Author: Daniel Pipes
Publication: New York Post
Date: April 22, 2003
URL: http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/73942.htm
URL: http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1066
Who's to blame for the destruction
of Iraqi museums, libraries and archives, amounting to what The New York
Times calls "one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern
history"?
The Bush administration, say academic
specialists on the Middle East. They proceed to compare American leaders
to some of the worst mass-murderers in history.
* Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University:
U.S. political leaders are "destroyers of civilization" like Attila the
Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.
* Michael Sells of Haverford College:
They are "barbarians" whose "criminal neglect" makes them comparable to
Nero.
* Said Arjomand of the State University
of New York (Stony Brook): The U.S. government's "war crime" renders it
akin to the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in 1258.
These academics overlook one tiny
detail, however: It was Iraqis who looted and burned, and they did so against
the coalition's wishes. Blaming Americans for Iraqi crimes is deeply patronizing,
equating Iraqis with children not responsible for their actions.
The academics also overlook another
fact: the extreme rarity of such cultural self-destruction.
The French did not sack the Louvre
in 1944. The Japanese did not burn their national library a year later.
Panamanians did not destroy their archives in 1990. Kuwaitis did not destroy
their historic Korans in 1991. Yes, looting took place in all these cases,
but nothing approached what The Associated Press calls Iraq's "unchecked
frenzy of cultural theft."
And a frenzy it was. At the National
Museum of Iraq, perhaps the greatest storehouse of antiquities in the Middle
East, "the 28 galleries of the museum and vaults with huge steel doors
guarding storage chambers that descend floor after floor into unlighted
darkness had been completely ransacked," reported one eyewitness.
The devastation at Iraq's national
library and archives was worse, for both institutions were purposefully
incinerated. Much of the country's culture and records was destroyed; "nothing
was left in the national library's main wing but its charred walls and
ceilings and mounds of ash." The smoldering shell contained the charred
remnants of historic books "and a nation's intellectual legacy gone up
in smoke." Iraq's main Islamic library, with its collection of "rare early
legal and literary materials, priceless Korans, calligraphy and illumination"
was also burned.
This descent into barbarism is so
unusual, it has only a single precedent - Iraqi actions in '90-'91.
* In Kuwait: When Kuwait was an
Iraqi province, Iraqi troops plundered the national museum, set fire to
the planetarium, ransacked libraries and otherwise crippled the cultural
infrastructure.
* In Iraq: During the instability
that followed Iraq's loss, anti-government elements engaged in a looting
rampage, pillaging regional museums and other cultural institutions, stealing
some 4,000 items. Archaeologists published a catalogue, "Lost Heritage:
Antiquities Stolen from Iraq's Regional Museums," to prevent trade in these
artifacts.
How to explain this possibly unique
Iraqi penchant for cultural self-hatred? The inherently violent quality
of modern Iraqi society is one cause.
Writing in 1968, the Israeli scholar
Uriel Dann explained that a climate of violence is "part of the political
scene in Iraq . . . It is an undercurrent which pervades the vast substrata
of the people outside the sphere of power politics. Hundreds of thousands
of souls can easily be mobilized on the flimsiest pretext. They constitute
a permanently restive element, ready to break into riots."
The Kuwaiti scholar Shafiq N. Ghabra
expanded on this theme in 2001 in the Middle East Quarterly. Noting Iraq's
uneasy mix of Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites, urbanites and tribal
members, plus other divisions, he noted how unmanageable governments found
this diversity, which led them to create "a state devoid of political compromise."
Leaders "liquidated those holding opposing views, confiscated property
without notice, trumped up charges against its enemies and fought battles
with imaginary domestic foes."
The empty shell of the national
library testifies mutely to the excesses of a country singularly prone
to violence against itself.
The blame for the looting in Iraq,
therefore, lies not with the coalition forces but with the Iraqis themselves.
Yes, the coalition should have prepared better, but Iraqis alone bear moral
responsibility for the cultural wreckage.
This conclusion has two implications.
Middle East specialists have yet again confirmed their political obtuseness.
And Iraqis have signaled that they will act in ways highly unwelcome to
the coalition.
Daniel Pipes is director of the
Middle East Forum and author of "Militant Islam Reaches America" (W.W.
Norton).