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The Violent U.S. Character
It’s quite short of historic perspective as it keeps up a tale of "good Americans" before GWB, but the piece hits a nail which, to my utter shame, even I usually avoid to hit directly:
[T]here’s a deeper reason why the popular impeachment movement has never taken off — and it has to do not with Bush but with the American people. Bush’s warmongering spoke to something deep in our national psyche. The emotional force behind America’s support for the Iraq war, the molten core of an angry, resentful patriotism, is still too hot for Congress, the media and even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront directly. It’s a national myth. It’s John Wayne. To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness — come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. And we’re not ready to do that.
[…]
Bush tapped into a deep American strain of fearful, reflexive bellicosity, which Congress and the media went along with for a long time and which has remained largely unexamined to this day. Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn against some part of themselves.
Why Bush hasn’t been impeached
The Looting of Iraqi Cultural Heritage
– ‘Stop the looters destroying history’ 26/10/2006
– New shadows are cast over Iraq’s pre-Islamic art 11/09/2006
– New Concern Over Fate of Iraqi Antiquities 10/09/2006
– Chalmers Johnson on Robbing the Cradle of Civilization Sept. 2006
– Iraq’s Head of Antiquities Quits After Looting of Ancient Treasures 28/08/2006
– Iraqi Museum Sealed Against Looters 27/08/2006
– The Black Market – The Other Business of Art 09/08/2006
– Entemena recovered 26/07/2006
– Iraq – Still ‘Liberating’, Still Looting – Iraq’s Heritage Threatened 29/05/2006
– More recoveries for the Iraq Museum 21/03/2006
– Three years after looting of Iraqi National Museum: an official whitewash of US crime 07/04/2006
– U.S. admits military damaged Babylon ruins 14/01/2006
– More than 13,000 archaeological pieces still missing: police source 22/01/2006
– The US could have saved Iraq’s cultural heritage 26/01/2006
– Tomb raiders 19/01/2006
– Protecting Iraq’s Ancient Heritage (November 1996-November 2005)
– Pillaging the Gardens of Babylon, The Independent,11/9/05
– The Casualties of War: The Truth about the Iraq Museum By Matthew Bogdanos, American Journal of Archaeology, July 2005
– Looting of ancient sites threatens Iraqi heritage By Mark Wilkinson, Reuters 6/29/05
– Iraq’s treasures still being looted By James Menendez, BBC World service 6/21/05
– Archaeologists fight to save Iraqi sites By Owen Bowcott. The Guardian 6/20/05
– The UK government must act now. The director of the British Museum reflects on the looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad, and what now needs to be done By Neil MacGregor, The Art Newspaper, 6/4/05
– Thousands of stolen Iraqi artifacts found By Betsy Pisik, The Washington Times, 6/4/05
– Tracking Lost Empires. A New Database Documents Iraqi Sites, E. Berg and L. Woodville
– Looting Iraq: A Conversation With Museum Director Donny George, Philip Boroff reporter, Manuela Hoelterhoff editor, 1/15/05
– Cultural Leaders say Looting of Iraq’s Antiquities Continues By Barbara Schoetzau, New York 1/6/05
– The British Museum’s “Report on Meeting at Babylon 11th – 13th December 2004” signed by J.E. Curtis, Keeper, Department of the Ancient Near East.
Asset Valuation: Looted art carries it’s own set of problems Lawrence M. Kaye and Howard N. Spiegler, 05/24/04 New York Law Journal
– The website of The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARII – formerly the American Association for Research in Baghdad, AARB): http://www.taarii.org/
– Stop, Thieves! Recovering Iraq’s Looted Treasures Roger Atwood, 10/03/04 The Washington Post
– The massacre of Mesopotamian archaeology: Looting in Iraq is out of control, Joanne Farchakh, 09/21/04 The Daily Star – Lebanon
– Looting of Iraqi Cultural Heritage Sites Worsens After Major Combat, Says CU’s Bahrani, 09/10/04 Columbia University News
– Plundering the Past: Freedom brings surge in looting of antiquities from Ur and other Mesopotamian sites, Hussein Ali al-Yasiri, 09/06/04 IWPR
– Coalition forces are doing little to prevent the widespread looting and destruction of Iraq’s world-famous historical sites, Zainab Bahrani, 08/31/04 Guardian Unlimited
– “The Art of War.” A Minnesota reservist is the U.S. military¹s only professional curator. Meet the Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ Corine Wegener, Iraq war hero, Adam Minter, 8/04 The Rake
– raq: the legacy of neglect and conflict, Jason Edward Kaufman, 5/1/04 The Art Newspaper
– Archaeologists review loss of valuable artifacts one year after looting, William Harms, 4/15/04 News Office
– Archeologists mourn plunder of Iraq’s treasures, Luke Baker, 4/10/04 Reuters
– The Treasure Hunter, John Russell is a real-life Indiana Jones, out to protect Iraq’s ancient artifacts from looters. Andrew Lawler, 4/4/2004 The Boston Globe
– Protecting antiquities in Iraq an uphill battle, Neela Banerjee and Micah Garen, 4/4/2004 The New York Times
– A Market For Injusticen, Susan Pagani, 03/11/2004 San Antonio Current
– Iraq National Library fire: more than met the eye 09 June 2004
– Spoils of War: The Antiquities Trade and the Looting of Iraq, Gregory Elich http://www.globalresearch.ca
– Cops and Markets Use incentives, not tighter bans, to preserve Iraq’s heritage, 2/6/04 Opinion Journal
– ‘Pit bull’ dogs Iraq Museum looters, Mary Wiltenburg, 2/20/04 The Christian Science Monitor
– Iraq Journal: Grave Robbers’ Looting Spree , Robert E. Sullivan, 1/16/04 http://www.foxnews.com
– The Australian Archaeological Association (AAA) urgently calls on the Australian Government to help implement and maintain protective measures for the monuments and portable cultural heritage of Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia).
– Looted Iraqi Art Displayed Online by Ryan Singel
– Ancient Iraqi Sites Show Theft, Destruction reports that although U.S. bombs spared most sites and treasures, some ancient locations in Iraq have been seriously damaged by recent looting. National Geographic News.
– http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/iraqcrisis/index.html: This website chronicles the role that the British Museum has taken in co-ordinating this international effort under the auspices of UNESCO and at the request of staff from the Iraq Museum: Keith Watenpaugh, Edouard Méténier, Jens Hanssen, Hala Fattah.
– Opening the Doors:Intellectual Life and Academic Conditions in Post-War Baghdad. A Report of the Iraqi Observatory 15 July 2003
– 2003- Iraq War & Archaeology This site lists and maintains relevant information regarding the Iraq War and its impact on archaeological/historical sites/monuments/artifacts.
– more links can be found at: http://www.savingantiquities.org/k-safe-resources.htm
– Art Loss In Iraq (aspects of International law about protection of cultural heritage)
– US accused of plans to loot Iraqi antiques 07/04/2003
– Stories and facts behind the looting of the Archeological Museum in Baghdad 10/04/2003
– USA encouraged plundering 11/04/2003
– The violent obliteration of art and memory (article in Yale Daily News 15 april 2003)
– The 2003 Iraq War & Archaeology (website maintained by Francis Deblauwe, Ph.D., an independent scholar, native of Belgium, located in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.)
– Looters, Arsonists Destroy Ancient Library Archive 4/15/03
– Baghdad museum raped
– Experts: Looters Had Keys to Iraqi Vaults 4/17/03
– Expert Thieves Pillaged Iraqi Museums 4/17/03
– The looting of Baghdad’s museum and library 4/19/03
– Lost Treasures From Iraq 4/23/03
– Fox News Engineer Charged With Smuggling Looted Iraqi Items 4/23/03
– Crimes Against Culture Are Remembered Forever 4/22/03
– Grieve for the Loss of Iraq’s Historical Soul 4/21/03
– US Army Was Told to Protect Looted Museum 4/20/03
– An Ancient City Mourns the Death of Memories 4/18/03
– Did Baghdad’s Antiquity Thieves Steal-to-Order? 4/17/03
– Looted Iraqi Paintings Seized by Jordanian Customs 4/18/03
– Art Collectors Drove the Plundering of Iraq’s Antiquities 4/20/03
– Bush Appointees Resign Over Iraqi Looting 4/17/03
– A Civilization Torn to Pieces 4/13/03
– A Heritage Under Siege 4/10/03
– Pilagers Strip 7,000 Years of Mesopotamian Treasure 4/13/03
– Has Anyone in US Read the History of Iraq? 4/13/03
– Baghdad Archeological Museum Looted 4/12/03
– US Art Dealer Lobby Could Loot Iraqi Heritage 4/10/03
– US Troops Accused of Letting Looters Smuggle Iraqi Antiquities 4/30/03
– Art Dealers May Have ‘Ordered’ Looting 4/29/03
– Looting of Iraqi museum was long planned 5/01/03
– US: Organized Gangs Were Involved in Looting of Baghdad Museum 5/7/03
– Thousands of Iraqi Artifacts Found 5/7/03
– Loss of Iraqi Antiquities Estimates Called ‘Gross Exaggeration’ 5/17/03
– Aid Workers Say US Troops Vandalized Ancient City 5/18/03
– Plundering of Museums in Baghdad – 08/05/2003
– UNESCO affirms loss of 1,000 archeological pieces from Baghdad museum 20/5/2003
