Iraq War's cultural costs as seen through a Chicago prism

April 26, 2009|By Julia Keller

Like any conscientious citizen, Lawrence Rothfield followed news accounts of the Iraq War. And like many humanities scholars, he was concerned about the fate of Iraq's cultural heritage, manifested in its national museum and its many archeological sites.

But as an English professor at the University of Chicago and founding director of the university's Cultural Policy Center -- as, that is, a Chicago guy -- Rothfield realized that his hometown was, in many ways, at the center of the story. Consequently, four years ago he began to research and write "The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum." It was recently published by the University of Chicago Press.

"That's what spurred me to dive into the project -- that there were so many Chicago elements to it," Rothfield says.

As he explains in the introduction to his lucid, well-researched book, "several of the key imaginers of postwar Iraq -- including Paul Wolfowitz (PhD, University of Chicago, 1972) and Ahmad Chalabi (PhD, University of Chicago, 1969) -- had connections to our institution, the University of Chicago. [Former Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld's granddaughter attended the university's high school." Also, the university is home to the Oriental Institute, which since its establishment in 1919 has been one of the world's most respected research organizations for Near East history.

And so the events that occurred in the dust and chaos of a distant war, events that Rothfield classifies as a "cultural disaster," resonate with special force in Chicago, he says. Rothfield's book explains why the sacking of the National Museum of Iraq in 2003 and the ongoing looting of archeological sites throughout that country matter so much, and what could have been done to prevent the tragedy.

"We lost history," he declares. "We lost the chance to better understand how civilization was invented."

While Saddam Hussein's murderous regime was being overthrown by coalition forces, Iraq's cultural institutions were left unprotected, Rothfield explains. Looters struck the museum, fleeing with more than 15,000 artifacts that could then be sold on the increasingly lucrative black market for antiquities. And as great as the physical loss of objects such as cuneiform bricks and a 9th Century wheeled brazier and a mask carved some 5,000 years ago might be, there was another kind of loss as well: American prestige. The unchecked pillage "raised serious questions about the commitment of Iraq's liberators to the values of civilization," Rothfield writes.

Even more dire, the profits from the sale of illegally obtained antiquities, Rothfield reminds us, have been used by terrorists and insurgents to fund their mayhem. "The people smuggling weapons are the same ones smuggling antiquities," he points out.

Iraq is, in effect, ground zero for the human species. "This is the cradle of civilization. These people invented cities, mathematics, irrigation, the idea of a code of law," Rothfield says. "We are all descendants of the Sumerians and the Assyrians and the other cultures that emerged between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. If we want to understand where we're going, it helps to know how we began.

"There are many things we'll never know, because of the losses we suffered there."

But what could have been done to stop it? And don't all armed conflicts cause the loss of some cultural objects?

Despite the controversial war that sparked its subject matter -- arguments about the Iraq War continue to rage -- "The Rape of Mesopotamia" answers these questions with a clear eye and a solid hold on the facts, not a polemical bias. Rothfield traces the many foul-ups that made the museum and archeological sites vulnerable, describing his book as "a tale of mixed motives and mixed signals; of appalling bureaucratic lassitude and individual derring-do," peopled by "archeologists, collectors, cultural bureaucrats, the secretary of state and secretary of defense, Pentagon war planners, Civil Affairs officers, site targeters, ambassadors and antiquities ministers." He had to fight his way through the "thicket of bureaucracies," he says, to find the truth.

"This disaster was preventable," declares Rothfield, who has taught at the U. of C. since 1985. "But it would have taken a fair amount of long-term planning and some tightening of international law to have prevented it in 2003." The American military is beginning to learn from its mistakes, he reports. Securing cultural sites and museums is now listed as an official duty in field manuals.

In the meantime, scholars lament the loss of major portions of what Rothfield calls "our common past." The objects stolen or destroyed in the wake of the Iraq War -- the tablets and statues and friezes and amulets, dating back thousands of years -- were more than just pieces of art that adorned a museum. They were our shared cultural history. They were, in the broadest sense of the phrase, family heirlooms.