From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
Why a Museum?
Saddam stole Iraq's history. Looters may have wanted it back.
We shouldn't have been surprised that, after the looting of Baghdad's antiquities museum last weekend, negligent Americans, not the looters themselves, got most of the blame. For much of the media, every bad thing since the invasion has been America's fault. So adding another charge to the indictment was an easy call.
That view is going to need a little revision, though, in light of Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov's story yesterday that the Americans couldn't protect the museum because they were taking fire from the building. He also reported that the damage was less than originally thought. Staffers from the Iraqi Antiquities Department, he wrote, had "preserved the museum's most important treasures, including the kings' graves of Ur and the Assyrian bulls," by hiding them in vaults that the looters didn't touch.
Still, just who was responsible? Or to put it another way: Why would the Iraqis plunder their cultural heritage?
We've seen riots and looting in this country. But at no time during such disturbances were art museums or libraries attacked. Yet when civil order broke down in Baghdad, the museum and national library became targets. Why? Word yesterday out of a UNESCO meeting in Paris was that it was a professional job. Looters had keys for the vaults and discriminated between originals, which they took, and copies, which they left behind.
"I have a suspicion it was organized outside the country," the University of Chicago's McGuire Gibson told the Associated Press. The implication is that it was a contract job by organized crime or some shadowy figure in the illicit traffic of antiquities. Nobody in the art world seems to have thought of Saddam Hussein.
But "I would personally suggest it was done by Saddam's circle, and my prime suspect would by Uday," says Con Coughlin, author of "Saddam: King of Terror," in an interview. "Saddam and his family are basically cultural vandals. When he left Kuwait he trashed the place. So it makes sense that when he leaves Iraq he took the most valuable items." Saddam's family is essentially "a Mafia family, and Barzan [Saddam's half-brother], the guy arrested Thursday, was basically the bagman."
Saddam had been busy looting the museum long before the war began. A decade ago, Iraq Opposition Radio alleged that "several antiquity collections have found their way outside Iraq and been sold for the benefit of Saddam's family and his cronies." And in October the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported that Saddam had started moving--to a remote town in northwestern Iraq--several truckloads of "gold bars and artworks from museums in Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul."
But clearly he hadn't moved it all, and at least some of the looting, to judge by press accounts, was done by ordinary Iraqis on a spree. Again: Why? It's not as if there is an easy resale market in such things.
In fact, the word "museum" is misleading: It means something different in Saddam's Iraq than it does here. Totalitarian regimes are not uninterested in culture. But unlike the citizens of liberal democracies, for whom culture has a value in itself, dictators look on culture as politics by other means. Politics was the target of the looting, too.
Modernist art in Russia all but died in the 1920s, when Lenin denounced it as bourgeois and decadent, decreeing that the purpose of art was to glorify the revolution and the worker. The Nazis' looting of private art collections from Jewish families was not only mercenary but aimed at destroying a people by robbing it of its culture.
Saddam's regime was no different. "You have to understand that Saddam's propaganda ministry made great play on Iraq's cultural heritage, and he was forever linking himself with the great figures of Mesopotamian history such as Nebuchadnezzar," Mr. Coughlin says; Babylon was "turned into a Disney theme park." Saddam bulldozed large parts of the ruins, replacing them with bricked walls. "Tens of thousands of bricks used in the construction bore a special inscription," writes Mr. Coughlin in his book, "reminding future generations that the 'Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar was rebuilt in the era of the leader President Saddam Hussein.' "
In short, Iraqis laid waste to the museum in Baghdad because it had become the symbol of a hated regime. And little wonder. Saddam stole his country's treasures, hauling off truckloads for his enrichment. But he also misappropriated Iraq's history by making it a tool of his personality cult.
In time some of those objects may find their way back to Baghdad. But with Saddam now gone, their past is once again their own.
Mr. Gibson is features editor of The Wall Street Journal's Leisure & Arts page.