– UN Lengthens List of Looted Art in Iraq 5/24/03
– Iraq’s Lost Antiquities – Who’s to Blame? 5/22/03
– The Looters Knew What They Wanted’ 5/24/03
– Looting of Ancient Sites Continues Despite Pleas to US Troops for Help 5/27/03
– Most of Missing Iraqi Antiquities Found in Secret Vault 6/7/03
– What Really Happened at the Baghdad Museum? 6/19/03
– New Iraq Inventory: Looters Stole 6,000 Artifacts 6/21/03
– Iraq Cultural Heritage Protection Act (Archaeological Insitute of America)
– Looting of the Iraqi Cultural Heritage (the Internatonal Council of Museums)
– A selection of links concerning the fate of archaeological antiquites and sites in Iraq (Glasgow University)
MORE LOOTING
Hospital Looters Stealing Incubators and Drugs 4/12/03 – Fisk: Pillage 4/12/03 –
How And Why US Encouraged Looting In Iraq 4/16/03 – BBC:
US Troops Encouraged Iraqi Looters 5/6/03 – Looters at Iraqi Nuclear Site Terrify Residents 5/8/03 – Scientists: Looted Nuke Material Could Sicken Iraqis 5/7/03 – US: 20% of Iraq’s Nuclear Material Missing 5/21/03 – ElBaradei Warns of Iraq Nuclear Emergency 5/19/03 – Dangerous Loot South of Baghdad: Iraqis Sick from Radiation 5/22/03 – Iraq’s free fall 23/05/03 – UN Atomic Agency Wants to Investigate Looting at Iraqi Nuke Site 5/5/03 – US Blames Looting for Derailing Plan to Restore Iraq 5/19/03 – US Forces Shoot Looter in Iraq 5/15/03 – UN: Iraqi Nuclear Looting Could Result in ‘Dirty Bomb’ 5/14/03 – Seven Iraqi Nuclear Sites Looted 5/10/03 – To Restore Peace, US Hires Iraqi Looters 5/9/03 – Iraqi Police Beg for Guns to Fight Looting 5/8/03 – Thieves Loot Home for Abandoned Iraqi Children 4/25/03 – Baghdad: Looting and Arson Still Rife in a City of Suspicion 4/20/03 – Dangerous Viruses Lost to Looters in Iraq 4/18/03 – 15 Baghdad Banks Robbed, US Troops Shoot the Good Guys 4/19/03 – Cockburn: Looting’s Roots 4/14/03 – Muslims Save Baghdad’s Jewish Community Center from Looters 4/14/03 – Looters Rule Until Nothing Left to Steal 4/13/03 – Looters Swarm Into New Areas of Baghdad 4/12/03 – Looting, Chaos Bring UN Aid to a Halt 4/12/03 – Troops Watch as Baghdad Ransacked 4/12/03 – Rumsfeld: Looting is Transition to Freedom 4/11/03 – People of Baghdad Guard Hospitals From Looters 4/12/03 – The Hell That Was Once a Hospital 4/12/03 – Looting is what this war is all about 4/24/03 – Saddam’ Rule Collapsing in Baghdad, Looters Rampage 4/9/03 – As Brits Take Over Basra, Looters Strip Schools and Stores 4/7/03 – Iraqis Loot Basra As British Take Control 4/7/03 – Nuclear Team to Assess Scale of Looting 5/28/03 – Looting Leaves Iraq’s Oil Industry in Ruins 6/10/03 – A Fertile Crescent for Looting 6/12/03 – BBC and Guardian cover up US role in Iraq looting 6/14/03
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 25 2007 22:51 utc | 111
Published: Tuesday, April 15, 2003
(More Opinion articles)
The violent obliteration of art and memory
Susannah Rutherglen
In Other News
ID’s, which may be given to Yalies, would be a victory for illegal immigrants’ rights
May 19, 2007
This past week, as Saddam Hussein’s 24 years of rule over Iraq came to an apparent end, 7,000 years of human history vaporized along with them. The citizens of Baghdad, armed with clubs, guns and sticks, stormed the National Museum of Iraq and smashed or stole 170,000 artifacts, some dating back virtually to the Garden of Eden. In perhaps the worst instance of cultural destruction ever seen in the Middle East, two days of pillaging ended with the disappearance of some of humanity’s very first works of art: precious gold filaments and jewelry from Sumeria; ceramics from the time of the Hanging Gardens of Nebuchadnezzar; harps, cuneiform tablets, sculptured heads, tapestries and friezes; even, ironically enough, the ancient tablets of the Code of Hammurabi, one of the first works of law known to civilization. Curators stood by weeping as American soldiers, flouting the 1954 Hague conventions, stood by and blithely witnessed the catastrophe.
However tragic, this measure of cultural ruin was not unforeseeable. Months ago, archaeologists and historians were pounding at the doors of Congress and the United Nations, warning of the potential material consequences of an invasion of Iraq. The Archaeological Institute of America even issued an official warning, expressing concern about the safety of digging sites and museums scattered across the country. But these voices were barely heard, despite the extensive looting and loss of artifacts that had followed the Gulf War in 1991. So caught up had the world become in the complex minute-by-minute transformations of Middle Eastern politics, the fact was somehow misplaced that Iraq — a swath of land embracing the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, two of the fountains of the world — had once upon a time given birth to human culture, and that the artifacts of that birth needed preserving.
Or did they? American officials, of course, have always argued that Iraq’s humanitarian crisis far surpasses the dangers to its archaeological treasures. Any potential cultural destruction would be worth the price, since a single Iraqi life is worth more than an entire museum of cuneiform and ivory. This is a noble view, but, in action on the streets of Baghdad, it reveals itself to be phony and simplistic. “Protection” does not have to be a zero-sum game in which lives win and works of art lose; indeed, by acting to protect the museum, American soldiers would have spared several casualties to the violent trampling through its galleries. One U.S. officer claimed that the military was ill-equipped to put a stop to any of the massive looting in Baghdad — even though the American investment in securing the museum would have been ridiculously minimal. As the director of the museum pointed out, not without bitterness, “If they had just one tank and two soldiers, nothing like this would have happened.”
In this respect, the infuriating inertia of the American forces suggests not a benevolent, all-consuming regard for the lives and liberation of Baghdad’s citizens, but something far more insidious and frightening — a concerted interest in destruction. When the U.S. troops dismantled the security apparatus that protected Iraq’s museums, it had an absolute responsibility to establish a new one — to ensure that cultural treasures would be safe from the inevitable disorder, panic and opportunism prevailing in the aftermath of a government’s collapse. Why would the troops instead have permitted full-scale demolition to proceed virtually unabated?
The answer, I think, is that the American attitude toward Iraq as a whole is not that of a nation’s compassionate liberators, but of its invaders and destroyers. Since time immemorial, this kind of attitude has always found its most acute expression in the pillaging of artistic riches. From the Persian invasion of Athens, to the Roman devastation of Carthage, to Tamerlane’s ravaging of Delhi, to the levelling of Teotihuacan, to the rape of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, to the sack of Rome in the 16th century, to the British gutting of Beijing’s Summer Palace, to Russia’s theft of Trojan gold from Germany during the 1940s, to the Afghan government’s destruction of Buddhist statues two years ago, sentiments of aggression and barbarism have always found their finest expression in the looting and theft of precious symbols of civilization. These acts, alongside which the murder of Iraq’s national museum will surely take its place, are nothing less than acts of war.
In this sense, the American presence in Iraq, and its corresponding attitude toward the country’s treasures, suggests not profound compassion for the plight of Saddam’s subjects, but rather permeating feelings of violence, aggression and fury; not the resolution of a humanitarian crisis, but the purposeful and violent obliteration of a country and its civilization.
Indeed, our very choice to jeopardize Iraq’s cultural artifacts for the ostensible sake of its citizens is a poisonous and hypocritical one. Perhaps it is true that lives matter more than objects, that we cannot privilege a single artifact over the life and freedom of a human being. But in the end, it is impossible to value human life without first valuing its artifacts. The work of art is the bearer of our cultural memory; it is the only trace we keep of the fact that we have lived at all. Long before Sigmund Freud compared the ruins of Rome to the layers of the human consciousness, the work of art came to stand as a lasting storehouse for the ephemeral contents of human lives, a place where we might recover the meaning of our culture and ourselves through time. As Hannah Arendt wrote, the treasures of the museum make “a home for mortal men, whose stability will endure and outlast the ever-changing movement of their lives and actions.” Last week, American forces, supervising the destruction of the objects in which this stability first became manifest, proved her tragically wrong.
Susannah Rutherglen is a senior in Trumbull College.
