When I first went to the Iraq National Museum, I tried to get in through a gate that in its design had been inspired by Nineveh, the ancient capital of Assyria. The gate had a big hole in it, above the door, where it had been pierced by an American tank shell. The door was locked – it turned out to belong to the children’s museum – so I walked further down the street, as far as the entrance to a garden that served both museums. There, instead of a ticket-seller and someone to tear off a stub, I found a twenty-year-old private from Mississippi. To begin with, he was reluctant to let me in; I had no press pass. When I showed him my passport, he softened. ‘Seeing as you’re a Brit, and you helped us in the war, I’ll be nice.’ I thought of my French father, and said, ‘And what if I were French?’ He replied, ‘I’d tell you to get the fuck out of here.’ We laughed, and I went in.
Baghdad in May was a broken city, with un-citizens and vacant plinths where once there had been a government. Approaching along a highway from Basra, I passed mile-long convoys of lorries and transporters. These promises of aid and coercion gave me a guilty sense of security; with this, the Americans would surely be able to fill any vacuum, even one that Saddam had left behind. But when they got to the capital, the lorries and transporters – and their military protectors, bored men and women swinging their legs out of the sides of their Humvees – retreated behind the walls of appropriated palaces. They rarely ventured out, and then only for short periods. They seemed unwilling, or perhaps unable, to rule.
I was drawn to Baghdad by news of the looting that had taken place in the museum during the second week of April, as the Americans were taking the city. Shortly after, a distraught museum official, Nabhal Amin, reportedly put the figure of lost and destroyed items at 170,000. Many Western newspapers accused the Americans of indifference to the catastrophe. More recently, it had been determined that, although some irreplaceable pieces were lost, much less was missing than the media had originally suggested. The Americans had sent an assistant district attorney and marine reservist called Matthew Bogdanos to conduct an inquiry into events, and to recover as many of the lost items as he could.
On the road to Baghdad, I’d read a primer on Iraq’s tribes and history that Gertrude Bell wrote for British officers during the First World War. (It is exemplary for its succinctness and lightly worn scholarship, as well as for the certainty of its judgements.) Bell was an influential member of the colonial establishment that established a British mandate after the war, the exponent of a sly imperialism that was to place an imported Sunni king, Feisal of Mecca, on the newly invented throne of a newly invented state which had many Shi’a citizens, perhaps even a majority of them. No one, nowadays, is surprised that the scheme failed, and that it led to a series of dictatorships, of which Saddam’s was the most dreadful. But Bell seems to have believed that imperialism could be both master and servant of the nascent state. Having fallen out with the colonial administration, she founded the Iraq National Museum and drafted an antiquities law that obliged Leonard Woolley, the British excavator of Ur, to divide his findings between his two employers – the British Museum and the University Museum in Philadelphia – and also the new museum in Baghdad. Iraq’s distant past may have convinced her that its disparate peoples constituted a nation, with a unified cultural history. She certainly realized the importance of physical heritage to nationhood. Now, in 2003, it appeared that the Americans didn’t have this sensitivity. You sensed this criticism behind the sneers of their detractors; it was why they’d permitted the looting. And so I wanted to meet Colonel Bogdanos, and find out what kind of occupier he was.
I crossed the museum’s garden and went in through what looked like the main door, into a hall beneath a low cupola where there was a small crowd of people, most of them foreigners. I recognized two from the TV and newspaper analysis of events at the museum. One of them, a handsome man with white hair, was leaning heavily on a stick – that was Professor McGuire Gibson of Chicago University’s department of archaeology. Gibson was talking to a short shapeless man with a precarious smile – Donny George, the museum’s research director.
Over the preceding few weeks, George had come to personify Iraqi culture. (More so than Selma Nawali Mutawali, the museum director, who kept away from the media, or even Jabbar Ibrahim Khalil, the director-general of the antiquities board.) He spoke good English. He’d given interviews. He’d flown to London to brief officials from the British Museum on what had been lost, and how. On the question of numbers, he was more circumspect than Amin; there was no way of knowing how many items had been lost, it seemed, until a time-consuming audit had been carried out. But when it came to blame, he clearly conveyed the impression that the Americans should have done more. ‘Mr George,’ according to the London Guardian, ‘described how he went to the US Marines’ headquarters to beg commanders to send troops to the museum three days after the looting began.’ ‘They did nothing for three more days . . . I don’t know why,’ Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, was quoted as saying. ‘It’s very extraordinary . . . that with American troops in Baghdad, American troops almost at the gates of the museum, this was allowed to happen.’
