me is not how the US troops failed to race through Baghdad through pockets of Fedayeen and an as yet unknown number of Special Republican Guards, but how little the museum staff did ahead of time–out of all the things they could have done–to protect the museum in the event that troops couldn’t get there immediately. Today I read that the museum has hired armed guards to protect what is left. How about that.
    As for protecting the oil ministry–oil is the wealth of the Iraqi people, and the reconstruction of the country and its economy can’t commence until the oil starts flowing again. The allies first protected the wells and offshore platforms because of what was done in Kuwait in 1991. Saddam had threatened that if he was forced out of Kuwait, he would leave it burning, and he did. Iraqi troops set fire to more than 700 oil wells as they were retreating, and it took nine months to extinguish them. And before the fires, Iraq had intentionally releasing 11 million barrels of oil into the Arabian Gulf, oiling more than 800 miles of Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian coastline and cost more than $700 million to clean up. Thanks to psyops urging the Iraqi troops not to destroy the wells, and thanks to the allies quick work to secure Iraq’s oil wells and offshore platforms, that isn’t a problem here. And by protecting the Oil ministry, the Iraqi economy can be jumpstarted immediately, not after nine months of repair work.

  11. Tresho Avatar
    Tresho

    I agree with Moira. The protection of the antiquities was fully within the power of the museum staff and Iraqi authorities prior to the onset of the war. The mid-East mindset of blaming someone else for one’s own defects is again shown.

  12. Lonewacko Avatar
    Lonewacko

    Whether the museum had been pre-looted, there’s still the library fire. I suggest for the next country, we should actually encourage looting and the burning of centuries-old manuscripts. Nothing like starting fresh, right? After burning down the buildings, let’s put a McDonald’s and a Disney store in its place.
    While I usually disagree with Fisk and Pilger and Chomsky, and I more or less supported the war, in this case I’m disgusted. Avoiding damage to shrines and the like was part of our mission, and as indicated above, that part of the mission was a spectacular failure. I have trouble believing a statement like “I don’t think that anyone anticipated that the riches of Iraq would be looted by the Iraqi people.”
    These events have been, and will continue to be, used by people like Fisk to make the U.S. look like a bunch of nekulturni cowboys. Maybe for once he’s right. The attempts by some to scoff at the destruction of priceless artifacts and to present false choices only makes it worse.

  13. James Avatar
    James

    I’d remind you that empathy isn’t like currency. I can feel badly for the deaths in Iraq and I can feel badly about antiquities being destroyed. By feeling badly about one I don’t suddenly not feel bad about another. I do not think anyone is saying that a piece of pottery is worth more than a life.
    As for protecting a nation’s antiquities, it was a great conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, who believed that tradition and commitment to a nation’s past and shared heritage was important. This, of course, was in the context of the deliberate wholesale destruction of the past during the French Revolution.
    The destruction and looting, the deliberate sabotage of a nation’s shared treasure, is a symbolic and psychological break. It is the purposeful and chaotic overthrow of the past.
    Maybe starting anew requires such breaks. And those breaks might have a necessary messiness to them.
    Whether you believe a connection to a symbolic and intellectual past is as important and significant for life in Iraq as the money that will come from oil fields is another matter, but please don’t mischaracterize people’s viewpoints that art comes before life. Because that idea is simply dishonest.

  14. Andrea Harris Avatar
    Andrea Harris

    James: it isn’t wrong to suppose some people prefer artifacts to live human beings when they openly admit it. Read some of the commenters on the Nielsen Hayden site linked in the post and you will see what we mean.
    Lonewacko: did you read anything anyone else here wrote, especially Moira? Here, I’ll quote a passage to help you: “The US had worked with historians for months before the war and added thousands of historical sites to the Pentagon database to insure that no bombs would drop near protected sites and they didn’t drop any bombs near those sites.” Maybe you don’t realize it, but Iraq, being that it is the celebrated “cradle of civilization,” is one gigantic archaeological site. There was only so much we could protect. We did what we could — took precautions to avoid blowing up the ruins or Ur and places like that — and I can only suppose the idea was that people in charge of places like this library, that had smaller objects that could be more easily packed away — were supposed to take care that that stuff was out of harms way. So as to this library that burned down — what the hell were the books still doing on the shelves? This was not a surprise attack — the administration had been telegraphing it for what, several months? Quite frankly I am suspicious as to what exactly went up in smoke vs. what had already been secreted away somewhere — or sold — but I guess it’s better to make a big emotional show and moan about “the Library at Alexandria.” And by the way, they’ve built a new one.