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 25 2007 22:57 utc | 115
Destruction Of Iraq’s Art
Iraq Art – Where’s The Loot? Two weeks after Iraq’s National Museum was looted, some observers are wondering where all the art ended up. “Despite scattered rumors of artifacts turning up from Tehran to Paris, not a single one of the 90,000 or 120,000 or 170,000 plundered artifacts – no one knows for sure how many – is known to have been offered for sale anywhere in the world. And investigators and legitimate art dealers think they know why.” Washington Post 04/23/03
Guards Needed For Iraq’s Museum Is Baghdad’s National Museum secured? “Expressing frustration that Iraq’s National Museum, archives and library in Baghdad were not secured against looters and organized art thieves, the director of Berlin’s Near East museum collection, Beata Salje, said Iraqi guards could be hired for as little as $3 a day. ‘Immediate help is necessary,’ Salje said at a news conference with other German experts. ‘It is important that the money is given as quickly as possible to our Iraqi colleagues so they can organize this’.” Miami Herald (AP) 04/22/03
Rumsfeld: Looting Exaggerated? Last week, trying to deflect reports of looting of the Iraq National Museum, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared: “The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over. And it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase. And you see it 20 times. And you think, my goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?” ABCNews 04/22/03
Looted Iraqi Art Beginning To Turn Up A”rt collectors and dealers say they are already getting queries about artifacts looted from Iraq’s museums, and the FBI said today at least one suspected piece had been seized at an American airport.” The Age (AP) (Melbourne) 04/22/03
Iraq Art – Failure To Act During the Second World War, Allied governments made protecting Europe’s art treasures a priority. It was a policy that paid many benefits. So why did the Americans not have a similar policy to help protect Iraq’s culture? Chicago Tribune 04/21/03
Stolen Iraqi Art Seized At Jordanian Border “Jordanian customs authorities have seized 42 paintings believed to have been looted from Iraq’s National Museum, government officials said Saturday.” Nando Times (AP) 04/20/03
Iraq Museum Looting Overstated? Was the extent of the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad overstated? “Thanks to Iraqi preparations before the war, it seems the worst has been avoided. Donny George, the director-general of restoration at the Iraqi Antiquities Department, Wednesday said his staff had preserved the museum’s most important treasures, including the kings’ graves of Ur and the Assyrian bulls. These objects were hidden in vaults that haven’t been violated by looters. Most of the things were removed. ‘We knew a war was coming, so it was our duty to protect everything. We thought there would be some sort of bombing at the museum. We never thought it could be looted’.” Wall Street Journal 04/17/03
What Happened To Warnings About Iraq Museums? Before the war on Iraq, warnings were sent to the Britsh and American governments about protecting Iraq’s cultural treasures. “They were completely ignored by the British government, who failed to acknowledge letters sent to them. That was unspeakably terrible. But meetings did take place with the Pentagon, who were given lists of endangered sites. They made contact with some of the appropriate experts, and assurances were given. But I think they were not prepared for what happened in Baghdad – for any of it. The looting of hospitals, for instance – just the scale of it all. I don’t think anybody foresaw that there would be a disaster on this scale. The letters that were written were not very specific. They probably did not mention possible looting in the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad. It hadn’t crossed my mind that that would even be possible.” The Telegraph (UK) 04/19/03
The Dictator And His (Bad) Art “In light of the atrocities committed against the Iraqi people and other unfortunates over the past 30 years, it is undoubtedly beside the point to criticize Saddam Hussein for his aesthetics. Still, one of the more tantalizing discoveries of the last few days, as we peel back the onion layers of his regime, has been the revelation of the dictator’s taste is art…” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 04/19/03
Bush Advisers Resign Over Iraq Looting “Three White House cultural advisers have resigned in protest at the failure of US forces to prevent the looting of Iraq’s national museum.” The advisers were all members of the President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property. The three advisers had sharp words for the Bush administration’s failure to have in place any sort of contingency plan for dealing with such foreseeable problems, and committee chair Martin Sullivan, who is one of those resigning, added that the looting was doubly preventable, since the United States was the nation in control of the timetable of the war. “In a pre-emptive war that’s the kind of thing you should have planned for,” he said. BBC 04/18/03
The Fog Of Washington Arrogance “Let’s be serious. Is anybody really surprised that Baghdad’s great civic art museum didn’t rate a measly tank? That the treasures of ancient Mesopotamia sat unguarded and exposed, ripe for the picking by local scavengers either amateur or professional? The horrendous event was not, after all, a dire outcome of ‘the fog of war.’ It was instead a routine example of the fog of the Bush administration, when it comes to matters cultural.” Los Angeles Times 04/18/03
Museum Looters Were Pros The looting of Baghdad’s National Museum of Antiquities was no mere grab-and-go act by a desperate citizenry. According to UNESCO, the vast majority of the museum thefts were perpetrated by professional art thieves who knew exactly what to take, and where to find it. “Museum officials in Baghdad told UNESCO that one group of thieves had keys to an underground vault where the most valuable artifacts were stored. The thefts were probably the work of international gangs who hired Iraqis for the job, and who have been active in recent years doing illegal excavations at Iraqi archaeological digs.” Washington Post 04/18/03
The Real Cost of the Baghdad Looting Although Americans may find it convenient to think of the Middle East as a land of barbaric, uncultured souls prone to unstoppable violence, the recent horrific and systematic destruction of Iraq’s cultural firmament points up how wrong these misconceptions truly are. When Baghdad’s central library burned to the ground last week, centuries of irreplacable cultural scholarship were lost to the world. Iraq has always taken great pride in its culture and its history, and has catalogued both with a meticulousness which ‘cultured’ Americans have never matched. “Since 1967, the country has had stringent laws preventing the export of antiquities. One of the saddest ironies of the destruction is that Iraq’s defense of its cultural heritage was considered a model for the region.” Washington Post 04/18/03
Cultural History Theft – An Organized Racket “Stealing a country’s physical history, its archaeological remains, has become the world’s third biggest organised racket, after drugs and guns. There are those who argue that it shouldn’t need to be illegal at all. There are those who say, look, the free market should operate here. Why shouldn’t a private collector be allowed to buy an antiquity and keep it in his bathroom, maybe next to the bidet, or as a tasteful holder for the Toilet Duck, if he wishes to do so, and if both he and the seller are happy with the price? You will not be surprised to hear that many of those who argue this way are American. You may not be surprised, either, that shortly before the invasion of Iraq, and with the spoils of war on their mind, some of these people formed themselves into a lobbying organisation called the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP).” The Spectator 04/17/03
America’s Contempt For History (Other Than Its Own) Allowing the destruction of Iraq’s art shows the contempt the United States has for other cultures. “The notion that Iraq even has history – let alone that 7,000 years ago this land was the cradle of civilization – is not likely to occur to the neocolonialists running a brawny young nation barely more than 200 years old. The United States’ earnest innocence is the charm that our entertainment industry markets so successfully around the world, but it is also the perennial seed of disaster as we blithely rearrange corners of the planet we only pretend to understand.” The Nation 04/16/03
British Museum Reaches Out To Iraq British Museum director Neil MacGregor expresses his dismay over the looting of Iraq’s National Museum. “The human aspect is as vital as the artistic and cultural. These museum people in Baghdad, MacGregor points out, are friends, close associates, with whom his staff have been in regular contact over long-term shared projects. Only weeks ago, while the coalition plotted air attacks, British Museum scholars were still exchanging prized information on the decipherment of precious cuneiform tablets. Many of these writings on clay, having survived 5,000 years, now lie smashed.” London Evening Standard 04/17/03
Choosing Destruction For Iraqi Art Why did the Bush administration choose not to protect Iraq’s cultural treasures? “Only two of the thousands of pieces of art that were stolen after the first Gulf War were recovered. Even if a sculpture of a bronze Akkadian king isn’t important to the Bush administration, you’d think its own self-interest would be: In the eyes of the world, the war’s success will be measured as much by what happens now and over the coming months as by the shock and awe campaign.” Slate 04/17/03
How Iraq’s National Museum Was Looted “Museum guard, Abdulk Rahman, tried to stop the first pillagers breaking through security gates at the rear of the compound, but he was forced to give up. Once inside, guards and curators were powerless to resist. A few hours later, US troops answered a desperate call from a curator, Raid Abdul Ridha Mohammed. Tanks were brought to the entrance, which dispersed the looters, but the Americans stayed for only half an hour. Immediately after their departure, the looters returned. The main ransacking seems to have occurred the next day, when hundreds of looters quickly gained access to the 28 public galleries.” The Art Newspaper 04/17/03
What Was Stolen Or Destroyed The Art Newspaper has put illustrations of artwork lost in Iraq’s National Museum online. The drawings come from the museum’s catalog. “We should stress that at this stage there is no detailed information on what objects have been looted, what have been damaged and what are safe. Nevertheless, the images in the Treasures of the Iraq Museum represent many of the most important objects from the collection, which numbers some 170,000 pieces.” The Art Newspaper 04/17/03
An International Tragedy “The tragedy has provoked international uproar. Western museums have launched an urgent rescue mission to trace and return the missing treasures. Downing Street has demanded a list of the antiquities that can be circulated to British troops in Iraq. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, has promised a military guard on remaining museums and important archaeological sites. And Unesco is to hold an emergency meeting tomorrow to prepare an action plan. For many, it is too late. Shards of antique pottery, smashed stone sculptures and scattered bits of parchment abandoned in the museum galleries make clear that little care will be taken with the stolen antiquities.” The Art Newspaper 04/17/03
Art Destruction – Questions And A Few Facts The Art Newspaper asks eight important questions about the destruction of Iraq’s museums and what happens next. The Art Newspaper 04/17/03
Iraqi Culpability In Art Destruction? Jim Hoagland writes that while Americans should have done something to protect Iraqi art, “the rush to condemn Americans for looting and destruction committed by Iraqis obscures fundamental questions about social responsibility and accountability in Iraq and throughout the Arab world. The debate about responsibility for the museum’s losses goes to the heart of the need for urgent moral and psychological change in the greater Middle East. An important question is going unasked in the rush to condemn: If looting was so predictable, what did the Iraqis – and particularly the staff of the museum – do to protect the museum’s valuable antiquities?” Washington Post 04/17/03
Iraq Art Destruction Makes New Enemies For America That Americans allowed the destruction of Iraqi culture while they stood by and watched has ignited rage among those Iraqis who might have been expected to support the Americans. “Somewhere, in the cacophony of bombs and the orgy of looting that followed, Baghdad’s cultural elite became angry about the war, seeing in its destruction a vulgarity that only pushed the country deeper into degradation. Even today, even in Baghdad, there are people unused to chaos, and chaos now it is.” The New York Times 04/17/03
American Cutural Property Commission Official Resigns In Protest Citing “the wanton and preventable destruction” of Iraq’s National Museum of Antiquities, the chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property has submitted his resignation to President Bush. Washington Post 04/17/03
Iraq Art – A Forseeable Tragedy That Iraq’s museums would be pillaged was a forseeable thing, writes Kenneth Baker. “We have to wonder how the Pentagon and the State Department could fail to see the cultural calamity coming, such a predictable consequence of urban war chaos. Weeks before the invasion, the Archaeological Institute of America published an ‘Open Declaration on Cultural Heritage at Risk in Iraq,’ signed by hundreds of scholars from around the world.” San Francisco Chronicle 04/17/03
Did Americans Allow Iraq Museum Looting Because Of A Lack Of Appreciation For Art? Is the fact that American troops protected oil fields but not museums significant? Caroline Abels writes that “we might never know why the looting continued unchecked despite strong early warnings from the world art community that Iraq’s treasures required protection. But the cynic in me wonders whether the American military would have done more to protect the museums had we been a country that better recognized the value of art.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 04/17/03
Don’t Buy Iraqi Antiquities World museum leaders suggest a moratorium on Iraqi antiquity sales as well as offering rewards for the return of art looted from Iraq’s museums. “I feel very strongly that we have to mobilize a reaction and make people aware that it’s not going to be easy to get the looted stuff out on the market.” The New York Times 04/16/03
Assessing Blame In Iraq Looting Who will be blamed for allowing the looting of Iraq’s museums? “Many Iraqis already believe that allied forces targeted ancient sites during the first Gulf War out of malice; this new destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage may soon be attributed not to Iraqi criminals but to coalition intentions. In this war US commanders were already provided with a list of the most important of an estimated 10,000 ancient sites in Iraq. The Americans claim that they took great care to avoid hitting these but say that Saddam Hussein deliberately sited many of his defences near such places to give them cover.” The Times (UK) 04/16/03
Protection From Bombs, Not Looters Iraqi curators thought the biggest threat to their art was American bombs. They weren’t prepared for looting… The Times (UK) 04/16/03
Who Will Buy Looted Iraqi Art? There won’t be many buyers. “The major salerooms greatly restrict their sales of antiquities, most of which have no commercial value unless they carry with them what effectively amounts to a passport. The history of any major piece must be well known to make that piece saleable.” The Times (UK) 04/16/03
When Is It Okay To Deface Art? “In Paradise Square, Baghdad, tearing down a giant bronze Saddam is seen as moving, heroic and symbolic. Bad art about bad people deserves all the abuse it gets, we might argue, but where do the lines of acceptability lie when an artist wilfully wrecks another artist’s work? Jake and Dinos Chapman are in trouble again for defacing a complete set of Goya’s 80 Disasters of War etchings. Goya worked on the series for a decade from 1810 and never saw it printed in his lifetime.” But strangely, the defacement is moving… London Evening Standard 04/15/03
The Art Saddam Liked “The art in Saddam’s palaces is very emphatically the embodiment of ideas and appetites, and as such, it is not really that funny. The erotic art is particularly recognisable as the sort of thing you’d see in Hitler’s private collection – right down to the Aryan types. But Saddam is less elevated in his taste than Hitler. The Fuhrer was more pretentious. By contrast, there are no high cultural allusions whatsoever in the Saddamite paintings. They are from the universal cultural gutter – pure dreck. They look spraypainted, in a rampant hyperbolic style where all men are muscular, all women have giant breasts and missiles are metal cocks. These are art for the barely literate, or the barely sentient, dredged from some red-lit back alley of the brain.” The Guardian (UK) 04/15/03
Is Museum’s Destruction So Bad? The destruction of the Iraq Museum is a disaster. “Some objects will doubtless be recovered, and a few of the most remarkable may turn out to have been hidden away. Even so, when the news about the museum emerged some people over here began talking about how the Iraqi people had ‘lost their past’. A museum like the one in Baghdad, they argued, gives a people a sense of who they are, and where they come from. Is this true? There is a lot of sentimentality attached to archaeology by outsiders.” The Guardian (UK) 04/15/03
British Art Experts To Iraq Britain is sending a team of art experts to Iraq to try to help pick up the pieces after the smashing and looting of the National Museum of Antiquities. “Officials from Unesco, the UN cultural agency, will meet staff from the British Museum on Thursday to discuss tactics for Iraq. ‘There will be a large conservation task to be done, extending over many years and requiring the widest possible international co-operation’.”