I knew, or thought I knew, this much:
At 11 a.m. on Tuesday 8 April, Iraqi fighters entered the museum grounds, firing on US forces that were outside the grounds. Jabbar, George and the only remaining museum guard fled. A fourth employee, Muhsin Abbas, was reluctant to leave his house in the compound. During the ensuing fighting, one or more Iraqis fired rocket-propelled grenades from the roof of the children’s museum; the firing was stopped by the tank shell that holed the Assyrian gate. By Thursday, and perhaps before, fighting in the compound had subsided, to the extent that looters and vandals were able to enter through the back gate which had seen the heaviest fighting. On Thursday, Abbas entreated an American tank commander, positioned at an intersection a few hundred yards away, to move his tank to the museum gates; the commander refused, and the looting continued until Friday. On Saturday, George, who had taken refuge in his aunt’s house, heard radio reports of the looting. The following morning, having exacted a promise of immediate American protection for the museum, he and Jabbar returned to their posts. The help didn’t come. On Tuesday, George used a journalist’s satellite phone to contact colleagues at the British Museum. Tony Blair’s office was informed that the Iraq National Museum was still unprotected. The following day, Wednesday 16 April, the Americans arrived.
As I observed the foreigners at the museum, who turned out mostly to be archaeologists, two American soldiers crossed towards the group. There was a tall, genial-looking fellow with blonde hair; he followed a smaller, compact man wearing a T-shirt who rolled his shoulders as he walked. The short one was in charge; without glancing at anyone, he approached George and they talked for a minute. The American had a sharp nose and little pale eyes. When he’d finished, he walked back through the group of people again, looking straight ahead. I saw his name, in capitals on the seat of his combat fatigues: bogdanos.
There’s an empty space on the second floor of the Iraq National Museum where there used to be a limestone head of a goddess, dating from around 3100 BC. The head is called the Warka Head after the place (which is now called Warka, but which the ancients knew as Uruk) in southern Iraq where it was found. Photographs show her lips pursed and horizontal over a shy chin, no cheekbones to speak of, and a sensational arrangement of eyes and eyebrows: two enormous almond-shaped vacancies surmounted by a continuous, undulating and very deep indentation. The rhythm of this, her eyebrow, flows into her nose. Now she’s gone.
In her heyday – when she was being propitiated, bribed and flattered – the civilization of Sumer, the lush region in which Uruk lay, was spreading its influence into Iran and up the Euphrates valley to Syria and Anatolia. (Sumer corresponds to southern Mesopotamia, which is a Greek word meaning between two rivers – in this case, the Tigris and Euphrates.) By the time of the Warka Head, much of Sumer had been under irrigation for more than 2,000 years. Crop surpluses financed the purchase from neighbouring regions of timber, precious stones and copper for tools and weapons. The Sumerians gave their gods houses, not unlike their own, that we know as temples; when reconstructed and enlarged, these came to resemble a mountain of ascending platforms and were the prototype of the temple tower, or ziggurat.
During the museum tour, I stuck close to McGuire Gibson. He clumped quickly around, discharging information and wisdom. At the bottom of a flight of steps that led up to the first-floor galleries, he pointed out a window made of glass bricks that the looters had smashed in order to get in. It suggested that the thieves – I mean the professionals who took the good stuff, not the freebooters who stole light bulbs and trashed filing cabinets – knew the museum plan. As we went up the stairs, Gibson observed that every step was badly chipped. ‘The thieves were probably bringing down the Basitki Statue,’ he said. ‘It weighs more than three hundred pounds. They must have bounced it down the stairs.’ I asked what the Basitki Statue was. ‘It’s a naked man, but we only have the bottom half. They found it in the north, while they were building a road. It’s a marvellous example of Akkadian metallurgy, almost totally copper – which is much harder to pour than bronze.’ I asked the date. ‘Around 2300 BC.’