  15. Ben Avatar
    Ben

    Guys, Look, whether it was Ba’athists or ordinary Iraqis who looted the Museum, the fact still remains it was the Iraqis that did this to themselves. If you wreck your own house, blaming me because I might have stopped you from doing something stupid is silly. Blaming the US military for not protecting the Museum while conducting military operations, protecting it from the Iraqis themselves who otherwise was not a threat to our forces, makes little sense.
    It is apparent we took great pains to avoid bombing or damaging the various cultural items of Iraq. But if the Iraqis turn around and destroy what we did not, especially considering that it is their stuff, blaming the US is rather wacko. What were we supposed to do, shoot the civilians?
    While guarding the antiquities from war damage was part of the military mission, it gets lumped in with removing Saddam, finding his WMD, rescuing our POWs, hunting down terrorists, etc. All in all, this “spectacular failure” does not even rate when weighed against the incredible success overall. (And in 3 weeks!)
    Oh about the Halliburton contracts. I see a double standard here. No one is complaining about the TotalFinaELF and LukOil contracts and French/Russian actions to stop this war and keep Saddam in power.

  16. Brian Avatar
    Brian

    This really puts the mess in Mesopotamia. A few thoughts:
    1. The museum caper was an inside job. Saddam’s boys smuggle oil, why not art?
    2. This is why these sorts of things belong in safe and cozy Western museums, like the Elgin Marbles in London or the Ur collection at the U. of Pennsylvania. (Great collection by the way, drop by and see it sometime.)
    3. When we conservatives start talking about “art-schmart, who needs it”, we sound like colossal rubes. Just yesterday Limbaugh said “Iraqi culture? What Iraqi culture?” I gagged and switched to NPR. I soon gagged again and switched back. But try to show a little class, people. I’m just sayin, is all.

  17. Diana Avatar
    Diana

    Oh, now I see the two parties lining up. Let’s call ’em the blues and the greens.
    Blues: No blood for oil. The destruction of the Museum and the Library, and the looting prove that the US only cared for one thing.
    Greens: Democracy for Iraq. The destruction of the Museum and the Library and the looting must be put in perspective.
    I’m not a member of either party. I supported the war and always will, no matter what happens, because getting ridding of Saddam and Baathism were necessary to change a chaotic world order for the better.
    But the looting was a diversion from that. Looting is bad because it’s theft and theft is wrong because it’s against the law and breaking the law is never right. Never.
    The “let’s excuse the looters” here: if it’s not so bad, why not let it continue? If it’s not so bad, why not allow your own neighborhoods to be looted?
    How would you like the Smithsonian, the Met, the American Museum of Natural History, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and MoMa to be looted?
    “Oil is the wealth of the Iraqi people…” those treasures in the Museum are also the wealth of the Iraqi people. And yours. And mine. Protecting the ministry of oil and not the Museum and the Library, when the brass KNEW about the importance of both those insitutions, is a major fuckup.
    I cannot believe the philistine garbage that some of the commenters here have spewed.
    Take your party lines and shove ’em where the moon don’t shine.
    I prefer independent thought.
    The war was good. The destruction that followed was bad.

  18. Jay Manifold Avatar
    Jay Manifold

    It’s good to see a challenge to the exclusive-or logic being bandied about, ie we could save lives or we could save artifacts, and which is more important? That’s not the way risk management works: besides risk avoidance and risk acceptance, there are also risk transference and risk mitigation. A minor change in prioritization and redeployment of a couple of squads of infantry and this would never have happened. And it must never happen again. If people who supported the war raise enough of a stink, very likely it won’t happen again.

  19. Diana Avatar
    Diana

    Jay: As the speedy deployment of troops to the Ministry of Oil shows, the brass knew that Certain Things had to be protected. As the WaPo link (above) indicates, the brass knew that those antiquities were priceless. As “A Berman” points out, we sacrifice lives (fireman, cops) to protect private property here. And no one is blaming the ass-in-the-grass soldier. I blame the brass. Yup: I blame the brass for a major league screwup.
    An indicator of how they KNEW they screwed up, even if some bloggers don’t want to admit it, is that they changed the policy and began to crack down on looters. If they weren’t doing anything wrong, then why change the policy.

  20. Myles Avatar
    Myles

    Well said that man. They should have protected the hospitals as well and so says the Geneva convention. It’s not as if it wasn’t obvious that there would be looting.

  21. Myles Avatar
    Myles

    Sorry Diana, didn’t look at the name on the post.

  22. Martin Knight Avatar
    Martin Knight

    My question is; what makes everyone here so sure that the museum’s most valuable treasures were still in the museum as of the time the military rode into Baghdad?
    Saddam considered Iraq to be his personal property … what makes everyone so sure he didn’t have them buried somewhere? To my knowledge, the museum was closed to the Iraqi public many years ago.
    And Skimble? The Halliburton subsidiary that got the contract you’re talking about as if it’s some big conspiracy? It’s called Boots & Coots International Well Control Inc. They are the absolute best in the world at fighting oil well fires.
    So they got the contract based on the merits. No conspiracy here. Move along.