BBC 04/15/03
British Museum Offers Iraqis Help The British Museum is offering to help the Iraq Museum. “The museum is considering the unprecedented move of arranging extended loans or gifts from its vast stores to help recreate the shattered displays when Iraqi museums reopen. It has the world’s greatest Mesopotamian collection outside Iraq.” The Guardian (UK) 04/16/03
The Symbolism Of Toppling Statues The images of Saddam’s statues being pulled down in Iraq were compelling. “What is it about a dead and really poor statue – a boring one indeed – that rouses such personal antipathy? And why did we who were not there stay so gripped throughout the whole business? All of us are aware of the symbolic freight of statues like this one. Their toppling clearly symbolizes the end of the overthrown regime. Often the pent-up resentments against a now-absent leader are taken out on his images. The history of art and the history of all images is punctuated by events of this kind…” OpinionJournal.com 04/16/03
Saddam Liked Fantasy Raunch In His Art An American artist named Rowena was surprised to discover that two of her oil paintings hung in Saddam Husein’s personal quarters. The paintings are fantasy raunch, and “Rowena, 58, said she did the oil paintings that hung in the dictator’s den about 15 years ago as covers for bodice-ripper paperbacks with titles such as ‘King Dragon’ and ‘Shadows Out of Hell’.” Oh, and she’d like them back… New York Daily News 04/15/03
Tracking Down Iraq’s Treasures Archaeologists are trying to track down items plundered from Iraq’s National Museum of Antiquities. “They can’t put the sculptures, statues, and coins back on the shelves from which they were wrested. But they can put together a database of what was lost in the looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. By gathering as much detailed information as possible, they hope to render unsellable the thousands of artifacts stolen from Iraq’s largest museum, one of the region’s most important. The more that is known about the lost pieces, the less likely they will be able to pass into private hands on the black market, scholars and curators say.” Boston Globe 04/15/03
US Says It Will Help “Restore” Baghdad Museum The United States says it will help restore the Iraq National Museum. “Secretary of State Colin Powell said the Baghdad museum was ‘one of the great museums in the world’ and that the US would take a leading role in restoring it. Coalition forces were criticised for not protecting the institution, which housed many treasures from ‘the cradle of civilisation’, when it was ransacked on Friday. But critics say it’s too late. ‘And it’s gone, and it’s lost. If Marines had started before, none of this would have happened. It’s too late. It’s no use. It’s no use’.”
See pictures of damage to the museum here BBC 04/14/03
Destroying Iraq’s Museum – One Tank Could Have Saved It The looting of the Iraq Museum is a loss for the world. “The losses will be felt worldwide, but its greatest impact will be on the Iraqi people themselves when it comes to rebuilding their sense of national identity. International cultural organisations had urged before the war that the cultural heritage of Iraq, which has more than 10,000 archaeological sites, be spared. US forces are making a belated attempt to protect the National Museum, calling on Iraqi policemen to turn up for duty. There is no pay, but 80 have given their services. ‘The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened. I hold the American troops responsible. They know that this is a museum. They protect oil ministries but not the cultural heritage’.” The Telegraph (UK) 04/13/03
Erasing The Story Of Civilization The looting of Iraq’s museums is “a cultural catastrophe. Yesterday the museum’s exhibition halls and security vaults were a barren mess – display cases smashed, offices ransacked and floors littered with hand-written index cards recording the timeless detail of more than 170,000 rare items that were pilfered. Worse, in their search for gold and gems, the looters got into the museum’s underground vaults, where they smashed the contents of the thousands of tin trunks. It was here that staff had painstakingly packed priceless ceramics that tell the story of life from one civilisation to the next through 9000 fabled years in Mesopotamia.” The Age (Melbourne) 04/14/03
Iraq Museum Destroyed Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad has been destroyed. “Once American troops entered Baghdad in sufficient force to topple Saddam Hussein’s government this week, it took only 48 hours for the museum to be destroyed, with at least 170,000 artifacts carried away by looters. The full extent of the disaster that befell the museum came to light only today, as the frenzied looting that swept much of the capital over the previous three days began to ebb.” The New York Times 04/13/03
Calls To Protect Iraqi Art “Concerned archaeologists urged United States military leaders to take more forceful steps to protect Iraqi’s cultural treasures and to restore control of them to the local Department of Antiquities. For weeks before the war, archaeologists and other scholars had alerted military planners to the risks of combat, particularly postwar pillage of the country’s antiquities. These include 10,000 sites of ruins with such resonating names as Babylon, Nineveh, Nimrud and Ur.” The New York Times 04/13/03
Looters Clean Out Iraqi Museum The Mosul Museum in Iraq has been looted. “The looters knew what they were looking for, and in less than 10 minutes had walked off with several million dollars worth of Parthian sculpture. “Iraq has a great history,” said the museum’s curator. “It’s just been wrecked. I’m extremely angry. We used to have American and British tourists who visited this museum. I want to know whether the Americans accept this.” The Guardian (UK) 04/12/03
Interest In Iraq Art Soars The British Museum reports that visits to its Iraqi exhibitions have tripled since the war on Iraq began. The British Museum has the greatest collection of Mesopotamian art outside Iraq. A spokeswoman confirmed that visits to its Mesopotamian and Assyrian galleries had risen significantly. ‘It’s just general curiosity from what’s going on (with the war). Members of the public are coming from all over the world.” BBC 03/31/03
Is Saddam Holding Historical Treasures Hostage? “Millennia ago, Iraq was the cradle of civilization, hence the concern about its cultural and archaeological sites. Is the U.S. taking sufficient care to spare Iraq’s treasures? The laws of warfare make clear that while combatants may not target such sites, if they are used for military purposes they lose their protection.” Unfortunately, say US commanders, the Iraqis have are putting military targets next to important archaeological sites. Recently Iraq “placed military equipment and communications equipment next to the 2,000-year-old brick arch of Ctesiphon on the banks of the Tigris River, the world’s largest surviving arch from ancient times and the widest single-span arch in the world.” OpinionJournal.com 03/27/03
Destroying The Cradle Of Civilization? Archaeologists fear that George Bush’s war on Iraq and its aftermath could “obliterate much of humanity’s earliest heritage. Heavily looted in the last 10 years, Iraq’s archaeological treasure remains as precarious as the rest of the country’s post-war future. ‘What’s really at stake here is our past. What happened here was the establishment of civilization as we know it – codified religion, bureaucracy, cities, writing. What developed there was modern life – urban existence.” Philadelphia Inquirer 03/24/03
Destroying Treasures Of History Is Wrong – No Matter Who’s Doing It Two years ago the world stood apalled as the Taliban blasted the historic Bamiyan Buddhas into oblivion. Though the regime commited many atrocities, somehow the destruction of the centuries-old statues stirred fresh outrage. Now the US is planning to bomb Iraq, site of many historical/archaeological treasures. Is this not outrageous also? Newsday 03/02/03
Iraq War Would Imperil Archaeological Treasures Archaeologists worry that a war in Iraq will stop digs across the Middle East. “Researchers with long experience in Iraq say they are worried that postwar looting could cause even more damage to the antiquities than combat. They also fear that some art dealers and collectors might try to take advantage of any postwar disarray and change in government to gain access to more of Iraq’s archaeological treasures.” The New York Times 02/25/03
Iraq War = Certain Destruction Of Artifacts Of Human History Iraq is rich in important historical sites and artifacts. “The country is one of the prime centers of Islamic art and culture. It is home to some of the earliest surviving examples of Islamic architecture — the Great Mosque at Samarra and the desert palace of Ukhaidar — and it is also a magnet for religious pilgrimage. The tombs of Imam Ali and his son Husein, founders of the Shiite branch of Islam, at Najaf and Karbala, are two of the most revered in the Muslim world.” A war will surely damage some of it. The New York Times 02/25/03
Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 25 2007 23:18 utc | 125
“The Smash of Civilizations
By Chalmers Johnson
In the months before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and his senior officials spoke of preserving Iraq’s “patrimony” for the Iraqi people. At a time when talking about Iraqi oil was taboo, what he meant by patrimony was exactly that — Iraqi oil. In their “joint statement on Iraq’s future” of April 8, 2003, George Bush and Tony Blair declared, “We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq’s natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit.”[1] In this they were true to their word. Among the few places American soldiers actually did guard during and in the wake of their invasion were oil fields and the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. But the real Iraqi patrimony, that invaluable human inheritance of thousands of years, was another matter. At a time when American pundits were warning of a future “clash of civilizations,” our occupation forces were letting perhaps the greatest of all human patrimonies be looted and smashed.
There have been many dispiriting sights on TV since George Bush launched his ill-starred war on Iraq — the pictures from Abu Ghraib, Fallujah laid waste, American soldiers kicking down the doors of private homes and pointing assault rifles at women and children. But few have reverberated historically like the looting of Baghdad’s museum — or been forgotten more quickly in this country.