That was the era of Sargon, the founder of the Akkadian Empire that spread outwards from central Mesopotamia and eclipsed Sumerian city-states like Uruk. It extended its influence northwards – up the Tigris into Assyria (which lay in what is now northern Iraq), and up the Euphrates into Syria. Unlike the Sumerian tongue, whose origins are obscure, Akkadian is from the Semitic family of languages, whose modern members include Arabic and Hebrew. Akkadian went on to become the lingua franca of Mesopotamia and was used as a diplomatic language throughout the Middle East.
Up on the first floor, Gibson stopped by a steel strut supporting a big black stone. ‘At least they didn’t take the basalt stele,’ he said. The stele has two depictions in low relief of a Sumerian king killing a lion. In one, he’s shooting the beast. In the other, he’s spearing it. The king wears a patterned skirt and has bunched hair and enormous eyes. I’d seen him, or kings like him, in other contexts: doing battle or holding an animal that was about to be sacrificed. Gibson told me why he thought the basalt stele was important. ‘These are the first indications we have of what kings do. If you think about it, it hasn’t changed very much. Look at Queen Elizabeth. She hunts, goes to church and reviews the guard.’
Here were the origins of the human struggle to be civilized; and, a later mark of that continuing struggle, how civilized it had been to dig up the evidence and put it on show, making self-congratulation – look at what we were, look at what we are – so convenient. But now the link to both those ordered pasts, the ancient and the recent, had been cut.
The corridor leading to the galleries was lined with offices that had been ransacked; their papers were strewn over the floor. Most of the display cabinets were empty, and some of them smashed. The contents of most of the cabinets had been put in vaults. (About one hundred pieces, the heaviest and most fragile ones, had been left in the gallery when the war began; forty-two of them had been stolen.) About thirty of them had been smashed. No one knew when life – in the museum, in the city at large – would start again, or what it would be like when it did.
In fact, the severance had happened long before the war. In 1991, reverberations from America’s aerial attack on the nearby telecommunications ministry had shattered some pieces, leading to efforts to pack others into the vaults. Many of the museum’s most valuable items – the royal treasure of Ur, for example, and the gold jewellery of Nirnrud – were deposited in the vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq. According to Gibson, George and other staff members had decided to leave these pieces in the bank, to reduce the likelihood of theft. ‘They knew that war could restart at any time. They were even afraid that people from the government would come and take them.’ After 1991, sanctions meant that the museum’s air-conditioning units couldn’t be repaired. Chemicals for restoration were impossible to buy. The museum was closed for a decade; it reopened only in 2001.
Gibson spoke of the invention, in ancient Mesopotamia, of the world’s first writing system. The Sumerians started by scoring line drawings on damp clay. Later, they impressed straight lines with a stylus. The impression of the stylus formed a wedge, which gave the script its name, cuneiform, from the Latin cuneus, wedge. The result was a sort of picture writing, written in boxes from right to left. The desire for mass reproduction was met by the invention of the hollow cylinder seal, made of stone (originally wood, Gibson reckons) and incised with writing or images; it left an impression when rolled out on clay. (The thieves who entered the Iraq National Museum knew where the museum’s collection of cylinder seals were, and stole thousands of them.)
Our tour ended in the Assyrian gallery which was the most normal-looking in the museum; none of its enormous bas-reliefs, many of them from Khorsabad, could possibly have been moved. The staff had put sandbags on the floor, to cushion the sculptures if they were dislodged during the bombing. (None was.) Looking at the bas-reliefs, it struck me that the coldness of Assyrian sculpture equals its magnificence.
Before now, I’d had no reason to doubt the belief that there is little, save the shared experience of Ottoman and then British imperialism, to bind Iraqis together. Shi’a and Sunni Muslims in the south and middle, Kurds in the north; what was their common thread? (Not Islam; that could be an agent of division.) But Bell and the others who built up the museum had detected a thread. So, in our era, had people like Gibson. He got mildly irritated when I disparaged Iraq’s claims to nationhood: ‘That’s propaganda by people who want to split the country.’ The thread ran through Sumeria, Akkad, Babylonia, Assyria. It wasn’t ethnic; it wound around deities and language, ways of governing and warring.
A few weeks later, I read an English translation of the epic of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. Gilgamesh spends most of the story behaving perfectly yobbishly, before finally (and undeservedly) stumbling on wisdom. The epic probably started as a series of lays sung by Sumerian minstrels. Later, the Babylonians enlarged and standardized it, and translated it into Akkadian. But the reason I was able to read it with relatively few lacunae is the important place the epic occupied in the great libraries of the Assyrian kings. There had been a common literature, it seemed, from the Persian Gulf almost to Turkey, common ideas of kingship and sagacity. Until a few weeks ago, there had been Saddam; his bootprint was on every face.
