A Call to Art

A new and menacing force is roaming the Iraqi countryside. They are armed to the teeth, and they want your pottery. They call themselves the “Culture Cops,” and their Italian-designed, vase-emblazoned uniforms are the hottest thing to hit the Mesopotamian marshes since the July United Service Organizations tour of California’s recently-inaugurated governor. Officially known as the Archaeological Site Protection Force, this band of former civilian guards represents America’s latest attempt to quell the broad criticism of its failure to protect Iraq’s cultural treasures from being stolen last year. Unfortunately, it is too little too late.

Funded by the State Department and trained by Italian national police, their ranks are barely sufficient to patrol six of Iraq’s 18 provinces, and their presence has thus far proved little more than an annoyance to hardened looters. Iraq is a mine of ancient treasures, with over 100,000 archaeological sites, only a tenth of which are registered. Even when fully trained and mobilized, the 2,000 armed police will be a barely-serviceable deterrent.

And they will be unable to restore the damage already done—in the last year the Iraqi countryside has begun to resemble a moonscape pockmarked by meteorites as looters have removed entire sections of valuable archaeological finds. In the wake of the U.S. invasion, civilian guards fled in the face of gun-toting mobs, and looters have since been digging with relative impunity. Archival reconstruction and international police cooperation have managed to return many of the pieces stolen from the Baghdad Museum, but the harm done to these archaeological sites is irrevocable. While U.S. damage control might again succeed in the apprehension of many of the stolen objects, their context and provenance are forever lost, severely curtailing the wealth of information professional archaeologists might have otherwise reaped.

The destruction of cultural capital in the name of war is, of course, nothing new. In perhaps the most famous example, a Venetian cannonball destroyed a large section of the Athenian Parthenon in 1687 after the besieged Turks had turned it into a powder magazine. Victorious forces often purposefully destroy cultural icons and monuments in order to demoralize the conquered, highlighting the difference between cultural and political capital—I am sure nobody at the U.N. Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization cried as the U.S. Marines toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square. Other destruction, such as at the site of the ancient city of Babylon where Iraqi opposition troops were strategically positioned during the invasion, is considered unavoidable collateral damage and is largely overlooked by the international community. Beyond this, however, a line is drawn by the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. According to some international law experts, this convention would hold the United States legally responsible for, among other things, the damage caused when U.S. military forces refused to protect vulnerable cultural sites such as the Baghdad Museum, where looters roamed the grounds undisturbed like hyenas after the kill.

Unfortunately, the United States never signed the convention. With a Hiroshima-induced World War II victory fresh in their minds, the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Eisenhower administration nixed the convention for fear that it would impinge on America’s strategic use of nuclear weapons. Half a century later, it seems just a little hypocritical that it is in order to preserve the option of using weapons of mass destruction that the U.S. will not be held legally responsible for damage inflicted during a war waged in order to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction—and ones that don’t seem to exist, at that.

It is time for the United States to move beyond its self-appointed role as global policeman and become a socially responsible world citizen. If the Bush administration continues to bulldoze through all obstacles in the name of global peace and security, there will be little left to rebuild out of the rubble. The cultural attrition in Iraq has struck a heavy blow to Iraqi reconstruction, eradicating symbols of cultural unity that might have served as the bedrock of a rejuvenated Iraqi national identity sans Saddam. Moreover, as the proverbial cradle of civilization, Iraq’s loss is a loss for us all, diluting the reservoir of world heritage and erasing pieces of our common history. Combined with the war in Afghanistan, when disturbed migratory patterns brought the siberian crane and other species to the brink of extinction, it also forms a disturbing trend. The United States has ushered in a new era of preemptive war, an era in which it should be able to anticipate and prevent much of the collateral damage its aggression incurs. So far, however, the Bush administration has projected a devil-may-care attitude, an approach that will only make an enemy of the world and tear it apart in the process.

If the United States truly wishes to amend for its callousness, it should try something a little more substantial than a couple of thousand rent-a-cops in fancy uniforms. For starters, May 14 would be a prime day to take advantage of the fiftieth anniversary of the Hague Convention by declaring America’s intention to sign and ratify the pact at last. Becoming a global leader in social responsibility will go farther to ending anti-U.S. sentiment and terrorism than bullying and warmongering ever will.

Nicholas R. Smith ’04 is an East Asian studies concentrator in Leverett House.