The looting of the Iraq Museum (Baghdad) is the most severe single blow to cultural heritage in modern history, comparable to the sack of Constantinople, the burning of the library at Alexandria, the Vandal and Mogul invasions, and the ravages of the conquistadors.
?- The American Schools of Oriental Research, Apr. 16, 2003
From April 10 to 12, 2003, during the mayhem that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, looters entered the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad. They stole and destroyed artifacts and caused damage to the museum. But as the confusion also enveloped the museum, no one outside Iraq knew exactly what was taken or the identity of the thieves. Seizing upon tiny bits of available information, Western archaeologists created their own narrative of events and aggressively promoted it through the world media. That narrative revealed nothing about what had happened at the museum. It told everything about the prejudices and biases of its authors.[2]
In this account, U.S. authorities had been explicitly warned of the danger to the museum prior to the war. They deliberately neglected to stop the looting and were possibly complicit in it. The archaeologists' narrative told a moralizing tale of culpability and guilt and heaped it upon U.S. policymakers and forces, even as the battles raged. No analogy was too far-fetched, from the thirteenth-century Crusader sack of Constantinople to the Mongol destruction of Baghdad.
There was only one problem: this saga had no connection to reality. Over time, the truth trickled out, and it was less dramatic than the tale of the "sack of Baghdad" told by the archaeologists. Though severe, the looting of the museum was far less devastating than originally represented. Western scholars of ancient Iraq, who already had a long record of silence about the crimes of Hussein and the Baath Party, compounded their ignominy in April 2003 by irresponsible distortions and unwarranted extrapolations. The years of silence gave way to a spasm of anti-coalition hysteria, some of it genuine, much of it self-serving.
The public expressions of outrage on the part of the archaeological profession subsequently have almost completely evaporated. But questions remain: What was the nature of the relations between archaeologists and the Baath regime? What sorts of compromises did they involve? And did the conduct of the archaeologists prior to and during the war reflect more than a professional concern for the fate of artifacts? Did it constitute a continuation of complicity with the regime, or perhaps for some even a strategy to conceal it, in order to secure a privileged place on the ground in the war's aftermath?
These questions can only be answered by examining the layers of evidence. In this case, the evidence is close to the surface and unequivocal.
....
On April 18, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was assigned to aid in the recovery of stolen items. Then on April 23, a task force was created under the leadership of U.S. Marine reserve officer Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, a Manhattan district attorney in civilian life. At the same time, objects began to be returned by looters and "Iraqi protectors," primarily residents of surrounding neighborhoods and local religious leaders.[36] With Bogdanos in place, and Western media now on the scene in numbers, the picture began to change dramatically.
At the very end of April, Donny George participated in a conference at the British Museum where he was quoted as saying, "the Iraq Museum may have lost in excess of 170,000 items, some dating back 500,000 years."[37] But back in Baghdad, Bogdanos was beginning to raise questions over the scale of thefts: "Twenty-five pieces is not the same as 170,000," he said, referring to the actual number of display objects declared stolen by museum officials.[38] On May 1, The New York Times ran this headline: "Loss Estimates Are Cut on Iraqi Artifacts, but Questions Remain." And on May 2, Donny George gave an interview in The Art Newspaper that accelerated the reduction in loss estimates. Contradicting what he had stated just three days earlier to the press, and presumably at the British Museum conference, he now admitted, "We had moved out thousands of objects from the showcases, everything we could. There were something like a hundred that were either too heavy or too fragile?-but among them were some very important pieces
. From the traces of what I have seen it could be a small percentage of the 170,000 objects.".[39] In later months, George would claim that he and others had been misquoted and had never actually used the figure of 170,000 losses.[40]
During the late spring and summer of 2003, it became increasingly clear that the events at the museum did not conform to the initial narrative. Most of the missing high-quality artifacts had indeed been hidden in various vaults and locations by the staff.[41] The staff portrayed its deception as necessary to protect the holdings, but some journalists were enraged at the manipulation.[42]
Daniel Aaronovitch, writing in The Guardian, gave it fullest expression:
[i]Furious, I conclude two things from all this. The first is the credulousness of many Western academics and others who cannot conceive that a plausible and intelligent fellow-professional might have been an apparatchik of a fascist regime and a propagandist for his own past. The second is that?-these days?-you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed[/i].[43]
The continued recovery of objects, such as the Assyrian gold jewelry stored in the Central Bank and the famed Warka vase, made it increasingly difficult for the archaeologists to maintain high levels of indignation in public. The display of selected treasures in early July also defused angry sentiments and received wide media attention although professionals naturally dismissed it as a stunt.[44] (In September, another famous object, the Sumerian sculpture called the Warka lady, was recovered intact.) News reports also made it increasingly clear that the museum had been the scene of combat during April with the interior spaces used by Iraqi troops to fire at advancing Americans.[45]
But no one took responsibility for the deception. In June, John Malcolm Russell spoke to the "exaggerated claims" of the museum staff. Now he acknowledged that many people felt conned:
[i]Most people I know share my relief that so much of the collection survived, yet many also feel that their noble instincts were manipulated not only to produce shock and grief at a loss of such unprecedented magnitude but also to provoke rage at the cultural callousness of the United States in failing to prevent this predictable tragedy. I can sympathize with those who feel conned. For two weeks after the looting I must have been known as the weeping archaeologist ... So why did the museum staff apparently make such exaggerated claims? I don't know. Recent news reports have suggested that perhaps the first reporters on the scene, confronted with an empty museum, inquired about the total number of registered objects and reported that figure as the loss, or that the museum's senior staff, outraged by the lack of protection, produced this figure in anger to embarrass the Americans. I may never know the answer. Or perhaps some day, over dinner or a cup of tea, one of the Iraqi curators, whom I trust completely, will explain what happened.[/i][46]
Yet Russell did not include himself among those who had been conned, or who had conned others. Just as he brushed off complicity in defying pre-war sanctions, so he brushed off his role in abetting this last Iraqi deception. In September 2003, Russell was appointed deputy senior advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Culture by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
Donny George, the prime purveyor of the museum deception, also landed on his feet. The Western archaeological community did not care that he had misled the media and defamed the United States. In fact, he emerged as their hero, for secreting away the vast bulk of the museum holdings. Secure in the knowledge that he had this backing, George continued into the fall of 2003 to speak of U.S. perfidy, primarily in European and Arab newspapers.[47] He is now head of museums for the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.