Teaching the Iraqis about the Untidiness of History
In archaeological circles, Iraq is known as “the cradle of civilization,” with a record of culture going back more than 7,000 years. William R. Polk, the founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, says, “It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that life as we know it today began: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and, above all developed the skill of writing.”[2] No other places in the Bible except for Israel have more history and prophecy associated with them than Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer), and Mesopotamia — different names for the territory that the British around the time of World War I began to call “Iraq,” using the old Arab term for the lands of the former Turkish enclave of Mesopotamia (in Greek: “between the [Tigris and Eurphrates] rivers”).[3] Most of the early books of Genesis are set in Iraq (see, for instance, Genesis 10:10, 11:31; also Daniel 1-4; II Kings 24).
The best-known of the civilizations that make up Iraq’s cultural heritage are the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sassanids, and Muslims. On April 10, 2003, in a television address, President Bush acknowledged that the Iraqi people are “the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity.”[4.] Only two days later, under the complacent eyes of the U.S. Army, the Iraqis would begin to lose that heritage in a swirl of looting and burning.
In September 2004, in one of the few self-critical reports to come out of Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense, the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication wrote: “The larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended.”[5] Nowhere was this failure more apparent than in the indifference — even the glee — shown by Rumsfeld and his generals toward the looting on April 11 and 12, 2003, of the National Museum in Baghdad and the burning on April 14, 2003, of the National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowments. These events were, according to Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, “the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years.” Eleanor Robson of All Souls College, Oxford, said, “You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale.”[6] Yet Secretary Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game and shrugged it off with the comment that “Freedom’s untidy. . . . Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes.”[7]
The Baghdad archaeological museum has long been regarded as perhaps the richest of all such institutions in the Middle East. It is difficult to say with precision what was lost there in those catastrophic April days in 2003 because up-to-date inventories of its holdings, many never even described in archaeological journals, were also destroyed by the looters or were incomplete thanks to conditions in Baghdad after the Gulf War of 1991. One of the best records, however partial, of its holdings is the catalog of items the museum lent in 1988 to an exhibition held in Japan’s ancient capital of Nara entitled Silk Road Civilizations. But, as one museum official said to John Burns of the New York Times after the looting, “All gone, all gone. All gone in two days.”[8]
A single, beautifully illustrated, indispensable book edited by Milbry Park and Angela M.H. Schuster, The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), represents the heartbreaking attempt of over a dozen archaeological specialists on ancient Iraq to specify what was in the museum before the catastrophe, where those objects had been excavated, and the condition of those few thousand items that have been recovered. The editors and authors have dedicated a portion of the royalties from this book to the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.
At a conference on art crimes held in London a year after the disaster, the British Museum’s John Curtis reported that at least half of the forty most important stolen objects had not been retrieved and that of some 15,000 items looted from the museum’s showcases and storerooms about 8,000 had yet to be traced. Its entire collection of 5,800 cylinder seals and clay tablets, many containing cuneiform writing and other inscriptions some of which go back to the earliest discoveries of writing itself, was stolen.[9] Since then, as a result of an amnesty for looters, about 4,000 of the artifacts have been recovered in Iraq, and over a thousand have been confiscated in the United States.[10] Curtis noted that random checks of Western soldiers leaving Iraq had led to the discovery of several in illegal possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the U.S. then found more. Officials in Jordan have impounded about 2,000 pieces smuggled in from Iraq; in France, 500 pieces; in Italy, 300; in Syria, 300; and in Switzerland, 250. Lesser numbers have been seized in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad.
The 616 pieces that form the famous collection of “Nimrud gold,” excavated by the Iraqis in the late 1980s from the tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud, a few miles southeast of Mosul, were saved, but only because the museum had secretly moved them to the subterranean vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq at the time of the first Gulf War. By the time the Americans got around to protecting the bank in 2003, its building was a burnt-out shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all nine floors under it. Nonetheless, the underground compartments and their contents survived undamaged. On July 3, 2003, a small portion of the Nimrud holdings was put on display for a few hours, allowing a handful of Iraqi officials to see them for the first time since 1990.[11]
The torching of books and manuscripts in the Library of Korans and the National Library was in itself a historical disaster of the first order. Most of the Ottoman imperial documents and the old royal archives concerning the creation of Iraq were reduced to ashes. According to Humberto Márquez, the Venezuelan writer and author of Historia Universal de La Destrucción de Los Libros (2004), about a million books and ten million documents were destroyed by the fires of April 14, 2003.[12] Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent of the Independent of London, was in Baghdad the day of the fires. He rushed to the offices of the U.S. Marines’ Civil Affairs Bureau and gave the officer on duty precise map locations for the two archives and their names in Arabic and English, and pointed out that the smoke could be seen from three miles away. The officer shouted to a colleague, “This guy says some biblical library is on fire,” but the Americans did nothing to try to put out the flames.[13]
The Burger King of Ur
Given the black market value of ancient art objects, U.S. military leaders had been warned that the looting of all thirteen national museums throughout the country would be a particularly grave danger in the days after they captured Baghdad and took control of Iraq. In the chaos that followed the Gulf War of 1991, vandals had stolen about 4,000 objects from nine different regional museums. In monetary terms, the illegal trade in antiquities is the third most lucrative form of international trade globally, exceeded only by drug smuggling and arms sales.[14] Given the richness of Iraq’s past, there are also over 10,000 significant archaeological sites scattered across the country, only some 1,500 of which have been studied. Following the Gulf War, a number of them were illegally excavated and their artifacts sold to unscrupulous international collectors in Western countries and Japan. All this was known to American commanders.
In January 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, an American delegation of scholars, museum directors, art collectors, and antiquities dealers met with officials at the Pentagon to discuss the forthcoming invasion. They specifically warned that Baghdad’s National Museum was the single most important site in the country. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute said, “I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected.”[15] Gibson went back to the Pentagon twice to discuss the dangers, and he and his colleagues sent several e-mail reminders to military officers in the weeks before the war began. However, a more ominous indicator of things to come was reported in the April 14, 2003, London Guardian: Rich American collectors with connections to the White House were busy “persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq’s heritage by prevention of sales abroad.” On January 24, 2003, some sixty New York-based collectors and dealers organized themselves into a new group called the American Council for Cultural Policy and met with Bush administration and Pentagon officials to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws.[16] Opening up private trade in Iraqi artifacts, they suggested, would offer such items better security than they could receive in Iraq.
The main international legal safeguard for historically and humanistically important institutions and sites is the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, signed on May 14, 1954. The U.S. is not a party to that convention, primarily because, during the Cold War, it feared that the treaty might restrict its freedom to engage in nuclear war; but during the 1991 Gulf War the elder Bush’s administration accepted the convention’s rules and abided by a “no-fire target list” of places where valuable cultural items were known to exist.[17] UNESCO and other guardians of cultural artifacts expected the younger Bush’s administration to follow the same procedures in the 2003 war.
Moreover, on March 26, 2003, the Pentagon’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), headed by Lt. Gen. (ret.) Jay Garner — the civil authority the U.S. had set up for the moment hostilities ceased — sent to all senior U.S. commanders a list of sixteen institutions that “merit securing as soon as possible to prevent further damage, destruction, and/or pilferage of records and assets.” The five-page memo dispatched two weeks before the fall of Baghdad also said, “Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures” and that “looters should be arrested/detained.” First on Gen. Garner’s list of places to protect was the Iraqi Central Bank, which is now a ruin; second was the Museum of Antiquities. Sixteenth was the Oil Ministry, the only place that U.S. forces occupying Baghdad actually defended. Martin Sullivan, chair of the President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for the previous eight years, and Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and a member of the committee, both resigned to protest the failure of CENTCOM to obey orders. Sullivan said it was “inexcusable” that the museum should not have had the same priority as the Oil Ministry.[18]
As we now know, the American forces made no effort to prevent the looting of the great cultural institutions of Iraq, its soldiers simply watching vandals enter and torch the buildings. Said Arjomand, an editor of the journal Studies on Persianate Societies and a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote, “Our troops, who have been proudly guarding the Oil Ministry, where no window is broken, deliberately condoned these horrendous events.”[19] American commanders claim that, to the contrary, they were too busy fighting and had too few troops to protect the museum and libraries. However, this seems to be an unlikely explanation. During the battle for Baghdad, the U.S. military was perfectly willing to dispatch some 2,000 troops to secure northern Iraq’s oilfields, and their record on antiquities did not improve when the fighting subsided. At the 6,000-year-old Sumerian city of Ur with its massive ziggurat, or stepped temple-tower (built in the period 2112 – 2095 B.C. and restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century B.C.), the Marines spray-painted their motto, “Semper Fi” (semper fidelis, always faithful) onto its walls.[20] The military then made the monument “off limits” to everyone in order to disguise the desecration that had occurred there, including the looting by U.S. soldiers of clay bricks used in the construction of the ancient buildings.
Until April 2003, the area around Ur, in the environs of Nasiriyah, was remote and sacrosanct. However, the U.S. military chose the land immediately adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base with two runways measuring 12,000 and 9,700 feet respectively and four satellite camps. In the process, military engineers moved more than 9,500 truckloads of dirt in order to build 350,000 square feet of hangars and other facilities for aircraft and Predator unmanned drones. They completely ruined the area, the literal heartland of human civilization, for any further archaeological research or future tourism. On October 24, 2003, according to the Global Security Organization, the Army and Air Force built its own modern ziggurat. It “opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility, co-located with [a] . . . Pizza Hut, provides another Burger King restaurant so that more service men and women serving in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget about the task at hand in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent that takes them back home.”[21]
The great British archaeologist, Sir Max Mallowan (husband of Agatha Christie), who pioneered the excavations at Ur, Nineveh, and Nimrud, quotes some classical advice that the Americans might have been wise to heed: “There was danger in disturbing ancient monuments. . . . It was both wise and historically important to reverence the legacies of ancient times. Ur was a city infested with ghosts of the past and it was prudent to appease them.”[22]
The American record elsewhere in Iraq is no better. At Babylon, American and Polish forces built a military depot, despite objections from archaeologists. John Curtis, the British Museum’s authority on Iraq’s many archaeological sites, reported on a visit in December 2004 that he saw “cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate” and a “2,600-year-old brick pavement crushed by military vehicles.”[23] Other observers say that the dust stirred up by U.S. helicopters has sandblasted the fragile brick façade of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 B.C.[24] The archaeologist Zainab Bahrani reports, “Between May and August 2004, the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both of the sixth century B.C., collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters. Nearby, heavy machines and vehicles stand parked on the remains of a Greek theater from the era of Alexander of Macedon [Alexander the Great].”[25]
And none of this even begins to deal with the massive, ongoing looting of historical sites across Iraq by freelance grave and antiquities robbers, preparing to stock the living rooms of western collectors. The unceasing chaos and lack of security brought to Iraq in the wake of our invasion have meant that a future peaceful Iraq may hardly have a patrimony to display. It is no small accomplishment of the Bush administration to have plunged the cradle of the human past into the same sort of chaos and lack of security as the Iraqi present. If amnesia is bliss, then the fate of Iraq’s antiquities represents a kind of modern paradise.
