Time to Forget

You're free to forget. So forget! So said the broadside put out by the Diggers in 1966 to berate their fellow hippies. And it seems fitting when we talk about the looting spree that occurred shortly after United States troops conquered Iraq. Salon printed a story on the incident, as did many others.

On April 10, a day after Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed and Baghdad was in the hands of U.S. military forces, the National Museum of Iraq was ransacked. In a matter of hours, thousands of Iraqis, some thought to be working for art dealers, clambered into the museum that had been closed to the public for years. After two days of looting, almost all of the museum's 170,000 artifacts were either stolen or damaged. Ancient vases were smashed. Statues were beheaded. In the museum's collection were items from Ur and Uruk, the first city-states, settled around 4000 B.C., including art, jewelry and clay tablets containing cuneiform, considered to be the first examples of writing. The museum also housed giant alabaster and limestone carvings taken from palaces of ancient kings.

"It's catastrophic," says Gibson, who is also head of the American Association for Research in Baghdad, a consortium of about 30 U.S. museums and universities. "It's a lot like a lobotomy. The deep memory of an entire culture, a culture that has continued for thousands of years, has been removed. There was 5,000 years of written records, even Egyptian records don't go back that far. It's an incredible crime."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld offered a particularly cogent defense of the United States failure to protect the Museum, saying, "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?'"

Already some of you are saying, hey, what's this? Why are you getting all hung up on some moldy old relics. Well for one my training is in History and I have a particular fondness for mold old relics. Someday I hope to be one.

But more importantly, this is a convenient place to grab hold of a larger issue. We invaded Iraq and, in essence, eliminated the legal and governmental structures that would have prevented these sort of lootings from happening. And then we stood by and let this and a thousand other lesser crimes occur and did little. Why?

If you see Control Room, and I urge you to if you get the chance, one of the more interesting scenes involves a United States Military spokesman explaining to a CNN reporter that the Iraqi people are responsible to police themselves. It's time to forget what happened 20 days ago when we invaded and took over.

What if we had clamped down on the looting right off the bat. What if the United States government had listened to experts within the State Department, and others like McGuire Gibson (referenced in the Salon article) and been prepared to impose order on the Iraqi people? Some would have been angry with us; but in the long run might not our willingness to enforce civil behavior have paid big dividends? Particularly now as we are facing insurgencies left and right.

It's hard to say, and I suppose, since that moment has passed, we may as well forget. Flowers are lovely.