The Second Sacking Of Baghdad

In what turned out to be uncannily prophetic, in February of this year Saddam Hussein had likened theAmericans to the Mongol hordes that had destroyed Baghdad in 1258. Bush as a modern-day Hulagu, Genghis Khan’sgrandson, has since unleashed his hordes riding Humvees and Bradleys, and like the Mongols who often droveslaves, conquering armies and mercenaries ahead to do the dirty job of fighting and pillaging cities on their path, thisnew horde set ‘liberated’ Iraqis on the loose in their own cities.

The sheer magnitude of this looting is staggering. Thirty-nine of the forty hospitals in Baghdad are notfunctioning because there’s nothing left. Private and public properties alike have been stripped ofeverything down to electrical sockets. The Iraqi National Library and Archives, which housed preciousmanuscripts and rare versions of the Qur’an, has been razed to ground. It is estimated that 170000 pieces ofhistorical artefacts from Babylonia, Assyria, Sumeria, Akkadia, Nineveh and other centres of the Mesopotamiancivilisation have been stolen from the National Museum of Antiquities: everything from pre-historic stonetools to tablets containing Hammurabi’s code to Parthian sculptures.

There is even talk now that the looting may have been a concerted effort by collectors to get pricelessartefacts out of the country. According to Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and along-time critic of the administration’s policies vis-à-vis Iraq, a group of private collectors that nowhas the sympathetic ear of the Bush administration wants to repeal laws in Iraq that prevent archaeologicalcollections from being taken out of the country.

That the US armed forces stood by and watched all this looting is well documented and not even disputed bythe administration. However, a more serious charge by an eyewitness published in the Swedish newspaper DagensNyheter alleges that the US Marines actually encouraged looters after breaking down doors to certaingovernment buildings.

All the protestations that there was nothing the US & Britain could have done to prevent lawlessness orthat their troops are not trained in peacekeeping is not only disingenuous because there were plenty offorewarning from myriad experts, but also a reprehensible abnegation of responsibility. The argument that theoccupiers had to choose between saving people and saving historical and private property does not wash either.

They are expected to save both. They are expected to maintain law and order with a firm hand, to ferret outcriminals, to deal with protests against their occupation, to ensure that basic services remain uninterrupted,to address public grievances, to prevent fights between the various factions, to ensure there’s adequatefood and water. In short, they’re expected to govern. And without committing any human rights abuses evenwhen the odd rock or grenade is hurled at them by the disgruntled local populace. Whoever said occupation waseasy or that the price to pay for it can entirely come from oil-wells? Who is to tell the cowboys inWashington that there’s more to the protocol of war than riding into town and firing from six-shooters?

If allowing the law and order situation to break down was bad enough, the administration’s response canonly be termed as appalling. "Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things,"Rumsfeld, that paragon of sensitivity and uprightness, said glibly and patronisingly when queried byreporters. I have to wonder if he would be able to continue taking that remarkably broadminded view of Iraqilawlessness if the looting were happening in his home.

Won’t somebody tell him it’s not about Iraqi exuberance at having been ‘freed’ or the picture ofthe same person carting off the same vase being telecast twenty times on the telly, but about fulfillingresponsibilities that have been codified in the same Geneva Convention he had quoted when confronted withimages of American POWs on Arab TV? That, for all the tyranny of the Saddam Hussein regime, at least theresidents of Baghdad had basic services, medical care and the right to hold on to their property, all ofwhich have vanished under the liberating force of the Americans?

In all this there’s an element of disdain for Iraqi treasures and dignity that’s hard to ignore. Theconstant characterisation of this conflict as an operation of liberation smacks of renewing the doctrine ofthe white man’s burden in the under-developed world, and these modern-day missionaries have come to save theIraqis from themselves, and not simply in political terms. Where there is proselytising zeal, disdain cannotbe far behind, and in less enlightened people they are often two facets of the same sentiment. As in when amarine watching the looting shrugs and asks what else one can expect of the Iraqis. This to him is clearlyjustification enough for his civilising presence in that country.

What he and Rumsfeld don’t tell the world is that the looting did not begin with the Iraqis, but with theMarines the day they occupied the international airport outside Baghdad, when they pocketed gold-platedfaucets, liquor, vases, artwork and even doorknobs. But then, perhaps, what the Marines were doing was sharingin the spoils of war, or, as the perpetrators claimed, only taking ‘souvenirs’, a term that is not only alot more civilised, but also meant to pre-empt any criticism later on. It is as Amitav Ghosh wrote in In anAntique Land, ‘… the interest of the powerful defined necessity, while the demands of the poorappeared as greed.’

Yes, the rapacious residents of Saddam City were surely driven by greed, while the occupying forces had nochoice but to put an end to the evil regime. As is this war to begin with, which is not one massive lootingspree of Iraqi oil and infrastructure, but a liberation of the oppressed. The very kind of liberation thecolonial cultures of Europe embarked upon the world over, including Iraq, pillaging their cultural heritage inthe name of scholarship and preservation and imposing their will on colonised peoples.

Even the rhetoric is similar. "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors orenemies, but as liberators. Your wealth has been stripped of you by unjust men... The people of Baghdad shallflourish under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws." So said General F.S. Maude,commander of British forces in Iraq in 1917. Today the tenor of Bush’s message to the Iraqis is not verydifferent.

After watching the events unfolding since the war began, especially since the ‘liberation’, I have toconclude that Saddam got it wrong. The comparisons with the Mongol hordes can be taken only so far.

The Mongol hordes looted and pillaged because that was what invading armies in those days did. The Mongolshad no use for the books and art and learning of the peoples they conquered. At least not at first. Nor didthey even attempt dissimulation like the kind we’re seeing today for their actions. If they used propaganda,it has lost out to the memory of their more direct methods of subjugating and terrorising people.

Further, there was no Geneva Convention to codify the conduct of war during those days. Nor the HagueConvention regarding the protection of cultural heritage, which neither of the two civilising countries inthis conflict has yet signed. And yet the Mongols paid the vanquished the ultimate compliment: with the malleability typical of nomads, they settled downamongst and assimilated into the very peoples whose cultural icons they destroyed earlier, be it in China or West Asia or onthe banks of the Volga. Certainly I don't suggest that the Americans do the same, but clearly there are numerous other ways of showingrespect, none of which seem to have occured to them yet

On the other hand, not only have these modern-day hordes allowed the destruction of millennia of humanhistory and the pillaging of hospitals and schools and administrative centres out of sheer wantonness,arrogance, apathy and incompetent planning, they are equally unlikely to learn anything from the conquered.‘Stuff happens,’ as Rumsfeld said. Or as Joshua Moravchik, an apologist for the administration from theAmerican Enterprise Institute pointed out, while justifying the need to only protect oil, that the oil fieldswere of primary importance not for the Americans but for the Iraqis themselves as a source of income torebuild their hospitals. The very hospitals the Americans oversaw the destruction of so that they could thenmagnanimously rebuild them with the help of Iraqi oil and Bechtel’s vast experience.

In search of a more apt historical parallel, I’m tempted to think of the Bush administration as beingcomprised of philistines. But then again I’m not so sure. Modern researchers believe that quite contrary topopular belief, the Philistines were a cultured people.

Balaji Venkateswaran lives near San Francisco and is known to express his opinions at the most inopportunemoments.