The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  They would find Saddam’s swimming pool intact, along with his spacious palm groves and rose gardens. Indeed—how often are brutal men surrounded by beauty—the scent of roses drifted even now through the colossal marble halls and chambers and underground corridors of the Republican Palace. There were peonies and nasturtiums and the roses were red and pink and white and crimson and covered in white butterflies, and water—though the 3rd Infantry Division had not yet found the pumps—gurgled from taps into the flower beds. There was even a miniature zoo with a cuddly old bear and lion cubs to which the Americans were feeding a live sheep per day. In Saddam’s pool-side washing room, piles of books had been tied up for removal—Iraqi poetry and, would you believe it, volumes of Islamic jurisprudence—while exercise machines waited across the floor to keep the second Saladin in moderate physical shape. His sixty-sixth birthday would fall in two weeks’ time. Over the door were the initials “S.H.”

  Walking the miles of corridors—after walking the 2-mile road to the palace itself, through yet more fields of roses and palms and piles of spent ammunition and the smell of something awful and dead beyond the flower beds—one was struck by the obsessive mixture of glory and banality. The 15-foot chandeliers inspire admiration, but the solid gold bathroom fittings—the solid gold loo holder and the solid gold loo handle—created a kind of cultural aggression. If one was supposed to be intimidated by Saddam’s power—as the Coliseum and the triumphal arches were meant to impress the people of Rome—what was one to make of the narrow unpolished marble staircases or the great marble walls of the antechamber with their gold-leaf ceilings, walls into which were cut quotations from the interminably dull speeches and thoughts of “His Excellency President Saddam Hussein.”

  Fascist is the word that sprang to mind, but fascism with a touch of Don Corleone thrown in. In that great conference room would sit the attendant lords—the senior masters of the Baath party, the security apparatchiks upon whom the regime depended—desperately attempting to keep awake as their leader embarked on his four-hour explanations of the state of the world and of Iraq’s place within it. As he talked of Zionism, they could admire the Al-Aqsa mosque. When he became angry, they could glance at the fiery missiles streaking towards that glowering sky with the clouds hanging oppressively low in the heavens.

  His words were even cut into the stonework of the outer palace walls where four 20-foot-high busts of the great warrior Hammurabi, clad in medieval helmet and neck-covering, stare at one another across the courtyard. Hammurabi, however, had a moustache and—amazing to perceive—bore an uncommon likeness to Saddam Hussein. Could the government of the “New Iraq” really hold its cabinet meetings here while these four monsters stared at their American-supplied Mercedes? Answer: no. The statues were removed by crane within six months.

  The gold leaf, the marble, the chandeliers, the sheer height and depth of the chambers took the breath away. In one hall, a Pantheon-like dome soared golden above the walls, and when I shouted “Saddam” I listened to the repeated echo of “Saddam” for almost a minute. And I had an absolute conviction that Saddam did just that. If he could instruct his masons to carve his name upon the walls, surely he wanted to hear it repeated in the heights of his palace.

  Far below was the Saddam private cinema, with its blue patent leather seats and two rolls of film—one French, one Russian—still waiting for the final picture show. Outside, beyond the great lawns and the fountains, stood the American Abrams tanks of the 3rd Infantry Division, their names containing the banality and power of another nation. On their barrels I could read how the crews had dubbed their armoured behemoths. Atomic Dog. Annihilator. Arsonist. Anthrax. Anguish. Agamemnon . Saddam would have approved.

  BAGHDAD WAS BURNING. I counted sixteen columns of smoke rising over the city on the aftenoon of 11 April. At the beginning, there was the Ministry of Trade. I watched the looters throw petrol through the smashed windows of the ground floor and the fire burst from them within two seconds. Then there was a clutch of offices at the bottom of the Jumhuriya Bridge which emitted clouds of black, sulphurous smoke. By mid-afternoon, I was standing outside the Central Bank of Iraq as each window flamed like a candle, a mile-long curtain of ash and burning papers drifting over the Tigris.

