Tomgram

Cultural cleansing

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What it means to be an occupying force in modern Iraq’s Year Zero — three snapshots:

I think I’d caption this one, “The modern Mongols come calling”: It’s a piece from the Associated Press, “Hussein’s gazelles feed Marine base.” It reads in full:

“Tikrit, Iraq — Supper time has become a double treat at a Marine base outside Saddam Hussein’s hometown — not only is there fresh meat, but it’s from Hussein’s personal hunting preserve. The Tikrit South airfield, where Marine Wing Support Squadron 271 has set up base, is on the edge of a preserve where Hussein and favored guests once hunted gazelle. Now, Marines are hunting the animals as a welcome substitute for prepackaged Meals Ready to Eat.

“It was delicious. I don’t know if it’s because we’ve been eating MREs for two months, but everyone’s enjoyed it a lot,” said Cpl. Joshua Wicksell, 26, of Corpus Christi, Texas.”

The next, which I might caption, “Assassination on Main Street, Iraq (deferred),” comes from an article by a fine stylist, Charlie LeDuff, in the Saturday New York Times, A Cleric Assumes a Bully Pulpit, and is about a Shiite preacher connected to a Shiite political party with ties to Iran, who has become the de facto “elected” mayor of the city of Kut, to the disgust of American special forces troops.

“The frustrated Americans have referred to the chain-smoking cleric as a clown, a false prophet, a sham holy man, a boob. But the more they slander him, the mightier his stature and his message of resistance to American domination seem to become. It seems that the more Mr. Abbas’s presence grows, the slipperier the Americans’ grip on power and the good will of Kut residents becomes

“American Special Forces soldiers who frequent the hotel lobby here, drinking coffee and napping in the foyer, say they considered killing Mr. Abbas but have since thought better of it. Col. Ron Johnson, a commander of American marines in the sector, says the Americans have taken a wait-and-see approach.
“‘Abbas is a clown, but he remains a concern to us,’ Colonel Johnson said. ‘We’ve taken the attitude that if we ignore him for the time being, he might go away.'”

“It was delicious. I don’t know if it’s because we’ve been eating MREs for two months, but everyone’s enjoyed it a lot,” said Cpl. Joshua Wicksell, 26, of Corpus Christi, Texas.”

The next, which I might caption, “Assassination on Main Street, Iraq (deferred),” comes from an article by a fine stylist, Charlie LeDuff, in the Saturday New York Times, A Cleric Assumes a Bully Pulpit, and is about a Shiite preacher connected to a Shiite political party with ties to Iran, who has become the de facto “elected” mayor of the city of Kut, to the disgust of American special forces troops.

“The frustrated Americans have referred to the chain-smoking cleric as a clown, a false prophet, a sham holy man, a boob. But the more they slander him, the mightier his stature and his message of resistance to American domination seem to become. It seems that the more Mr. Abbas’s presence grows, the slipperier the Americans’ grip on power and the good will of Kut residents becomes

“American Special Forces soldiers who frequent the hotel lobby here, drinking coffee and napping in the foyer, say they considered killing Mr. Abbas but have since thought better of it. Col. Ron Johnson, a commander of American marines in the sector, says the Americans have taken a wait-and-see approach.
“‘Abbas is a clown, but he remains a concern to us,’ Colonel Johnson said. ‘We’ve taken the attitude that if we ignore him for the time being, he might go away.'”

The third, which I might entitle, “How not to count coup in Iraq,” is a passage from a piece in today’s British Financial Times by Charles Clover, Confusion reigns for the new guardians of Iraq’s oil. It focuses on who is running the Oil Ministry, housed in “one of the few government buildings guarded by US soldiers.” The former Director General of the ministry, who refused to give his name when interviewed, was thoroughly confused about who was in charge, but did offer this comment on American preparations for creating the new Iraq:

“However, [the Director General] lamented the whole US approach to dealing with post-war Iraq. ‘We have a lot of experience with coups d’etat and this one is the worst,’ he said. ‘Any colonel in the Iraqi army will tell you that when he does a coup he goes to the broadcasting station with five announcements.”‘The first one is long live this, down with that. The second one is your new government is this and that. The third is the list of the people to go on retirement. The fourth one, every other official is to report back to work tomorrow morning. The fifth is the curfew.’This is usually done within one hour, he added. ‘Now we are waiting more than a week and still we hear nothing from them.'”