President Bush’s supporters have talked endlessly about his global war on terrorism as a “clash of civilizations.” But the civilization we are in the process of destroying in Iraq is part of our own heritage. It is also part of the world’s patrimony. Before our invasion of Afghanistan, we condemned the Taliban for their dynamiting of the monumental third century A.D. Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in March, 2001. Those were two gigantic statues of remarkable historical value and the barbarism involved in their destruction blazed in headlines and horrified commentaries in our country. Today, our own government is guilty of far greater crimes when it comes to the destruction of a whole universe of antiquity, and few here, when they consider Iraqi attitudes toward the American occupation, even take that into consideration. But what we do not care to remember, others may recall all too well.
NOTES
[1.] American Embassy, London, ” Visit of President Bush to Northern Ireland, April 7-8, 2003.”
[2.] William R. Polk, “Introduction,” Milbry Polk and Angela M. H. Schuster, eds., The Looting of the Iraq Museum: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), p. 5. Also see Suzanne Muchnic, “Spotlight on Iraq’s Plundered Past,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2005.
[3.] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Owl Books, 1989, 2001), p. 450.
[4.] George Bush’s address to the Iraqi people, broadcast on “Towards Freedom TV,” April 10, 2003.
[5.] Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication (Washington, D.C.: September 2004), pp. 39-40.
[6.] See Frank Rich, “And Now: ‘Operation Iraqi Looting,'” New York Times, April 27, 2003.
[7.] Robert Scheer, “It’s U.S. Policy that’s ‘Untidy,'” Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2003; reprinted in Books in Flames, Tomdispatch, April 15, 2003.
[8.] John F. Burns, “Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its Treasures,” New York Times, April 13, 2003; Piotr Michalowski (University of Michigan), The Ransacking of the Baghdad Museum is a Disgrace, History News Network, April 14, 2003.
[9.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit, pp. 209-210.
[10.] Mark Wilkinson, Looting of Ancient Sites Threatens Iraqi Heritage, Reuters, June 29, 2005.
[11.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit., pp. 23, 212-13; Louise Jury, “At Least 8,000 Treasures Looted from Iraq Museum Still Untraced,” Independent, May 24, 2005; Stephen Fidler, “‘The Looters Knew What They Wanted. It Looks Like Vandalism, but Organized Crime May be Behind It,'” Financial Times, May 23, 2003; Rod Liddle, The Day of the Jackals, Spectator, April 19, 2003.
[12.] Humberto Márquez, Iraq Invasion the ‘Biggest Cultural Disaster Since 1258,’ Antiwar.com, February 16, 2005.
[13.] Robert Fisk, “Library Books, Letters, and Priceless Documents are Set Ablaze in Final Chapter of the Sacking of Baghdad,” Independent, April 15, 2003.
[14.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 10.
[15.] Guy Gugliotta, “Pentagon Was Told of Risk to Museums; U.S. Urged to Save Iraq’s Historic Artifacts,” Washington Post, April 14, 2003; McGuire Gibson, “Cultural Tragedy In Iraq: A Report On the Looting of Museums, Archives, and Sites,” International Foundation for Art Research.
[16.] Rod Liddle, op. cit..; Oliver Burkeman, Ancient Archive Lost in Baghdad Blaze, Guardian, April 15, 2003.
[17.] See James A. R. Nafziger, Art Loss in Iraq: Protection of Cultural Heritage in Time of War and Its Aftermath, International Foundation for Art Research.
[18.] Paul Martin, Ed Vulliamy, and Gaby Hinsliff, U.S. Army was Told to Protect Looted Museum, Observer, April 20, 2003; Frank Rich, op. cit.; Paul Martin, “Troops Were Told to Guard Treasures,” Washington Times, April 20, 2003.
[19.] Said Arjomand, Under the Eyes of U.S. Forces and This Happened?, History News Network, April 14, 2003.
[20.] Ed Vulliamy, Troops ‘Vandalize’ Ancient City of Ur, Observer, May 18, 2003; Paul Johnson, Art: A New History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 18, 35; Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 99, fig. 25.
[21.] Tallil Air Base, GlobalSecurity.org.
[22.] Max Mallowan, Mallowan’s Memoirs (London: Collins, 1977), p. 61.
[23.] Rory McCarthy and Maev Kennedy, Babylon Wrecked by War, Guardian, January 15, 2005.
[24.] Owen Bowcott, Archaeologists Fight to Save Iraqi Sites, Guardian, June 20, 2005.
[25.] Zainab Bahrani, “The Fall of Babylon,” in Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 214.
This essay is extracted from Chalmers Johnson’s Nemesis: The Crisis of the American Republic, forthcoming from Metropolitan Books in late 2006, the final volume in the Blowback Trilogy. The first two volumes are Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000) and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2004).
Posted by: r’giap | May 26 2007 17:36 utc | 152
The U.S. Imperialist Quest for world Domination, Unlimited
Capital Accumulation and a Domestic Police State
Dave Silver
June 12, 2005
The U.S. killers and oppressors in Iraq are being called “liberators” by CNN and almost all politicians as the Axis of Evil in Washington implements more social, economic and political repression at home to prepare for a police state that will create a more favorable climate for our genocidal activities abroad. While regime change was covert in the era of war criminal Henry Kissinger in Chile and other places, it is now, in the post Soviet, one superpower era, openly stated as a moral doctrine replacing the 19th century “manifest destiny.”
This has provided an easy opening for Democrats wearing a liberal mantra. Just as John Kerry posed as a critic of Bush, he voted for a Congressional War Resolution and two Patriot Acts, so now wearing the liberal mantra Howard Dean, the new DNC Chair said that “he’ll support the American kids sent over there” not by bringing them home now but rather the continued killing of Iraqis.
Then we have another venal breed of ex radicals and Vietnam era anti-war protestors that have come full circle in their anti-communism, (formerly anti-Sovietism), red baiting and ultimately joining the imperialist camp. Marc Cooper of the Nation denounces a “knee jerk reaction of the Left” who opposed the war in Afghanistan. Also to be found in the stable of opportunism and betrayal is Todd Gitlin a former leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and David Corn, Washington Editor of the Nation.
The U.S. sponsored mass murder from Guatemala and East Timor, from Chile, Angola and Lebanon to the Occupied Territories in the West Bank and Gaza, were genocidal acts aimed at insuring stability and domination for greater capital accumulation for U.S. transnational corporations like Bechtel, TRW and Halliburton of Dick Cheney fame. The defeat and occupation of Iraq is aimed at once and for all eliminating the nasty “Vietnam Syndrome,” securing the region for US corporation oil profits but in addition a beginning quest to dominate the world where the Third Reich failed. While this is taking place abroad the steps toward a police state keep apace. The “Patriot Act” one and two, that looks at your email and books taken out of the library, detentions without counsel or charges, surveillance, and economic violence aimed at many workers and people of color which are generally supported by the mainstream media that act as an arm of the White House, Pentagon and Department of Justice.
The U.S. quest for Empire uses its power to intimidate as they drive to weaken and perhaps destroy international law so that they have maximum options and choices. Any movement is effective to the extent that it conveys to the corporate rulers and its political puppets in power that continued rejection of the Movement’s demands will lead to growing costs and risks to them.
It is crucial that our broad anti-war movement be linked to Justice issues, so that the men in power realize that it will not fade away with the war’s conclusion and Occupation. The domestic issues of human and civil rights, economic exploitation, cutbacks and Orange Alerts are used to create a climate that facilitates our immoral and genocidal acts abroad. In order to be effective we must incorporate into our Movement a combination of tactics which include consciousness raising, demonstrations, marches, strikes, civil disobedience and other creative actions, all of them mutually supportive.
The anti-war movement must emphasize the real measures necessary, both short- and long-term to deal with the threat of terrorism against the United States. First desisting from an unjust and needless war and secondly a change in U.S. foreign policy to reduce the level of anti-U.S. hatred in the world. However, to be effective in making important changes in foreign and domestic policies and politicians, we must build a truly independent and alternative political movement/Party. Such a political fist is required to confront the common corporate enemy, which alone unites all of the issues of oppression and exploitation, of justice and peace.
We have to show that we support our troops by bringing them home now and not dying in Iraq literally or figuratively, physically or psychologically. Equally important is to raise the slogan of our troops not having to kill people in Iraq. We must enlarge the Movement and increase ties with the public and at the same time enlarge the more militant sectors of the Movement and increase the ties between them and other dissenters.
Finally, we have to recognize that, after the Iraqi civilian population, the people most at risk as a result of the U.S. attack on Iraq, are the Palestinians. The Israeli government has used the “war on terrorism” as a cover and justification for increased repression against the Palestinians. We must make sure that any stepped up Israeli attacks on the Palestinians are widely known and hugely protested. Issues of justice do not “taint or pollute” the anti-war message as many liberals and the New York Times would have us believe. They strengthens it.
One Humanity, One Struggle.
Posted by: r’giap | May 27 2007 16:46 utc | 191
(another perspective)
The Fight for Socialism is Actual Because Capitalism Has Rotten
José Reinaldo Carvalho
Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB)
March 28, 2007
In the last PCdoB’s Central Committee’s meeting, which took place in São Paulo from March 9 to 11 of 2007, the International Relations Secretary, José Reinaldo Carvalho, presented a report concerning the current international conjuncture. The focus was an analysis of the immediate scenario, bringing attention to the latest global happenings and their effect on economics and politics. The report also discussed the aspects of international actions of the PCdoB. In the occasion, it was affirmed that Brazil could be the venue for the International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties, on a date yet to be defined.
This year the event will take place in November, and will has as its focal theme the celebration of 90 years of the Revolution of October 1917. “This will be an opportunity for the communist parties to defend the revolution’s ideals, which are still alive”, he said. In the following paragraphs you will read parts of an interview the PCdoB’s Secretary gave to Vermelho (the Red), analyzing the world scenario.
