From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Archaeological Shields
Saddam holds Iraq's antiquities hostage.
Voices questioning the wisdom of the U.S.-led operation against Saddam Hussein's dictatorship charge it will cause the reckless destruction of Iraq's cultural heritage. Is the U.S. taking sufficient care to spare Iraq's treasures? Does the Gulf War provide any guidance? And why are the people now accusing the U.S. making no mention of Saddam's uses of archaeological sites as military shields then?
Millennia ago, Iraq was the cradle of civilization, hence the concern about its cultural and archaeological sites. Yet 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. Legally, therefore, the burden to protect these sites falls most heavily on Saddam's regime. If Saddam used them to shelter his forces or hide his armaments they would legally become military targets.
Unfortunately, at the CENTCOM briefing yesterday, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks disclosed that the Iraqis had 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.
This is history repeating itself. In early February 1991, for example, Saddam parked MiG fighter jets at a Babylonian ziggurat at Ur to deter coalition forces from disabling them during the Gulf War. By Nineveh, the ancient capital of the Assyrian empire, he built air bases and weapons factories. According to archaeological scholars from the University of Chicago, an 80-foot mound containing many ruins of ancient Nineveh also housed an oil storage tank. During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam used the site for anti-aircraft batteries because it was the most elevated spot in the area.
The French-built Osirak nuclear reactor, which the Israelis destroyed in 1981, was built adjacent to the Ctesiphon arch.
Erbil is one of the world's longest-inhabited cities. Ruins from its first settlements are more than 6,000 years old. Saddam built several military installations near the site.
In February 1991, the Pentagon contacted Robert McC. Adams, then secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a scholar of ancient Iraq, to help identify important archaeological sites to safeguard them from bombing. Even earlier Colin Powell made it clear that U.S. pilots were told to steer clear of antiquities.
Prof. Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist critical of U.S. bombing in the Gulf War due to its endangerment of antiquities, visited Iraq after the war and said that the damage turned out to be minor. Another initial critic of the bombing campaign, Prof. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago, allowed in 1993, "The U.S. Air Force went out of its way not to hit certain places."
In contrast, at the height of the bombing campaign the Pentagon produced aerial photographs of the Al-Basrah mosque. They showed clearly that the Iraqis had destroyed the mosque for propaganda purposes. While coalition forces had bombed a target some 100 yards away, leaving the mosque unscathed, Iraqi engineers sliced off the dome in the hope of duping journalists that the U.S. had been responsible for the destruction.
The U.S., over the past decade, has amassed an arsenal of precision bombs and weaponry. The risk of archaeological devastation is even smaller than in 1991. Besides, says retired Israeli Brig. Gen. Aharon Levran, the current war "will be less bombing intensive because the aim is . . . to eject Saddam Hussein from Iraq and remain on. If the U.S. were to rely on bombing civilian infrastructures like refineries or electrical grids, they would be shooting themselves in the foot."
The coalition is also dropping leaflets stressing its desire to preserve religious and cultural sites but warning that it will destroy "any viable military target."
The strongest argument that antiwar archaeology experts make is that the chaos that may reign in a post-Saddam Iraq will probably make it harder to safeguard archaeological sites and museums. This contention may be reasonable. But an operation aimed at deposing Saddam because he constitutes a clear and present danger to global security cannot be canceled because a successor regime may commit or not prevent the commission of a crime of another kind.
Rather than opposing a war that stands to liberate Iraqi archaeology from exploitation and destruction by a self-serving dictator who has destroyed and endangered Iraqi antiquities for decades, concerned archaeologists should be advising the U.S. on how best to preserve our ancient roots in a post-Saddam Iraq.
Ms. Glick, the deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post, is an embedded reporter with the U.S. Third Army Infantry Division in Iraq.
