Lawrence Rothfield: The Rape of Mesopotamia ... Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum

“Nobody Thought of Culture” War-Related Heritage Protection in the Early Prewar Period

Much has been written about the U.S. military’s failure to prepare adequately for the post-combat phase of the 2003 war and about the disastrous impact such shortsightedness had on virtually every sector of Iraqi society. The failure to take steps to prevent the looting of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad—and the less publicized, though far more devastating, ongoing looting of Iraq’s archaeological sites—must be understood within this larger short-term context of failure to protect any number of arguably more important assets. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s well-documented desire for invading forces to go in lighter and faster required jettisoning supposedly inessential forces from the first wave, and this meant there simply would be too few boots on the ground in Baghdad to be able to spare tanks to guard buildings, including but by no means limited to the museum. Undoubtedly, too, the rush to war meant that postwar planning would be foreshortened and truncated, in ways that made it difficult for cultural heritage protection—and any number of other important postwar tasks—to even get onto the planning agenda, let alone included in operational orders.

But it would be a mistake to assume that Rumsfeld’s strategic preference for speed, the rush to war, or even the tactical decision to punch into Baghdad were the only factors sealing the fate of the museum. There were also deep-seated, longer-term structural impediments, within both the military and the Bush administration, that blocked the development of assets capable of being deployed to protect museums and archaeological sites, had Pentagon policy makers or United States Central Command (USCENTCOM) planners wished to do so.

Soldiers consider themselves warriors, not police, and the American military in particular has traditionally placed a much lower value on the mundane tasks of patrolling or guarding areas than on combat operations. Peacekeeping and stability operations are thankless jobs, lacking the glory associated with the phrase “Mission accomplished.” The military’s relative indifference to this aspect of their work is reflected in the failure to establish standing units of civil-military officers or trained units of paramilitary police, even after the Gulf War, Bosnia, and Kosovo made clear that such troops were needed. Although it was obvious to any analyst of these conflicts that the U.S. military needed, at the very least, the capacity to train indigenous police as well as other specialized civil-military units, policing within the military continued to be funded in an ad hoc manner, through cumbersome supplementary budget requests coming from the State Department. As Robert Perito notes, while the military engaged in serious lessons-learned reviews that improved combat operations, “no similar effort at efficiency on the post-conflict side was made by relevant U.S. civilian agencies and executive-branch departments [nor, one might add, by the uniformed military]; they simply had not adopted post-conflict stability as a core mission.”

In this the U.S. military differed considerably from its NATO allies, for several reasons. First, our European counterparts had experience operating national police and paramilitary security forces and were comfortable with their functioning in tandem with regular military. In contrast, America has never permitted the development of a national police, reflecting the distrust of centralized power that has characterized America since its founding....