Instability and Uncertainty
“The world is living a moment characterized mainly by instability and uncertainty. The latest stock market losses we have seen in the news demonstrate it clearly. One by one, investors have been panicking over loosing their investments’ profits. First, there was an attempt to put out the fire by saying it was all about a “Chinese Crisis”, once the first manifestation of such wave happened in Shanghai’s stock market. Not long after, it was figured that the cause was not in the Chinese economy, but rather in the American economy, with its structural unbalances and its colossal deficits. The American economy owes over US$ 3 trillion, a result of deficits accumulation in foreign trade, an unbearable situation on the long term. São Paulo’s bourgeois favorite newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, beyond suspicion of catastrophism and anti-Americanism, made the following statement on March 13: ‘From one of the biggest loaners on the planet — a condition which emerged after the First World War — the United States became one of the biggest debtors’. And more ahead it said: ‘If, for any reason, citizens, companies and foreign governments sold in mass public titles, stock shares, real estate and other goods which maintain the United States, the effect would be cataclysm. As for now, however, there are no firm signs that the convenience wedding between the United States and world shall get to an end soon. The Stock Markets’ frenzy was not capable to shake the trust on the U.S. dollar, in which is established the global financial system. But it is not written in any natural law that the current pattern will prevail forever. It would be even healthy for the world to get away from this unilateral model, of this excessive dependence on the U.S. dollar.’ (our bold) The Stock Market shacking in the last few weeks launched uncertainties about the future. It revealed the fragile bases and the enormous unbalance of the economy’s growth observed in general global terms in the latest years, which could result in dramatic situations. More and more this economic expansion is labeled as a myth, that it would have found a point of balance for sustainable growth in a virtuous moment”.
Limited Growth Cycles
“The fact of accentuated world economic growth has been taking place in the last few years, combined with no financial crises, has stimulated some sectors to make apology of the capabilities of capitalist economy expansion and, in a revival revisionist, to label of “dogmatic and vulgar Marxism” the point of view that capitalism leads to stagnation and crises. I don’t believe that such opinions are naïve. Candid existed only in the fertile pity of Voltaire. I think those are visions with the purpose of making capitalism look good, to create a confusion in the political environment, to blind workers so that they cannot see the actual structural character of capitalist crisis. It’s a way of removing revolutionary and workers parties from the battle field to the field of classes’ conciliation”.
Imperialism Brutal Offensive
“In the political field, it’s necessary to bring out the fact that North-American imperialistic unilateral, pro-war and militarist politics are still under course. And the international conjuncture is strongly marked by this brutal offense imposed by the United States in order to carry out its world hegemony through force. The most recent speeches of Mr. Bush and Miss Condoleezza Rice, in a political play, try to give the impression that their government would be leaving the status of unilateral to become multilateral, which is not true. It can be demonstrated through recent political facts”.
“In Iraq, the United States rose the stakes, spending more money with military affairs and sending more soldiers to the Middle East, which means that the American occupation is not to end soon. The same is valid for Afghanistan, where that imperialist occupation has risen, through NATO. Another sign is the growing American offensive against the legitimately elected government of Palestine, fomenting the civil and fratricide war among Palestine forces. We can also bring to memory the recent American bomb attack in Somalia, under the pretext that they would be hunting head agents of international terrorism nets, in addition to an ever growing militarization of the African continent. In Lebanon, the Bush government has been supporting the post-American chains which control the government and fomenting an environment proper to restart a campaign of siege and annihilation of the Resistance forces. At the same time, the United States progresses with the offensive against the politics of Iran, Syria and North Korea, including in such offensives aggressions threatening. Another characteristic of the unilateral politics is the retaking of the anti-missiles shields construction programs, this time in Poland and the Czech Republic, a clear provocation to Russia.”
“Recently there was an increment of the anti-Chinese North-American positions, from a harsh reaction of the U.S. Department of State and of the Pentagon to the announcement that China increased its expenses with its military affairs. At the same time, the Bush government is trying to foment a supposed transition in Cuba. For that, it went as far as elaboration a contingency plan, with the ultimate goal of establishing an American protectorate in Cuba.”
The United States’ politics for Latin America
“The most recent expressions of the North-American interests in Latin America are made clear with the proclamation of the so-called ‘year of Latin America engagement’, which the first act was President Bush’s visit to five countries (Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala). The visit’s goal was to revert the anti-imperialistic process under course in the continent and that consists of a repudiation of the peoples to ALCA, the free-trade treaties, the existence of North-American bases and the electoral victories of the progressive forces. The factor which stands out the most in the objectively anti-imperialistic movement is the consolidation of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, which has been going deeper in its popular and anti-imperialistic characteristics, at the same time that it proclaims its socialist goals.
The Masses’ Repudiation
“Bush’s visit to Latin America did not result in any thing truly positive for the imperialist boss. He was repudiated by the masses in all countries he paid a visit to. In Brazil’s case, Bush wished to throw the Brazilian government against the Venezuelan government, through fake compliments and leftovers, announcing the recognition of the Brazilian president as the leader of Latin America and Brazil’s eminent role in the hemisphere’s relations. However, the Brazilian government reaffirmed that it would not accept to play the role of contention power against the Venezuelan government. Bush also wanted to captivate the Brazilian production of ethanol, something important minding the energetic crisis the United States faces today, but without reducing the high export taxes the United States charges for our ethanol. In reality, he wants to make of Brazil a big “plantation” for his own supply. In this sense the outcome of his visit was also insignificant. In Uruguay, Bush wanted the government to sign a free-trade treaty and the country chose to remain under Mercosur’s rules. The North-American imperialism has been collecting political and military defeats when trying to impose its unilateral and pro-war politics, which forced it to go after allies and to use the resource of controlling the Security Council of the United Nations for the approval of resolutions favoring the United States. The political scenario reveals, however, a growing North-American isolation and the existence of better conditions for the development of the peoples’ fights for peace, national sovereignty, democracy and social progress.”
Brazil in the Anti-imperialist Fight
“I believe that Brazil and the leftist forces need to prepare themselves in order to match the anti-imperialistic fight environment which has been developing more and more in the world today. It needs to do more in the struggle against the politics of war, against economic interventionism and protectionism. It is possible to make politics which will give more importance to the Brazilians’ wishes for democracy and anti-imperialism. The challenge lies in us Brazilians being more intrepid, something our party has launched and an important update of our politic tactics, also becoming capable of being faced in the international arena of our government’s foreign politics, of the internationalist action of the PCdoB and other parties of the left. The government must become a transforming government, looking after deeper social changes because despite the positive social politics under course, our country lives a tremendous social crisis which will be defeated only if we face our structural problems, if we buy a fight with financial capital, if we promote land and urban reforms, if we elevate the educational and cultural level of the Brazilian people and if we apply economic policies more directly related to the goal of decentralize and redistribute the countries gross income”.
The Perspective of Socialism
“The next Communist and Workers Parties International Meeting, which shall take place in November, will have as theme the 90 years of the October Revolution, the present day validity of its ideals and the perspectives of the fight for Socialism today. The event will be held on November 4 and 5 in Minsk, Belarus, organized by the Communist Party of Belarus. Following it, on the 6 and 7, Moscow will witness the festivities of the 90th anniversary of the Great Socialist October Revolution, promoted by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. It’s very important that the Party dedicates the whole of its activities during the year of 2007 to two important occasions: the 90th anniversary of the October Revolution and the 85th anniversary of the Communist Party of Brazil. A party such as ours, which brings out a intense political fight day after day, which rightly makes ample political alliances, which accepts all challenges of the masses’ fights, taking charge of social, economic, political and cultural struggles at different levels, must face with the same rigor and enthusiasm the ideological fight and reaffirms in each battle the socialist ideals and workers’ struggles, the Party’s Socialist Program and its communist identity. Nowadays, in order to take us to the defensive in this field, to conduct us to the dilemma of renouncing to the principles in order to survive as political force, some try to stigmatize the communists as a force which acts with an eye on who’s at their backs, or who bears the “vulgar Marxism” or dogmatism. The revolutionary principles and theories update themselves in the heat of the fight — “grey is the theory, green is the tree of life”, used to say the poet. But updating them does not mean leaving behind the socialist goals, the communist identity, the fights of classes and the anti-imperialistic fight. The circumstances, the shapes, the actors of the Great October Socialist Revolution will no be repeated in any other country, but its ideals are present in the current fights of workers and peoples of the world. It cannot happen again as a dated historical happening, because the social and political contradictions that motivated this and other revolutions are even more piercing and will not resolve themselves for spontaneous generation. The fight for socialism is current because capitalism has rotten, it has no perspective. Humanity is before the disjunctive between socialism and barbarity”. The communists bet in their emancipation vocation.
Posted by: r’giap | May 27 2007 16:51 utc | 193
(& another)
America’s Agenda for Global Military Domination
Michel Chossudovsky
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO503A.html
March 17, 2005
The Pentagon has released the summary of a top secret Pentagon document, which sketches America’s agenda for global military domination.
This redirection of America’s military strategy seems to have passed virtually unnoticed. With the exception of The Wall Street Journal (see below in annex), not a word has been mentioned in the US media.
There has been no press coverage concerning this mysterious military blueprint. The latter outlines, according to the Wall Street Journal, America’s global military design which consists in “enhancing U.S. influence around the world”, through increased troop deployments and a massive buildup of America’s advanced weapons systems.
While the document follows in the footsteps of the administration’s “preemptive” war doctrine as detailed by the Neocons’ Project of the New American Century (PNAC), it goes much further in setting the contours of Washington’s global military agenda.
It calls for a more “proactive” approach to warfare, beyond the weaker notion of “preemptive” and defensive actions, where military operations are launched against a “declared enemy” with a view to “preserving the peace” and “defending America.”
The document explicitly acknowledges America’s global military mandate, beyond regional war theaters. This mandate also includes military operations directed against countries, which are not hostile to America, but which are considered strategic from the point of view of US interests.
From a broad military and foreign policy perspective, the March 2005 Pentagon document constitutes an imperial design, which supports US corporate interests Worldwide.
