Iraq looting overview progress report

The last week has been very busy, plus the pollen this season has left my eyeballs sore and swollen. I will be taking the next few days off, which should give me enough time to polish up some of the many things needing to be said about the reaction to the looting of the Iraqi museums.

It has been particularly disconcerting to see the lack of a sane middle ground between the academics' rush to judgement and the dismissive stance adopted by many war supporters, who see the academics' anguish as just more ivory-tower posturing. Though archeologists and art historians overwhelmingly opposed the war, and though much of their criticism since has been less than thoughtful and balanced (see more below), it is absurd to treat the damage done to museums and libraries by looting as anything less than a tragedy. Yet many pundits continue to lump all of the looting together, as if looting a national museum (or a public hospital) were equivalent to seizing the ill-gotten gains of a homicidal kleptocrat. And while "No blood for pottery" is a witty riposte, it is ultimately as shallow a sentiment as "No blood for oil" -- a facile reduction of a complex issue into a snappy slogan.

Nor am I impressed by those who claim the moral high ground by absolutist proclamations that one thing or another isn't worth the loss of a single human life. Seldom is one offered such a direct trade, after all: what is normally involved is a balancing of risks -- and we routinely put lives at risk (or set aside years of our lives) to accomplish all sorts of ends that are not directly life-saving. But more on that topic later.

This past Sunday's New York Times printed a long and disappointing piece by Frank Rich, which went over much of the material we've discussed here over the past few weeks, but spinning each bit of evidence to maximize American culpability. I have no doubt that the securing of Baghdad should have been done more swiftly, but I am also aware of difference between foresight and hindsight, and of the real-world need to balance ideal goals with limited and imperfect means. Self-appointed guardians of culture do themselves no favors by acting as if the Bush administration singled out museums and libraries for malign neglect. As we have pointed out before, the failure to secure important sites seems to have been widespread and followed no discernable pattern. And it is simply outrageous that Rich should conclude his piece by explicitly equating America's actions with those of Saddam Hussein, and falsely claiming that Saddam's palaces were protected when the Iraqi museums were not:

The tragedy for America is not just the loss itself but the naked revelation of our worst instincts at the very dawn of our grandiose project to bring democratic values to the Middle East. By protecting Iraq's oil but not its cultural motherlode, we echo the values of no one more than Saddam, who in 1995 cut off funds to the Baghdad museum, pleading the impact of sanctions, yet nonetheless found plenty of money to pour into his own palaces and their opulent hordes of kitsch. We may have been unable to protect tablets containing missing pieces of the Gilgamesh epic. But somehow we did manage to secure the lavish homes of Saddam's hierarchy, where the cultural gems ranged from videos of old James Bond movies to the collected novels of Danielle Steel.

Posted by David on April 30, 2003 1:43 PM