Leaving the entrance under the cupola, I saw smoke rise over the city. It came from high-tension wire that people had dug out of the ground; they were burning the wire to retrieve copper. I crossed to the building where the American guards were billeted, and asked for Bogdanos.
What I knew of him was that he had soldiered in Central Asia and distinguished himself in counter-narcotics on the Mexican border; that he’d boxed for the New York City Police Department Widows and Orphans Fund and been decorated for counter-terrorism in Afghanistan. More pertinently, in this new context, he had an MA in classical studies. His biographical details didn’t mention his unsuccessful prosecution of Puff Daddy, but that’s a blip in a career that I imagine, one day, will be gilded with public office.
He came out of the guardhouse: brisk, unfriendly. This, he said, is a recovery operation, not a criminal investigation. ‘The first job is to determine what is missing and for that you determine what you had and then what you have and do the math.’ To date, he said, nearly 1,000 pieces had been recovered, mostly from repentant locals. But, he added, ‘we’ve been hampered by the lack of a comprehensive inventory produced by the museum.’
The following day, unveiling his ‘preliminary findings’ via a live feed to the Pentagon press corps, Bogdanos said that staff members had produced ‘partial inventories’ for the gold and jewellery that they claimed to have moved to the central bank. The staff had vowed, furthermore, not to divulge the whereabouts of a secret storeroom ‘until a new government in Iraq is established and US forces leave the country’. A few days before, a reporter had asked Bogdanos whether he was accusing the Iraqis of obstruction. He replied, ‘I offer only facts, not opinions. You can draw your own conclusions.’
To me, he said, ‘There are several different dynamics at work here. Make sure you quote me right! I don’t like painting broad brush. I don’t take a binary view. Moral judgement gets in the way. I may have my opinion about the former regime and about members of the museum staff who were Ba’ath Party members, but I keep those opinions to myself.’
I asked Bogdanos what the museum meant to Iraqis. His answer was autobiographical. ‘I’ve been humbled . . . yeah, that’s the word . . . by the reaction. People, complete strangers, have been coming up to me and saying thank you. I go walking in the community, into the marketplace – I go to a little coffee shop. They call me the colonel from the museum. No matter how much I insist they won’t let me pay.’
Imagine Bogdanos going for his morning coffee, exchanging pleasantries with the regulars, striking a rapport. Think again. This is Baghdad, a city that’s jumpy as hell, where American soldiers aren’t permitted to remove their flak jackets and helmets in public, let alone hang out with the locals in coffee shops. No American goes out to coffee shops in Baghdad.
It seemed strange that it had taken the Americans from 8 April until 16 April to secure the museum. The staff, I pointed out, said that the battle for the museum had been largely fought on the 8th. Why, when he was entreated on Thursday, had the American tank commander regretted that he didn’t have the ‘authority’ to guard the main repository for the greatest of ancient civilizations? Why had a civil affairs officer assured George that protection would be dispatched immediately, only for it to take three days to arrive? Didn’t this constitute, at the very least, an astounding breakdown in communication?
Bogdanos looked angry. ‘I don’t understand this minority reporting.’ He paused. ‘Look, I’ve spent my entire adult life studying antiquities, and all the antiquities in the world – all of them – don’t equal a single human life. Iraqi, British, American – it makes no difference.
‘So, you want to know why the staff left on the eighth and the US got here on the sixteenth?’ I nodded. ‘THIS WAS A COMBAT ZONE.’ Not quite a shout. ‘Have you ever fired in anger?’ Bogdanos had guessed the answer, but waited for me to shake my head. ‘No one who has shot in anger would ask that question. The kids who got here – the heroes – did so as fast as was humanly possible.’
He was hitting his stride. ‘It’s clear beyond peradventure that the Iraqis violated international law by firing from the museum.’ He was referring to the rocket-propelled grenades that were fired from the room of the children’s museum; unused grenades had also been found on the roof of the museum library. ‘I could get outraged,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t get me anywhere. Now let me ask you a question.’ He leant forward. ‘Can you explain why one of the storage magazines had been opened without being forced, and why it had a firing position inside? How did that door get open?’