  As the pickings got smaller, the looters grew tired and—the history of Baghdad insists that anarchy takes this form—the symbols of government power were cremated. The Americans talked of a “new posture” but did nothing. They pushed armoured patrols through the east of the city, Abrams tanks and Humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, but their soldiers did no more than wave at the arsonists. I found a woman weeping beside her husband in the old Arab market. “We are destroying what we now have for ourselves,” she said to him. “We are destroying our own future.”

  The flames spread. By mid-afternoon, the al-Sadeer Hotel was burning—the army of child thieves sent into the building had already stolen the bed-linen and the mattresses, the beds and tables, even the reception desk and its mass of iron keys. Then from the towering Ministry of Industry, a concrete pile of Third Reich conception, came trails of black smoke. Every central street was strewn with papers, discarded furniture, stolen, wrecked cars and the contents of the small shops whose owners had not bothered to buy armoured doors. At last, the banks were also looted. Since the collapse of the Iraqi dinar—it stood at more than 4,000 to the dollar—no one had bothered to bash their way into the banks before. But in the morning, I saw a mob storming the Rafidain Bank near the Baghdad governorate, dragging a massive iron safe to the door and crowbarring it open. Given the worth of the dinar, they would have done better to leave the cash inside and steal the safe.

  Iraq’s scavengers thieved and destroyed what they were allowed to loot and burn by the Americans—but a two-hour drive around Baghdad showed clearly what the United States intended to protect, presumably for its own use. After days of arson and pillage, I compiled a short but revealing scorecard. U.S. troops had sat back and allowed mobs to wreck and then burn the ministries of Planning, Education, Irrigation, Trade, Industry, Foreign Affairs, Culture and Information. They did nothing to prevent looters from destroying priceless treasures of Iraq’s history in the Baghdad Archaeological Museum and in the museum in the northern city of Mosul, nor from looting three hospitals.

  However, the Americans put hundreds of troops inside two Iraqi ministries that remained untouched—and untouchable—with tanks and armoured personnel carriers and Humvee jeeps surrounding both institutions. So which particular ministries proved to be so important for the Americans? Why, the Ministry of the Interior, of course—with its vast wealth of intelligence information on Iraq—and the Ministry of Oil. The archives and files of Iraq’s most valuable asset—its oilfields and, even more important, its massive reserves, perhaps the world’s largest—were safe and sound, sealed off from the mobs and looters, and safe to be shared—as Washington almost certainly intended—with U.S. oil companies.

  It cast an interesting reflection on America’s supposed war aims. Anxious to “liberate” Iraq, it allowed its people to destroy the infrastructure of government as well as the private property of Saddam’s henchmen. The Bush administration insisted that the oil ministry was a vital part of Iraq’s inheritance, that the oil fields were to be held in trust “for the Iraqi people.” But was the Ministry of Trade—relit on 14 April by an enterprising arsonist—not vital to the future of the Iraqi people? Were the ministries of Education and Irrigation—still burning fiercely—not of critical importance to the next Iraqi government? The Americans, as we now knew, could spare 2,000 soldiers to protect the Kirkuk oilfields, containing probably the largest reserves in the world, but couldn’t even invest 200 soldiers to protect the Mosul museum from attack.

  There was much talk of that “new posture” from the Americans. Armoured and infantry patrols suddenly appeared on the middle-class streets of the capital, ordering young men hauling fridges, furniture and television sets to deposit their loot on the pavement if
they could not prove ownership. It was pitiful. After billions of dollars’ worth of government buildings, computers and archives had been destroyed, the Americans were stopping teenagers driving mule-drawn carts loaded with worthless second-hand chairs. There was a special anger now to the crowd that gathered every afternoon opposite the American lines outside the Palestine Hotel. On 12 April, they chanted “Peace-peace-peace—we want a new Iraqi government to give us security.” Two days later, some of them shouted “Bush– Saddam, they are the same.”