  23. Jay Manifold Avatar
    Jay Manifold

    Diana – We are in strenuous agreement. ;)

  24. Moira Avatar
    Moira

    I’m not arguing that antiquities don’t matter compared to oil, but I think it’s important to note that oil ministry employees couldn’t be expected to protect the contents of the building from looters, but museum employees could have been expected to do everything they possible ahead of time to safeguard the museum contents. They did not.
    No, I would not merely shrug if the Smithsonian or MOMA or Louvre were looted, and think, well, those losses are unfortunate but not really important. But I would expect the employees of those museums, if they had months to prepare for a certain invasion and every reason to fear looters, to take all measures available to them to put the objects out of the reach of looters beforehand. Just before the end of WWII, the museum employees in France removed the paintings and statues from the museums and placed them in basements, tunnels, and mine shafts so that they wouldn’t be accessible to looters. They didn’t simply hope that the allies would show up to protect them, and we have those practical, forward-thinking, and self-reliant people to thank today.
    The burning of the National Archives and Library of Qurans was as heartbreaking as the looting of the antiquities museum. I would have expected the museum to be a looting target because of the black market value of the items, but I would never have expected cultural vandalism in the archives and libraries; I do think the burning of the libraries caught everyone off guard. The museum was looted on Thursday, and the archives and library were set on fire on Saturday for reasons that are not at the moment known. I haven’t read anywhere that the employees of those institutions, aware of the museum looting, asked for protection. And if those employees did feel they had reason to worry, they had two days to gather a protective guard.
    Robert Fisk wrote that he ran to the Marine headquarters to inform them that the library was burning–flames 100 feet in the air he said, and denounces them for not showing up. But what Fisk doesn’t say is that all the Marines could have done is watch the building burn. (what a photo op that would have been–a stationary Marine standing near the burning Library of Qurans with no mention of the fact that the Marine was helpless to put the fire out because the Baathists had cut off the water). The Baathists had turned off the water supply and electricity grid (needed to pump the water) long before the troops got there, so there was no way to put out the fire. The Iraqi electricity grid is set up like a spiderweb across the country; you can’t just flip a switch to get it turned on, and if you do, you’ll fry the whole system. As the troops approached each city during the last three weeks, the Iraqis turned off the electricity and water, knowing that it would be a nightmare to get those services going again, and here again we have a prime example of the bastard Baathists’ disregard for the Iraqi people. The allies were careful not to bomb electricity grids and water processing plants, but it will now take more than a month to get those services going across the country because the effort needs to be coordinated across the country.
    There were good practical and psychological reasons for letting the Iraqis loot the Baathist headquarters, homes of regime leaders, and government buildings other than the oil ministry. For one, it reinforced the reality that the regime had fallen; many Iraqis right up until the last minute were afraid that the allies would strike a deal with Saddam and let him stay, and positioning troops in front of the Ministry of Information or Ministry of Defense would have reinforced those fears. It also served to let the Iraqis feel that they had a hand in destroying their hated government, a valuable thing in a region in which the application of US power is decried as an insult and humiliation to Arab pride. And those buildings had already been bombed, so its not as if we could have just repopulated them with new employees and carried on.
    The looting crossed the line when private homes and businesses began to be looted although it needs to be said and isn’t being widely reported that the warehouses, businesses, and homes were in the main owned by known high Baathist party members, also a number of hospitals that were for Baathists only–has anyone considered that the looted hospitals were closed because of the looting even though they were supposedly filled to the ceiling with Iraqi citizens and soldiers wounded in the war? How could you close a hospital that’s over capacity with wounded people? I’m not suggesting that innocent people weren’t also looted, but they were in the minority and you only need to read up on the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew or the LA Riots to realize that even in a stable democracy, the collapse of local government and/or the uprising of an enraged mob will take time for even the best trained professionals to subdue.
    You can’t accuse the troops of setting up an equivalency between the commercial value of a barrel oil against the historic value of an object like the Code of Hammurabi tablets. The loss of the tablets (if they were in the museum) is tremendous, and I, for one, appreciate the magnitude of the loss. But the country can’t run without its oil, and failing to secure the oil assets could have meant that the already daunting objective of creating a new government from scratch would have been additionally complicated, perhaps to a degree that would have utterly undermined the process. As it is, the allies are under tremendous pressure from the world community and a fair number of Iraqis to leave the country. They have to put together a stable Iraqi government and get the economy going in lightening time, and they couldn’t hope to do that without getting the country’s oil production going as soon as possible. That’s why the Ministry of Oil needed to be protected and the Ministries of Defense and Information did not.
    I can’t help but recognize the sad irony of the factor of time involved in this discussion–the expedience of rebuilding that required protecting the Ministry of Oil for Iraq’s future versus the loss of historical artifacts from the museum that recorded Iraq’s past. But I also recognize that 1) there is hope of recovery for the museum objects and 2) Iraq’s history hasn’t been obliterated simply because some of the artifacts recording that history are presently dispersed. As as for the oil, if the rebuilding of the country were now hampered by burning oil fields and destroyed wells–dragging the process out for many additional months–the additional stress and constraints would have made an already difficult process that much more difficult. We have very little time to stabilize the country, whereas we do have time to recover the stolen artifacts.
    Am I sorry that important Iraqi cultural assets weren’t better protected? Yes. Do I think the US troops bear sole or even most of the blame? No.