‘Someone let them in there?’
‘It’s a reasonable hypothesis.’
According to Bogdanos’s preliminary findings, ‘the first and second-level storage rooms were looted, but show no signs of forced entry on their shared exterior steel door. The keys to this door were last seen in a director’s safe and are now missing . . . Turning to the basement-level magazine, the evidence here strongly suggests that this magazine was compromised not by random looters, but by thieves with an intimate knowledge of the museum and its storage procedures. For it is here they attempted to steal the most traffickable and easily transportable items stored in the most remote corner of the museum. The front door of this basement magazine was intact, but its bricked rear doorway was broken and entered. This magazine has four rooms, three of which were virtually untouched. Indeed, even the fourth room appears untouched except for a single corner where almost thirty small boxes originally containing cylinder seals, amulets, and jewellery had been emptied, while hundreds of surrounding larger, but empty, boxes were untouched. The thieves here had keys that were previously hidden elsewhere in the museum.’
Towards the end of our conversation he said, ‘Let me ask you another question: Who did the looting?’ He answered himself: ‘The Iraqis, yeah.’
Clearly, there was abundant evidence that the looters had been tipped off – about the location of important keys, and of suitable items to steal. There was not, so far as I could make out, evidence to suggest who had done the tipping off: former or current staff members, senior or junior? The fighter in the first-floor storage magazine seems to have entered the museum along with the looters, after the battle had been largely won and the other Iraqi fighters had fled. But could one sniper have resisted a concerted American effort to secure the museum and its grounds? The Americans clearly hadn’t shrunk from firing back at him; his nest was pockmarked with their bullet holes. In front of the museum, there was little evidence of fighting – except for the Assyrian gate, which had been holed on the 8th. At the back, however, there was much more evidence of an armed struggle.
Strangely, Bogdanos’s report had the effect of discrediting some of his verbal insinuations. The report found ‘no evidence that any fighters entered the museum compound before the staff left on the eighth’. That hardly suggested collusion with the fighters. It acknowledged that the staff judged the museum safe for return on 12 April. That was four days before the Americans showed up, ‘as fast as humanly possible’.
The next day, I met a tank sergeant called David Richard. He’d been one of the first Americans into the compound, on the 16th. (George later told me that Richard had been the commander whom Abbas had asked to move his tank to the museum gates.) According to Richard, fighting in the vicinity of the museum compound had been ‘the most prolonged constant combat that I experienced in the war’. He suspected that a police station at the back of the compound, formerly manned by regular policemen and museum guards, had been used by Iraqi fighters as a command post for defence operations. But he contradicted Bogdanos’s assertion that the Americans had secured the museum as soon as they could. Even when the area around the compound was completely in American hands, Richard went on another mission, to secure a small airfield. When he went back to the museum, on the 16th, he was met by at least fifty reporters.
Bogdanos’s findings ended: ‘We are proud to have begun the journey and honoured to have served.’ Shortly after, he left Iraq. His stay had coincided with a dramatic downward revision of loss estimates – under 10,000 pieces had been stolen and destroyed, it seemed, rather than the 170,000 that had been reported. More than 900 artefacts had been returned. But Bogdanos never addressed the questions that needed answers if the Americans’ conduct was to be judged: precisely when did fighting in the compound end? If the compound was safe enough for dozens of looters and, later, dozens of journalists, how come it was lethal for the marines? He asked different questions – about the Iraqis. What was the extent of staff collusion with pro-Saddam fighters? How did the looters get into Mutawali’s safe? Is it worth losing sleep over dyed-in-the-wool Ba’athists? Editors and reporters duly lost interest in the old questions, and started asking the new ones. That was Bogdanos’s achievement.
None of the staff denied that inside knowledge had been a factor in the looting: but whose inside knowledge? At the start of hostilities, 300 people had been working on the site. Part of the problem for any reporter – certainly for me – was that, George apart, the museum staff was reluctant to talk. Jabbar never gave me an interview. He looked uncomfortable if we passed in the corridor. Mutawali slammed doors in my face. But the museum had never been an open place; few government offices in the Middle East are. Its ledgers and inventories were always less penetrable than those of most Western museums. Even that may not have been entirely the Iraqis’ fault. According to Neil MacGregor, the standard of management suffered when ‘sanctions started to bite’.
