I’ve wanted to write something more personal lately. I need to register a point of view, to disagree --- with what? Everything! It’s all wrong, on so many levels. One that stuck in my craw was an infantryman quoted by CNN, calling Iraq ‘the ugliest desert I’ve ever seen.’
As in, “I’ve just hauled ass in my Humvee through the ugliest desert I’ve ever seen.”
The quote startled me into remembering that desert. Its lyricism was at each moment contradicted by the powdery gritty flatness under my feet. At the horizon, dunes, their limber gentle curves oddly like nudes. On a hot day, in the distance, dunes hovered over a silvery shimmer in the earth: Mirage. I always missed the moment of lift off. As the Landrover bounced and jerked forward, that watery sheen kept retreating. Whereas the actual ground beneath my two feet had the harsh detail of magnification, a disappointment. But it was strewn with stuff: shards, beads, assorted trash of thousands of years. Picking up a small roughly cut carnelian bead in what seemed like nowhere, no habitation of any kind visible anywhere on the horizon, a mystery. Had it fallen from a girls neck 5000 years ago, or fifty? Was she walking, riding a donkey, a camel? As I examined the bead in my palm a depth of time opened up & took me in. Perhaps I was standing at an ancient riverbank. Over the last few thousand years the rivers had meandered hundred of miles across that plain, at one time or another slipping under my feet.
The Iraqi writer Betool Khedairi has said, “You cannot imagine the internal dialogue I have with my eight-thousand-year-old civilization every time I sit down at my desk.”
Depth of time. I read an amazing quote in a recent New Yorker from a nameless Iraqi doctor. “The sandstorm is coming back… You can smell it. It smells like earth. Whenever I smell this, it reminds me of dead people. Think about it. Think of Iraq’s history. What is that history but thousands of years of wars and killing… right back to Sumerian and Babylonian times. Millions of people have died on this earth and become part of it. Their bodies are part of the land, the earth we are breathing.”
I remember bones in a burial pot in the corner of the archeological lab. After a fierce rainstorm the mound that covered the ancient city bloomed with pots, their burial incantations revealed by the flash floods that followed the rain.
When I read that looters had ransacked the Baghdad museum I was grief stricken. I was just a girl when I went there & my memory is sketchy, really just impressions: cool spacious halls that sheltered the past and a quality of ambient delight which I think came from the director. I remember him as cordial and relaxed, known to my father, hospitable.
When I read about the looters, I was overcome by dread: how soon we are at the end of the beginning. The first moments of liberation were raped by American arrogance and carelessness. The despoliation of this museum is a cultural catastrophe of the first magnitude.
For America, this has been a fantastical war: against an enemy and culture wholly misunderstood, whose premises were deeply concealed in the murky waters of unverifiable suspicion. It’s curious that Bush, known for his Texas style straight talk, stakes the biggest wager of his presidency on the intellectually rotten ground of paranoia. Straight talk has rarely been shown to be so clearly divorced from good judgment. There are no reasoned arguments in his mind, and so far, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
My father comments that the extreme rightwing ideology infecting our government can’t be separated from its sidekick, Christian fundamentalism. These people don’t believe in evolution; why should they care what economists think about their economic policy? The value of reasoned argument and experienced judgment has withered across the nation as a result of the influence of these ideologues. More to the point, if Rumsfeld has contempt for the advice of his own advisors, why would anyone else’s suggestions carry any weight?
During the first Gulf War, American archeologists were in close contact with the U.S. military on protecting the priceless cultural heritage of Iraq from the effects of war. In Gulf War II, the American forces, responsible under the Geneva Convention for order and government in Iraq, made the choice to guard the oil ministry from looters and leave all other doors open to the mobs. If efforts to recover the collections fail, the result of the looting will be infamy for the United States. Artifacts forming a record of thousands of years of human civilization have been lost. It is a rip into the fabric of human culture. What has been lost is beyond valuing. Of course, any knowledgeable person could have predicted this, and many did. No doubt religious bias played a role in this unspeakable carelessness, even though the objects were pre-Islamic.
Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban demonstrated the insufficiency of Islamic fundamentalism as a basis for social and political life. Bush and his minions show that the defect is fundamentalism, not Islam.
The United States has refused to allow itself to be judged in the World Court, whose charter includes trying government representatives for war crimes. How quickly that refusal has become convenient! The reckoning may not arrive soon, but someday this tragedy in Baghdad will be understood as an American war crime.
URL for more info on Iraqi antiquities, including photos
URL for humanitarian assistance to Iraq
URL for Humanities and Social Sciences Online website with info on the situation
URL for the threat to world heritage in Iraq