In the meantime, the American drive — with plenty of help of foreign collectors, well-organized gangs of looters, poor looters, possibly Ba’ath Party arsonists and who knows who else — to create what a friend of mine calls a culture-free zone in Iraq shows little sign of abating. As Jill Berke, Assistant Director of the Center on Terrorism and Public Safety, wrote me the other day,

“The more I read about the looting of Baghdad’s treasures, the more I think of ethnic cleansing. In this case we can call it cultural cleansing, an erasure of a civilization not merely misunderstood by an American administration steeped in Christian fundamentalism, but dismissed by its capitalistic bent as well. The hubris of big biz boys wielding their big toys in a techno-fantasy war has produced a humiliation so complete that undisputed proof of the brilliance, the beauty, of Iraqi culture has disappeared. Yes, cultural cleansing… as Franklin Graham awaits permission to bring in food and bibles to the waiting flocks and Bechtel is poised to rebuild.”

Increasingly, “cultural cleansing” seems like the appropriate term to me as well. Now, thanks to a fine reporter, the Observer‘s Ed Vulliamy (who broke the prewar U.S. UN e-mail surveillance story) and his colleagues Paul Martin and Gaby Hinsliff, we know that the military was actually memoed by the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance that the Iraqi national museum should by the top security priority for American troops after the national bank. Interestingly, the Oil Ministry, which was guarded, came sixteenth on the list of ORHA’s sixteen top sites, but assumedly something got lost in the shuffle.

I’m also including an article from an on-line police magazine, www.nycop.com posted before the war ended, which shows the sort of basic thinking that any reasonable police professional would have put into a possible occupation of Baghdad. Assumedly, this wasn’t beyond the scope of the most simple-minded Pentagon planners, had there been any urge whatsoever to do this sort of planning. The author is a retired New York City police captain and the piece was passed on to me by Chuck Strozier, who teaches at John Jay College in New York. As he comments, “The attached [piece] suggests the American military was quite well prepared to have done good policing of post-war Iraq. The awful looting of the museum, it seems, was thus political and the result of undue influence of those nasty dealers with access because of their wealth and undoubted contributions to Republicans.”

Finally, a beautiful piece from the Sunday Washington Post Outlook section by a remarkable scholar, Robert Darnton, author of among other works, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, who reminds us of the trauma we experienced when the British burned our national library, then only four years old, in Washington DC in 1812 and speculates on what it means to lose a library, and more generally on the fragility of what we think of as civilization. Tom

US army was told to protect looted museum
The United States army ignored warnings from its own civilian advisers that could have stopped the looting of priceless artefacts in Baghdad, according to leaked documents seen by The Observer.

Paul Martin in Kuwait, Ed Vulliamy in Washington and Gaby Hinsliff

The Observer
April 20, 2003

Iraq’s national museum is identified as a ‘prime target for looters’ and should be the second top priority for securing by coalition troops after the national bank, says a memo sent last month by the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), set up to supervise the reconstruction of postwar Iraq.
Looting of the museum could mean ‘irreparable loss of cultural treasures of enormous importance to all humanity’, the document concluded. But the US army still failed to post soldiers outside the museum, and it was ransacked, with more than 270,000 artefacts taken.

General Jay Garner, the head of ORHA, is said to be ‘livid’. ‘We asked for just a few soldiers at each building or, if they feared snipers, then just one or two tanks,’ said one ORHA official. ‘The tanks were doing nothing once they got inside the city, yet the generals refused to deploy them, and look what happened.’

To read more of the Guardian piece click here

Restoring Order in Iraq
By Edward D. Reuss
New York Cop on-line magazine

Now that the hostilities are nearing an end in Iraq, the combat veterans of the US Army and US Marine Corps are now being asked to take on police duties as looting and other forms of lawlessness engulf many of the cities. How can law and order be restored after the war ends?

The first problem will be to restore at least a perception of law and order. Curfews during the hours of darkness is an obvious requirement. That being done, I know that the US Army will bring in trained units of Military Police to break down the cities into manageable areas for policing.

When I attended the Provost Marshal General’s School in Fort Gordon, Georgia, I was trained in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). The difference in military police and civilian police here in the USA creates specific constitutional problems of jurisdiction….

To read more Reuss click here and then on the article title

Burn a Country’s Past and You Torch Its Future
By Robert Darnton
The Washington Post
Sunday, April 20, 2003

It happened here, too. The British burned our national library in 1814. It wasn’t much of a library, to be sure — just a collection of about 3,000 volumes assembled for the use of senators and representatives in the new capitol being built in the wilderness of Washington, D.C. But in destroying it, the British invaders struck at the heart of what would develop into a national identity.

Do libraries really matter for a nation’s sense of its self? Evidently Iraqis felt the destruction of their national library, archives and museum in the past week as a loss of their connection to a collective past, something like a national memory. When asked to explain what the National Museum of Iraq had meant to him, a security guard answered, in tears, “It was beautiful. The museum is civilization.”

Robert Darnton is the Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of European History at Princeton University.

To read more Darnton click here