Alongside some sensible preparations for the war, there had been appalling sloppiness. In June, it became known that a BBC television presenter, Dan Cruickshank, had discovered the reconstituted lyre of Ur, one of the museum’s most famous pieces, among a heap of other things in a chaotic room. But what did this prove? Negligence, fear of foreign reporters – these aren’t the same as thievery and plots.
A few days later, I stood on top of the huge ziggurat at Ur, in southern Iraq. It was early evening, and Moayed, my translator, was jumpy. Ur is about ten kilometres from Nasiriyah, where we were staying, and he was worried that the road would be dangerous after nightfall. I’d got used to Moayed’s fretting. On the whole, he was a stimulating companion. He had a good stock of malapropisms – my favourite was his substitution of ‘terrorism’ for ‘tourism’. I liked his poetic conviction that everything would turn out for the worst. This was exemplified by a warning that he gave to our driver, not to honk at a tractor that had blocked the road: ‘He’ll get out his Kalashnikov and shoot us.’
The British had failed to prevent the destruction by looters of the steel factory near Basra where Moayed had worked as a supervisor. (Three thousand people lost their livelihoods.) I’d met him among the scores of engineers, doctors and teachers that clamoured every morning for a job outside the main UN hotel in Basra. (The UN eventually announced eighty vacancies; more than 5,000 people applied.) He didn’t like working with reporters. It took him far from his wife and five children, and made him even more depressed about how the country was faring. One day, he told me of a man who is asked how he can stand sour. The man replies: ‘Because there is sourer.’
In 1991, when Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf War led to an uprising across the south, a fairly senior Ba’athist official, a relation, sought sanctuary in Moayed’s home. Moayed agreed that the man should stay, even though, had the rebels come to hear, they would have killed Moayed as well as his guest. After the rebellion’s suppression, the official made sure that Moayed was rewarded with a titular honour denoting loyalty to the regime. Moayed felt no such loyalty, but the honour was useful as protection. Moayed told me this story with neither pride nor shame. He expected me to understand that this was the sort of compromise you had to make.
There were two military men on the ziggurat. One was Viktor Hancock, a handsome black soldier from Las Vegas. His joy was photography; Operation Iraqi Freedom had inspired him to shoot more than 220 rolls of film. Today was his eleventh visit to the ziggurat. ‘Beats the Luxor,’ he said with a smile, referring to Vegas and not the Upper Nile.
Our guide around the site was an affable air force major with an interest in archaeology, Jon Anderson. He indicated the airbase that the Iraqis had built in Ur’s shadow. Since the Americans had taken the base on March 22, Anderson reported, there had been almost no vandalism – a marine who tried to make off with a Third Dynasty brick had been ‘disciplined’. During the 1991 Gulf War, American troops sprayed bullets at the southern side of the ziggurat, and used their bayonets to dig up pottery pieces that have yet to be returned. From Anderson’s vantage, the new liberation was a blessed event. ‘It’s been an honour to be part of the effort.’
About 200 yards to the east lay the graves that Leonard Woolley started excavating in 1926; almost nineteen hundred were found, dating from about 2600 BC (well before the rise of the Akkadians) to about 2000 BC (after their eclipse). The most celebrated of these were the ‘Royal Graves’, so called because of the opulence of the grave goods inside, and the great number of sacrificed retainers. We descended the ziggurat and walked towards a wide pit that once contained more than seventy bodies – they’d apparently been drugged and laid out in rows. Anderson pointed out a feature that he liked: drains, holed with third century BC fingers, from which waste water percolated into dry soil.
Anderson led me past an embankment left by Woolley’s men, and down a surprising flight of steps. We descended a second flight, into a cool chamber with a pointy brick vault that seemed on the verge of collapse. In this chamber, and others like it, Woolley made some of the most celebrated finds in archaeology. There were gold vessels and statuettes; diadems of Indian carnelian and Afghan lapis lazuli; and headdresses, surmounted by sheet silver and inlaid stones, that were excavated on the skeletons of their wearers. There, too, was the lyre of Ur – or rather, the remains of it. It would join the compendium of national symbols. (If you smoke Sumer cigarettes, you’ll know it; it adorns the pack.)