  But there was worse—far worse—to come. Never, in all my dreams of destruction, could I have imagined the day I would enter the Iraqi National Archaeological Museum to find its treasures defiled. They lay across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq’s history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete floor. My feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history—only to be destroyed when America came to “liberate” the city. The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation’s thousands of years of civilisation.

  Not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul—perhaps not since the Second World War or earlier—have so many archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces. “This is what our own people did to their history,” the man in the grey gown said as we flicked our torches across the piles of once perfect Sumerian pots and Greek statues, now headless, armless, in the storeroom of Iraq’s National Archaeological Museum.

  “We need the American soldiers to guard what we have left. We need the Americans here. We need policemen.” But all the museum guard, Abdul-Setar Abdul-Jaber, experienced on 12 April 2003 were gun battles between looters and local residents, the bullets hissing over our heads outside the museum and skittering up the walls of neighbouring apartment blocks. “Look at this,” he said, picking up a massive hunk of pottery, its delicate patterns and beautifully decorated lips coming to a sudden end where the jar—perhaps two feet high in its original form—had been smashed into four pieces. “This was Assyrian.” The Assyrians ruled almost two thousand years before Christ.

  And what were the Americans doing as the new rulers of Baghdad? Why, that morning they were recruiting Saddam’s hated former policemen to restore law and order on their behalf. The last army to do anything like this was Mountbatten’s force in South-East Asia which employed the defeated Japanese army to control the streets of Vietnamese cities—bayonets fixed—after the recapture of IndoChina in 1945. A queue of respectably dressed Baghdad ex-cops formed outside the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad after they heard a radio broadcast calling for them to resume their “duties” on the streets. In the late afternoon, at least eight former and very portly senior police officers, all wearing green uniforms—the same colour as the uniforms of the Iraqi Baath party—turned up to offer their services to the Americans, accompanied by a U.S. Marine.

  But there was no sign that any of them would be sent down to the Archaeological Museum. There was no electricity in Baghdad—as there was no water and no law and no order—and so we stumbled in the darkness of the museum basement, tripping over toppled statues and blundering into broken-winged bulls. When I shone my torch over one far shelf, I drew in my breath. Every pot and jar—“3500 BC,” it said on one shelf corner—had been bashed to pieces. Why? How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when anarchy had been let loose—and less than three months after U.S. archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country’s treasures and put the museum on a military database— did the Americans allow the mobs to destroy so much of the priceless heritage of ancient Mesopotamia? And all this happened while U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld was sneering at the press for claiming that anarchy had broken out in Baghdad. “Stuff happens,” he said. Could there really be so many vases in Iraq?

  For well over 200 years, Western and local archaeologists have gathered up the remnants of this centre of early civilisation from palaces, ziggurats and 3,000-year-old graves. Their tens of thousands of handwritten card index files—often in English and in graceful nineteenth-century handwriting—now lay strewn amid the broken statuary. I picked up a tiny shard. “Late 2nd century, no. 1680” was written in pencil on the inside. To reach the storeroom, the mobs had broken through massive steel doors, entering from a back courtyard and heaving statues and treasures past a generator to cars and trucks.

  The looters had left only a few hours before I arrived and no one—not even the museum guard in the grey gown—had any idea how much they had taken. A glass case that had once held 40,000-year-old stone and flint objects had been smashed open. It lay empty. No one knows what happened to the Assyrian reliefs from the royal palace of Khorsabad, nor the 5,000-year-old seals nor the 4,500-year-old gold-leaf earrings once buried with Sumerian princesses. In the vast museum library, only a few books—mostly mid-nineteenth-century archaeological works—appeared to have been stolen or destroyed. Looters set little value on books. I found a complete set of The Geographical Journal from 1893 to 1936 still intact—lying next to them was a paperback entitled: Baghdad, The City of Peace—but thousands of card-index sheets had been flung from their boxes over stairwells and banisters.