“At its heart, the document is driven by the belief that the U.S. is engaged in a continuous global struggle that extends far beyond specific battlegrounds, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The vision is for a military that is far more proactive, focused on changing the world instead of just responding to conflicts such as a North Korean attack on South Korea, and assuming greater prominence in countries in which the U.S. isn’t at war. (WSJ, 11 March 2005)
The document suggests that its objective also consists in “offensive” rather than run of the mill “preemptive” operations. There is, in this regard, a subtle nuance in relation to earlier post-911 national security statements: “[The document presents] ‘four core’ problems, none of them involving traditional military confrontations. The services are told to develop forces that can: build partnerships with failing states to defeat internal terrorist threats; defend the homeland, including offensive strikes against terrorist groups planning attacks; influence the choices of countries at a strategic crossroads, such as China and Russia; and prevent the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by hostile states and terrorist groups.” (Ibid)
The emphasis is no longer solely on waging major theater wars as outlined in the PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century” , the March 2005 military blueprint points to shifts in weapons systems as well as the need for a global deployment of US forces in acts of Worldwide military policing and intervention. The PNAC in its September 2000 Report had described these non-theater military operations as “constabulary functions”: “The Pentagon must retain forces to preserve the current peace in ways that fall short of conduction major theater campaigns…. These duties are today’s most frequent missions, requiring forces configured for combat but capable of long-term, independent constabulary operations.” (PNAC, http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf , p. 18)
Recruitment of Troops to Police the Empire
The underlying emphasis is on the development and recruitment of specialized military manpower required to control and pacify indigenous forces and factions in different regions of the World: “the classified guidance urges the military to come up with less doctrinaire solutions that include sending in smaller teams of culturally savvy soldiers to train and mentor indigenous forces.” (Ibid)
The classified document points to the need for a massive recruitment and training of troops. These troops, including new contingents of special forces, green berets and other specialized military personnel, would be involved, around the World, in acts of military policing:
“Mr. Rumsfeld’s approach likely will trigger major shifts in the weapons systems that the Pentagon buys, and even more fundamental changes in the training and deployment of U.S. troops throughout the world, said defense officials who have played a role in crafting the document or are involved in the review.
The U.S. would seek to deploy these troops far earlier in a looming conflict than they traditionally have been to help a tottering government’s armed forces confront guerrillas before an insurgency is able to take root and build popular support. Officials said the plan envisions many such teams operating around the world.
US military involvement is not limited to the Middle East. The sending in of special forces in military policing operations, under the disguise of peace-keeping and training, is contemplated in all major regions of the World. A large part of these activities, however, will most probably be carried out by private mercenary companies on contract to the Pentagon, NATO or the United Nations. The military manpower requirements as well as the equipment are specialized. The policing will not be conducted by regular army units as in a theater war: “the new plan envisions more active U.S. involvement, resembling recent military aid missions to places like Niger and Chad, where the U.S. is dispatching teams of ground troops to train local militaries in basic counterinsurgency tactics. Future training missions, however, would likely be conducted on a much broader scale, one defense official said.
Of the military’s services, the Marines Corps right now is moving fastest to fill this gap and is looking at shifting some resources away from traditional amphibious-assault missions to new units designed specifically to work with foreign forces. To support these troops, military officials are looking at everything from acquiring cheap aerial surveillance systems to flying gunships that can be used in messy urban fights to come to the aid of ground troops. One “dream capability” might be an unmanned AC-130 gunship that could circle an area at relatively low altitude until it is needed, then swoop in to lay down a withering line of fire, said a defense official.” (Ibid)
New Post Cold War Enemies
While the “war on terrorism” and the containment of “rogue states” still constitute the official justification and driving force, China and Russia are explicitly identified in the classified March document as potential enemies.
“… the U.S. military … is seeking to dissuade rising powers, such as China, from challenging U.S. military dominance. Although weapons systems designed to fight guerrillas tend to be fairly cheap and low-tech, the review makes clear that to dissuade those countries from trying to compete, the U.S. military must retain its dominance in key high-tech areas, such as stealth technology, precision weaponry and manned and unmanned surveillance systems.” (Ibid)
While the European Union is not mentioned, the stated objective is to shunt the development of all potential military rivals.
“Trying to Run with the Big Dog”
How does Washington intend to reach its goal of global military hegemony?
Essentially through the continued development of the US weapons industry, requiring a massive shift out of the production of civilian goods and services. In other words, the ongoing increase in defense spending feeds this new undeclared arms race, with vast amounts of public money channeled to America’s major weapons producers.
The stated objective is to make the process of developing advanced weapons systems “so expensive”, that no other power on earth will able to compete or challenge “the Big Dog”, without jeopardizing its civilian economy: “[A]t the core of this strategy is the belief that the US must maintain such a large lead in crucial technologies that growing powers will conclude that it is too expensive for these countries to even think about trying to run with the big dog. They will realize that it is not worth sacrificing their economic growth, said one defense consultant who was hired to draft sections of the document. ” (Ibid, emphasis added)
Undeclared Arms Race between Europe and America
This new undeclared arms race is with the so-called “growing powers.”
While China and Russia are mentioned as a potential threat, America’s (unofficial) rivals also include France, Germany and Japan. The recognized partners of the US — in the context of the Anglo-American axis — are Britain, Australia and Canada, not to mention Israel (unofficially).
In this context, there are at present two dominant Western military axes: the Anglo-American axis and the competing Franco-German alliance. The European military project, largely dominated by France and Germany, will inevitably undermine NATO. Britain (through British Aerospace Systems Corporation) is firmly integrated into the US system of defense procurement in partnership with America’s big five weapons producers.
Needless to say, this new arms race is firmly embedded in the European project, which envisages under EU auspices, a massive redirection of State financial resources towards military expenditure. Moreover, the EU monetary system establishing a global currency which challenges the hegemony of the US dollar is intimately related to the development of an integrated EU defense force outside of NATO.
Under the European constitution, there will be a unified European foreign policy position which will include a common defense component. It is understood, although never seriously debated in public, that the proposed European Defense Force is intended to challenge America’s supremacy in military affairs: “under such a regime, trans-Atlantic relations will be dealt a fatal blow.” (according to Martin Callanan, British Conservative member of the European Parliament, Washington Times, 5 March 2005).
Ironically, this European military project, while encouraging an undeclared US-EU arms race, is not incompatible with continued US-EU cooperation in military affairs. The underlying objective for Europe is that EU corporate interests are protected and that European contractors are able to effectively cash in and “share the spoils” of the US-led wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. In other words, by challenging the Big Dog from a position of strength, the EU seeks to retain its role as “a partner” of America in its various military ventures.
There is a presumption, particularly in France, that the only way to build good relations with Washington, is to emulate the American Military Project — i.e., by adopting a similar strategy of beefing up Europe’s advanced weapons systems.
In other words, what we are dealing with is a fragile love-hate relationship between Old Europe and America, in defense systems, the oil industry as well as in the upper spheres of banking, finance and currency markets. The important issue is how this fragile geopolitical relationship will evolve in terms of coalitions and alliances in the years to come. France and Germany have military cooperation agreements with both Russia and China. European Defense companies are supplying China with sophisticated weaponry. Ultimately, Europe is viewed as an encroachment by the US, and military conflict between competing Western superpowers cannot be ruled out. (For further details, see Michel Chossudovsky, “The Anglo-American Axis,” http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO303B.html )
From skepticism concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to outright condemnation, in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion, Old Europe (in the wake of the invasion) has broadly accepted the legitimacy of the US military occupation of Iraq, despite the killings of civilians, not to mention the Bush administration’s policy guidelines on torture and political assassinations.
In a cruel irony, the new US-EU arms race has become the chosen avenue of the European Union, to foster “friendly relations” with the American superpower. Rather than opposing the US, Europe has embraced “the war on terrorism”. It is actively collaborating with the US in the arrest of presumed terrorists. Several EU countries have established Big Brother anti-terrorist laws, which constitute a European “copy and paste” version of the US Homeland Security legislation.
European public opinion is now galvanized into supporting the “war on terrorism”, which broadly benefits the European military industrial complex and the oil companies. In turn, the “war on terrorism” also provides a shaky legitimacy to the EU security agenda under the European Constitution. The latter is increasingly viewed with disbelief, as a pretext to implement police-state measures, while also dismantling labor legislation and the European welfare state.
In turn, the European media has also become a partner in the disinformation campaign. The “outside enemy” presented ad nauseam on network TV, on both sides of the Atlantic, is Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. In other words, the propaganda campaign serves to usefully camouflage the ongoing militarisation of civilian institutions, which is occurring simultaneously in Europe and America.
Guns and Butter: The Demise of the Civilian Economy
The proposed EU constitution requires a massive expansion of military spending in all member countries to the obvious detriment of the civilian economy.
The European Union’s 3% limit on annual budget deficits implies that the expansion in military expenditure will be accompanied by a massive curtailment of all categories of civilian expenditure, including social services, public infrastructure, not to mention government support to agriculture and industry. In this regard, “the war on terrorism” serves — in the context of the neoliberal reforms — as a pretext. It builds public acceptance for the imposition of austerity measures affecting civilian programs, on the grounds that money is needed to enhance national security and homeland defense.
The growth of military spending in Europe is directly related to the US military buildup. The more America spends on defense, the more Europe will want to spend on developing its own European Defense Force. “Keeping up with the Jones”, all of which is for a good and worthy, cause, namely fighting “Islamic terrorists” and defending the homeland.
EU enlargement is directly linked to the development and financing of the European weapons industry. The dominant European powers desperately need the contributions of the ten new EU members to finance the EU’s military buildup. In this regard, the European Constitution requires “the adoption of a security strategy for Europe, accompanied by financial commitments on military spending.” (European Report, 3 July 2003). In other words, under the European Constitution, EU enlargement tends to weaken the Atlantic military alliance (NATO).
The backlash on employment and social programs is the inevitable byproduct of both the American and European military projects, which channel vast amounts of State financial resources towards the war economy, at the expense of the civilian sectors.
The result are plant closures and bankruptcies in the civilian economy and a rising tide of poverty and unemployment throughout the Western World. Moreover, contrary to the 1930s, the dynamic development of the weapons industry creates very few jobs.
Meanwhile, as the Western war economy flourishes, the relocation of the production of civilian manufactured goods to Third World countries has increased in recent years at an dramatic pace. China, which constitutes by far the largest producer of civilian manufactured goods, increased its textile exports to the US by 80.2 percent in 2004, leading to a wave of plant closures and job losses (WSJ, 11 March 2005)
The global economy is characterized by a bipolar relationship. The rich Western countries produce weapons of mass destruction, whereas poor countries produce manufactured consumer goods. In a twisted logic, the rich countries use their advanced weapons systems to threaten or wage war on the poor developing countries, which supply Western markets with large amounts of consumer goods produced in cheap labor assembly plants.
America, in particular, has relied on this cheap supply of consumer goods to close down a large share of its manufacturing sector, while at the same time redirecting resources away from the civilian economy into the production of weapons of mass destruction. And the latter, in a bitter irony, are slated to be used against the country which supplies America with a large share of its consumer goods, namely China.
Posted by: r’giap | May 27 2007 17:17 utc | 194
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