The next morning, we went to the house of a woman in Nasiriyah called Iqbal, who worked for the antiquities department. We’d arranged to go with Iqbal to Umma, an important Third Dynasty city-state. It was one of at least six archaeological sites that were being looted across Dhiqar, the province of which Nasiriyah is the capital. Some had been invaded by armed gangs, 200-strong; guards assigned to the sites had fled. The gangs worked speedily and without regard for the archaeologists who’d preceded them. Meticulously revealed topographies – the outline of a city wall, for example, or the foundations of a temple – had been casually obliterated.
Hearing about the looting and its strange wantonness, I was reminded of a conversation that I’d had with an American official in Baghdad. The official had been flabbergasted by the destructive energy that the Iraqis were directing at telephone exchanges and hospitals, homes and universities. ‘I’ve never encountered anything like this,’ he said. ‘It’s like the whole country has turned itself inside out. It’s very un-Muslim. Wholesale thievery, as far as I remember, is not part of the Quran.’ Many Americans had believed that Saddam would leave behind model citizens. How long, I wondered, before they came to regard the Iraqis as savages, undeserving of liberation?
Exemplary savagery, many Iraqis maintained, would stop the looting, but the Americans didn’t want blood on their hands. In Nasiriyah, we’d heard a colleague of Iqbal’s, a man named Hamdani, accuse the occupiers of indifference to the looting. Hamdani had urged the Americans to post guards at important sites, and to mount helicopter patrols. Since Nasiriyah’s fall, he said, he’d been palmed off from one civil affairs officer to another. ‘I’ve spent fifty days of humiliation searching for security for the sites, and all I get is words.’
After two hours, we reached Umma where we saw about a hundred people on the tell, many of them with spades. Dealers were on hand, local people told us, to buy jewellery and cuneiform seals. A few days before, two American helicopters had landed at the site, and taken off twenty minutes later. Later, I discovered that McGuire Gibson had been in one of the helicopters. He described a ‘devastated landscape . . . an Early Dynastic cemetery was being plundered and other buildings were being riddled with new holes.’
Could it be stopped? Officially, it already had been. Pietro Cordone, the Italian diplomat whom the Americans had appointed to superintend Iraqi culture, told me in Baghdad that ‘about ninety-nine per cent of the sites have military guards.’ Their combined vigilance, he said, had ‘put an end to the stealing of artefacts’. I asked him about de-Ba’athification in the department of antiquities. He said, ‘We are working on that now.’
In a restaurant in Nasiriyah, Moayed and I had a conversation about what it meant to be an Iraqi. The restaurant owner, a former Olympic basketball player, was at our table. We were joined by a man whose profession was not revealed to me – only that he’d graduated in geography from a local college. The geography graduate ascribed the birth of national conscience to the discovery of oil. That sounded rather mercenary, I said. Not at all, replied the basketball player; he vividly recalled being seized by an urge to kiss the Iraqi flag during a tournament in Manila. What about ancient culture, I wondered. Had they been affected by news of looting at the ancient sites?
After an animated tripartite discussion, I got a reply to a different question: who was responsible for the looting? Moayed told me that there were two theories. The first was that the Israelis were pulling the strings; they wanted to destroy all traces of civilizations that had not recognized Jewry. The second theory was that the looting and theft were being perpetrated by the Kuwaitis, who were determined to wipe out evidence of civilizations that had encompassed both Iraq and Kuwait – and thus to discredit Iraq’s covetous adventurism
These were wacky theories, by any standards. I glanced at Moayed, expecting to see signs of morose amusement. I saw none; later, he told me that, in his opinion, both theories were credible. From Baghdad to Ur, the looting had been invested with political, not sociological significance. The theories were serving, or reflecting, agendas of which I’d been only dimly aware.
On 8 June, the BBC broadcast a programme about the Iraq National Museum by Dan Cruickshank – the man who’d spotted the lyre of Ur. The programme took Bogdanos’s view of events: the colonel got star treatment, the museum staff looked villainous. Cruickshank concluded that the looting had been an inside job; the museum, furthermore, was a ‘Ba’athist stronghold . . . the treasures here are far too important to the Iraqi people – to us all – to risk leaving the museum in the hands of any staff tainted by a murky or mysterious past.’