  British, French and German archaeologists played a leading role in the discovery of some of Iraq’s finest ancient treasures—that great British Arabist, diplomatic schemer and spy Gertrude Bell, the “uncrowned queen of Iraq,” whose tomb lay not far from the museum, was an enthusiastic supporter of their work. The Germans built the modern-day museum beside the Tigris and only in 2000 was it reopened to the public after nine years of closure following the first Gulf War.

  But even as the Americans encircled Baghdad, Saddam’s soldiers showed almost the same contempt for its treasures as the looters. Their slit trenches and empty artillery positions were still clearly visible in the museum lawns, one of them dug beside a huge stone statue of a winged bull. Only a few weeks before, Jabir Khalil Ibrahim, the director of Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities, had referred to the museum’s contents as “the heritage of the nation.” They were, he said, “not just things to see and enjoy—we get strength from them to look to the future. They represent the glory of Iraq.” Ibrahim had temporarily vanished, like so many government employees in Baghdad, and Abdul-Jaber and his colleagues were now trying to defend what was left of the country’s history with a collection of Kalashnikov rifles. “We don’t want to have guns—but everyone must have them now,” he said. “We have to defend ourselves because the Americans have let this happen. They made a war against one man—so why do they abandon us to this war and these criminals?” Half an hour later, I contacted the Civil Affairs unit of the U.S. Marines in Saadoun Street and gave them the exact location of the museum and the condition of its contents. A captain told me that “we’re probably going to get down there.” Too late. Iraq’s history had already been trashed by the looters whom the Americans unleashed on the city during their “liberation.”

  But “liberation” had already turned into occupation. Faced by a crowd of angry Iraqis in Fardus Square demanding a new Iraqi government “for our protection and security and peace,” U.S. Marines, who should have been providing that protection, stood shoulder to shoulder facing them, guns at the ready. The reality, which the Americans—and of course, Mr. Rumsfeld—failed to understand, was that under Saddam, the poor and deprived were always the Shia Muslims, the middle classes always the Sunnis—just as Saddam himself was a Sunni. So it was the Sunnis who were now suffering plunder at the hands of the Shia. And so the gun battles that broke out between property-owners and looters were, in effect, a conflic
t between Sunni and Shia Muslims. “By failing to end this violence—by stoking ethnic hatred through their inactivity—the Americans are now provoking a civil war in Baghdad,” I wrote that night in The Independent:

  I drove through the city for more than an hour. Hundreds of streets are now barricaded off with breeze blocks, burned cars and tree trunks, watched over by armed men who are ready to kill strangers who threaten their homes or shops . . . A few Marine patrols did dare to venture into the suburbs yesterday—positioning themselves next to hospitals which had already been looted—but fires burned across the city at dusk for the third consecutive day. The municipality building was blazing away last night and on the horizon other great fires were sending columns of smoke miles high into the air. Too little too late. Yesterday, a group of chemical engineers and water purification workers turned up at the Marine headquarters, pleading for protection so they could return to their jobs. Electrical supply workers came along, too. But Baghdad is already a city at war with itself, at the mercy of gunmen and thieves . . . “You are American!” a woman shouted at me in English . . . “Go back to your country. Get out of here. You are not wanted here. We hated Saddam and now we are hating Bush because he is destroying our city.” It was a mercy she could not visit the Museum of Antiquity to see for herself that the very heritage of her country—as well as her city—has been destroyed.

  And so, on 14 April, it was the burning of books. First came the looters, then came the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sack of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives—a priceless treasure of Ottoman documents including the old royal archives of Iraq—were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze. I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I tried to reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy who could have been no more than ten years old. Amid the ashes of hundreds of years of Iraqi history, I found just one file blowing in the wind outside: pages and pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sherif Hussein of Mecca—who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia— and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.