September 23, 2006

In this Sunday's New York Times, columnist Frank Rich uses the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad as an omen for everything that has gone wrong with the U.S. occupation of Iraq since, stating, "Even if there had never been an Abu Ghraib, a Guantanamo or an American president determined to rewrite the Geneva Conventions, America would still be losing the war for hearts and minds in the Arab world."

According to Rich, the negligence, cavalier attitude, and tone-deaf public relations that were on display during the looting have all been matched point-for-point during the bungled reconstruction.

Excerpts:
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Our blindness back in April 2003 seems ludicrous in retrospect. As the looting flared, an oblivious President Bush told the Iraqi people in a televised address that they were "the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity." Our actions -- or, more accurately, our inaction as the artifacts of that great civilization were carted away -- spoke louder than those pretty words. As Fred Ikle, the Reagan administration Pentagon policy chief, puts it in Thomas Ricks' "Fiasco," "America lost most of its prestige and respect in that episode."

That disaster might have been mitigated if our leaders had not dismissed the whole episode as a triviality. But Donald Rumsfeld likened the chaos to the aftermath of a soccer game and joked that television was exaggerating the story by recycling video of a single looter with a vase. ...

The war's many cheerleaders in the press fell into line. In keeping with the mood of the time, administration enforcers like Charles Krauthammer and Andrew Sullivan damned Rumsfeld's critics as fatuous aesthetes exploiting a passing incident to denigrate the liberation of Iraq. In a column in Salon titled "Idiocy of the Week" (that idiot would be me), Sullivan asked rhetorically who was right about "the alleged ransacking" of the museum, Rumsfeld or his critics? "Rummy, of course. He almost always is." ...

The museum changed hands in August, when Donny George, its longtime administrator and the chairman of Iraq's official antiquities board, fled the country fearing for his life and for the treasures in his care, both at the museum and the country's many archaeological sites. George is a Christian and had good reason to fear. The new government minister placed in charge of the museum, a dentist, is an acolyte of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose goal is to make Iraq a fundamentalist theocracy. To al-Sadr and his followers, the museum's legendary pre-Islam antiquities, harking back to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, are infidels' idols to be sacked.


Full article
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html?URI=http://select.nyt
imes.com/2006/09/24/opinion/24rich.html&OQ=_rQ3D1Q26hp&OP=41 ...