A couple of days after that broadcast, David Aaronovitch in the Guardian praised Cruickshank for showing that the story of American negligence was ‘bollocks’. On 13 June, Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post identified George as the source of a ‘lie’ designed to ‘highlight the dark side of the liberation’ – the propagator of the spurious claim that 170,000 pieces had been destroyed or stolen. Both writers, who were strong supporters of the war, castigated those who had tried to make the looting a symbol of America’s philistinism and arrogance.
In these versions of events, there were only heroes and villains. People seemed unwilling to think in shades of grey about what had happened. During George’s visit to London, the Guardian‘s Fiachra Gibbons had written that his ‘bravery after the first Gulf war has earned him something of a reputation as an Indiana Jones figure’. Now, in the same paper, Aaronovitch was describing him as an ‘apparatchik of a fascist regime and a propagandist for his own past’. During the BBC programme, Cruickshank said that Jabbar’s appointment as the head of the department of antiquities had been ‘political . . . endorsed by Saddam’s regime.’ This startlingly obvious piece of information made me think of Moayed and his position in the steel factory. I recalled a conversation that I’d had with Moayed about his participation, while he was in the army, in punitive missions into the marshes. These missions had been renowned for their brutality. I’d asked Moayed how many rebels he’d found and killed. He replied: none. I asked him how many reed houses he’d firebombed. He replied: none.
What if that was a lie? What if Moayed had killed and firebombed? The alternative would have been to lose his freedom or his life, and to endanger his family. After watching Cruickshank, I felt embarrassed at having asked Moayed these questions. I was the camp follower of an invading army. At some level, working for me must have been a humiliation. My questions showed that I’d never had to choose between a principle and my life, or the lives of people I loved.
That was one of the problems with Cruickshank’s programme. The other was that his blithe judgements weren’t backed by facts. His revelation that many of the stolen items had been ‘taken from the museum before the bombing, before the looting, by members of the Ba’ath Party’ relied not on scientific evidence, but on intuition: the staff’s ‘strange behaviour, not being straightforward, not answering questions’. One bit of evidence for his contention that George and the others had conspired to turn the compound into a centre of resistance was risibly unconvincing: a map of Baghdad on the wall of the police station at the back of the compound. How abnormal is it to find a map on a police station wall?
During the course of my own enquiries, I spoke to archaeologists and curators who knew the staff and had visited the museum shortly after the looting: Gibson; McGregor; John Curtis (the Keeper of the Near East at the British Museum), Henry Wright of the University of Michigan; John Russell of the Massachusetts College of Art. All refuted suggestions that senior members of staff had a hand in the looting. They believed that the battle for the museum had ended on the 10th, six days before the Americans turned up. They praised the staff for severely restricting access to storerooms and vaults – a necessary security precaution, at a time of great uncertainty and danger. According to Gibson, there was ‘absolutely no evidence’ that items were stolen before the war.
I remember George in May. He was grey and exhausted from duelling with Bogdanos. The department was ailing; old animosities were coming to the surface. Cordone was planning his de-Ba’athification, though no one knew how far he would go. George took me into an empty office that had been tidied up after the looting, and answered some of the allegations.
Mutawali’s safe, he said, had been opened with the help of about twenty skeleton keys, which had been found. He said that a bunker in front of the museum, which the Americans said had been built for defensive reasons, had been dug by staff as a bomb shelter. I asked George about his commitment to defend the museum. He said he’d been told by the regime to hand out AK-47s to staff members before the war – but that he and Jabbar had given orders not to shoot at Americans. (In the end, everyone fled.)
I asked George about compromise.
He said, ‘You’ve opened an old wound.’
George’s membership of the small Assyrian Christian minority meant, he said, that he’d been treated like a second-class citizen: ‘They used to call me a British-raised boy.’ He remembered a conversation in which colleagues asked him whether he would join the other Christians who were leaving the country in droves, and he’d thought to himself, ‘I’m not going and leaving the antiquities of my forefathers in the hands of people like you.’
Christian or not, George had been privileged with prestige and foreign trips. In Cruickshank’s words, he and the others were ‘servants’ of a regime that was ‘brutal and corrupt’. Perhaps they themselves were guilty of excess and cruelty. More likely, they succumbed to the same moral and intellectual corrosion that afflicted Moayed and many millions of his compatriots. Had we been in their position, my guess is that we would have done the same: Bogdanos; Krauthammer; me; you.
