It's Not The Oil, It's The Art!

"What the hell! As long as U.S. laws aren't broken, it's all right. After all,these things are not appreciated in those countries. They're brought here and given a home. Now culturedpeople can see them."

-- Lowell Collins, Houston antiquities dealer, on the plundering of Pre-Colombiansculptures from Mayan sites, quoted in The Art Stealers, Milton Esterow, Macmillan, 1972.

Here's a suggestion: arrestwhoever gave the order to leave Iraq's national museum unguarded, together with anyone who knew about it andfailed to override it, and take them to those outdoor holding cells built for terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. Wecan make room by releasing all the children we've finally admitted we've been holding among the prisoners("the radio said they were just detainees"). If we're feeling patriotic, we might want to rip theuniform of the United States of America off their backs and let them ride naked. Sound a little extreme? Readon.

The sacking of Iraq's national museum was "completely predictable," saysJane Walbaum, the president of the Archaeological Institute of America. As far back as February, the AIA hadbeen warning anyone who would listen that "following the 1991 Gulf War, archaeological sites and museumsin Iraq were looted on a large scale, with stolen antiquities appearing on the art markets in Western Europeand the United States." That the same looting was not just likely but certain to happen again, this timeon a gigantic scale, unless the U.S. took serious preventive measures, was a no-brainer.

Weeks before thieves and vandals were left free to haul away irreplaceable artefacts,destroying much of what they didn't take, the museum had also been identified as "a prime target forlooters" in a memo from retired Lt. General Jay Garner's office. Garner's people felt the museum shouldrate second behind the banks in order of security priority. Garner, the new "governor" of Iraq, wasreportedly livid when he learned he had been victimized by a bureaucratic dodge older than AncientMesopotamia: one cannot be held accountable for failing to act on a memo one has not yet "gottenaround" to reading.

"Inexcusable," said Martin Sullivan, the chair of the White House AdvisoryCommittee on Cultural Property, when U.S. forces ignored the memo, stood idly by and declined to intervene asthe museum was sacked. Sullivan and two other members of his committee resigned in protest. Bear in mind,these were not left-wing members of what Foxadelphia likes to call the "anti-Bush, anti-America"crowd. These were people who reported to the president.

Sullivan and his colleagues did the right thing, but should they have been shocked?The scandalous looting of Mesopotamia's cultural heritage, consistently described on cable TV as somethingunprecedented, was in fact a re-run of looting that went largely unreported after Gulf War One.

Immediately following the 1991 war against Iraq, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem begangetting requests to evaluate "pieces." The requests came from Americans. The "pieces" camefrom Iraq and were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because the objects presented for"evaluation" represented only a minute part of what had been stolen in the first Gulf war, the scenewas merely a microcosm of what was happening around the world at other cultural institutions (and for thebenefit of private collectors) as thieves shopped their bling-bling from the cradle of civilization.

John Malcolm Russell, writing in Archaeology in 1996, called this tragedy "TheModern Sack of Nineveh" and sounded a warning: "Today Assyria is in fashion again, and itssculptures are bringing unprecedented prices." He cited a Nineveh porch sculpture sold at auction for $12million, "by far the highest price ever paid for an antiquity."

What sounded like a warning to some ears may have rung like a dinner bell in others.As a result, many of the newly privatized artefacts are already passing through the global underground artmarket directly into the hands of collectors and dealers who know how to "appreciate" them, inexchange for cash and who knows what else.

That is why the working assumption must not be that "mistakes were made" ascommanders faced "tough calls" in the chaos.

Rather we should act on the basis that crimes against all humanity have been committedand demand a public accounting from the people who were in charge when it happened, to determine how much theyknew about what they were doing.

What a choice: either our field commanders are so ignorant and lacking in judgmentthey make George W. Bush look like Marcus Aurelius, or they are implicated in some very sinister businessindeed.

If they didn't know what they were doing, their ignorance was as inexcusable as it wasdisgraceful. They have done more damage to this country's standing abroad than they could ever be expected toimagine. They may have helped to finance decades of terrorism. If they did know what was going on, they're keyplayers in the biggest corruption scandal in U.S. military history.

The only other possible explanation is that they were acting on orders from muchhigher up the chain.

In any case, they should have already been put where cultured people can see them andinterrogated. This is no time for Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

David Vest writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. His scorching new CD,WayDown Here, is now available from CounterPunch.