  25. Diana Avatar
    Diana

    oil ministry employees couldn’t be expected to protect the contents of the building from looters, but museum employees could have been expected to do everything they possible ahead of time to safeguard the museum contents.
    I don’t understand this at all. Why do you have higher expectations for the museum employees than for the oil ministry employees?
    (It’s my understanding that there were only five employees at the museum.)

  26. Diana Avatar
    Diana

    PS Moira, I disassociate myself from anything Fisk writes. The rest of your very long comment is irrelevant to my points.

  27. Rachel Avatar
    Rachel

    I’ll bet the antiquities were fakes and that Sadamm had made off with the real stuff long ago. The Anthropological Museum in Mexico City has a similiar case a few years ago, when things on display turned out to be faked.

  28. Moira Avatar
    Moira

    I had higher expectations for the museum employees than for the oil ministry employees because I expected the museum employees to care about safeguarding antiquities like the golden harp and tablets of Hammurabi whereas I did not expect oil ministry employees to care what happened to their swivel chairs and computers; moreover, the oil ministry employees knew that government buildings were being bombed, so they weren’t likely to stick around, but the museum employees had assurance that the museum would not be a bombing target. Five museum employees standing outside the museum at dawn last Thursday could not be expected to protect the museum, but they had months to get the objects to a safe location, to hire armed guards, to set up steel and concrete temporary barricades at the windows and doors, to make arrangements with the Baghdad police ahead of time to patrol the museum grounds and get word to the coalition (through foreign peers if necessary) that the police were non-combatants protecting the facility.
    And I don’t agree with you that:
    “An indicator of how they KNEW they screwed up, even if some bloggers don’t want to admit it, is that they changed the policy and began to crack down on looters. If they weren’t doing anything wrong, then why change the policy.”
    Look at Basra. The looting was widespread and the British allowed it (as if they could stop it) against government buildings, Baathist buildings, Saddam’s palace, and the homes of Baathist officials like Chemical Ali. They started to crack down when the looting extended to businesses, banks, and Western hotels. The looting in Basra has subsided to a great degree because citizens stepped in to stop the looters, because the British shot and killed five armed looters at a bank who had fired on the British for telling them to stop, and because the British started to arrest the looters. The British in Basra didn’t “change the policy” because cultural assets had been targeted, but because the looting had evolved to a point at which they could and needed to step it. So why is the crackdown on looting in Baghdad, now that the government buildings have all been cleaned out, the result of “Brass” confronting its failure to stop the museum looting? It seems to me that the US troops in Baghdad are following the same model set by the British troops in Basra. BTW-The looting in Basra still isn’t completely under control (partly thanks to Saddam’s having emptied the prisons of the worst criminals a few months ago), and that is a city with one-quarter the population of Baghdad and a one-week head start on Baghdad in terms of coalition control. We can therefore expect the Baghdad looting will be that much more difficult to get under control.

  29. Charlie T. Avatar
    Charlie T.

    “This is a war. In a war, you’re a bit busy worrying about things other than the priorities an NPR audience would set.”
    Good grief. Dubya’s anti-intellectualism is catching on in surprisnig places.

  30. Lonewacko Avatar
    Lonewacko

    People, people. This case is closed. Saddam et al took all the antiquities, ancient manuscripts, and secret police files a long time ago. Nothing was lost here except a few fakes and some scratch paper.

  31. Someone Avatar
    Someone

    Charlie T.:
    Please don’t confuse anti-intellectualism (“no one cares about the artifacts”) with visceralism (“there are more important things to worry about than the artifacts”).

  32. Rachel Cohen Avatar
    Rachel Cohen

    “I had higher expectations for the museum employees than for the oil ministry employees because I expected the museum employees to care about safeguarding antiquities like the golden harp and tablets of Hammurabi”
    Don’t be naive. These people were political appointees who got their jobs thru bribes and favors. That’s how the Mid=-East works. They might have paid lip service to the glories of Iraq’s past, but they’re no saints in the service of art.