Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (10 page)

The main international legal safeguard for historically and humanistically important institutions and sites is The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, signed on May 14, 1954. The United States is not a party to that convention, primarily because, during the Cold War, it feared that the treaty might restrict its freedom to engage in nuclear war, but during the 1991 Gulf War the elder Bush’s administration accepted the convention’s rules and abided by a “no-fire target list” of places where valuable cultural items were known to exist.
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UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and other guardians of cultural artifacts expected the younger Bush’s administration to follow the same procedures in the 2003 war.

Moreover, on March 26, 2003, the Pentagon’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) headed by Lieutenant General (ret.) Jay Garner, the civil authority the United States had set up for the moment hostilities ceased, sent to all senior U.S. commanders a list of sixteen institutions that “merit securing as soon as possible to prevent further damage, destruction, and/or pilferage of records and assets.” The five-page memo dispatched two weeks before the fall of Baghdad also said, “Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures” and that “looters should be arrested/detained.” First on General Garner’s list of places to protect was the Central Bank of Iraq, which is now a ruin; second was the National Museum of Iraq; sixteenth was the Oil Ministry, one of only two places that U.S. forces occupying Baghdad actually defended (the other was the Interior Ministry). Martin Sullivan, chair of the President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for the previous eight years, and Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and a member
of the committee, both resigned to protest the failure of Centcom to obey orders. Sullivan said it was “inexcusable” that the museum should not have had the same priority as the Oil Ministry.
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As we now know, the American forces made no effort to prevent the looting of the great cultural institutions of Iraq. Its soldiers, often stationed nearby, simply watched vandals enter and torch the buildings. Professor Said Arjomand, an editor of the journal
Studies on Persianate Societies
and a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote, “Our troops, who have been proudly guarding the Oil Ministry, where no window is broken, deliberately condoned these horrendous events.”
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American commanders claim that, to the contrary, they were too busy fighting and had too few troops to protect the museum and libraries. However, this seems to be an unlikely explanation. During the battle for Baghdad, the U.S. military was perfectly willing to dispatch some two thousand troops to secure northern Iraq’s oil fields, and their record on antiquities did not improve when the fighting subsided. At the six-thousand-year-old Sumerian city of Ur with its massive ziggurat, or stepped temple tower (built in the period 2112-2095 BC, and restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century BC), the marines spray-painted their motto,
Semper Fi (semper fidelis,
“always faithful”), onto its walls.
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The military then made the monument “off limits” to everyone in order to disguise the desecration that had occurred there, including the looting by U.S. soldiers of clay bricks used in the construction of the ancient buildings.

Until April 2003, the area around Ur, in the environs of Nasiriyah, was remote and sacrosanct. However, the U.S. military chose the land immediately adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base with two runways, measuring 12,000 and 9,700 feet respectively, and four satellite camps. In the process, military engineers moved more than 9,500 truck-loads of dirt in order to build 350,000 square feet of hangars and other facilities for aircraft and Predator unmanned drones. They completely ruined the area, the literal heartland of human civilization, for any further archaeological research or future tourism. They did, however, erect their own American imperial ziggurats. On October 24, 2003, according to the Global Security Organization, the army and air force “opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility, co-located with [a] ... Pizza Hut, provides another Burger King restaurant so that more service men and
women serving in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget about the task at hand in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent that takes them back home.”
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The great British archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan (husband of Agatha Christie), who pioneered the excavations at Ur, Nineveh, and Nimrud, quotes some classical advice that the Americans might have been wise to heed: “There was danger in disturbing ancient monuments.... It was both wise and historically important to reverence the legacies of ancient times. Ur was a city infested with ghosts of the past and it was prudent to appease them.”
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The American record elsewhere in Iraq is no better. At Babylon, American and Polish forces built a military depot, despite objections from archaeologists. John Curtis, the British Museum’s authority on Iraq’s many archaeological sites, reported that, on a visit in December 2004, he saw “cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate” and a “2,600-year-old brick pavement crushed by military vehicles.”
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Other observers say that the dust stirred up by U.S. helicopters has sandblasted the fragile brick facade of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 BC.
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The archaeologist Zainab Bahrani reports, “Between May and August 2004, the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both of the sixth century BC, collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters. Nearby, heavy machines and vehicles stand parked on the remains of a Greek theater from the era of Alexander of Macedon [Alexander the Great].”
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In another example of American indifference to the Iraqi environment, the Marine Corps air base known as “Tikrit South” is located next door to a vast preserve where Saddam Hussein kept a herd of gazelles. The marines shot and ate the gazelles as a supplement to their prepackaged Meals Ready to Eat (MREs). Corporal Joshua Wicksell of Corpus Christi, Texas, declared freshly cooked gazelle to be delicious.
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And none of this even begins to deal with the massive, ongoing looting of historical sites across Iraq by freelance grave and antiquities robbers, preparing to stock the living rooms of Western collectors. The unceasing chaos and lack of security brought to Iraq in the wake of our invasion have meant that a future, peaceful Iraq may hardly have a patrimony to display. It is no small accomplishment of the Bush administration to have plunged the cradle of
the human past into the same sort of chaos and lack of security as the Iraqi present. If amnesia is bliss, then the fate of Iraq’s antiquities represents a kind of modern paradise.

THE CIVILIZATION WE ARE IN THE PROCESS OF DESTROYING IN IRAQ IS PART
of our own heritage. It is also part of the world’s patrimony. Before our invasion of Afghanistan, we condemned the Taliban for their March 2001 dynamiting of the monumental third-century AD Buddhist statues at Bamiyan. Those were two gigantic statues of remarkable historical value and the barbarism involved in their destruction blazed in headlines and horrified commentaries in our country. Today, our own government is guilty of far greater crimes when it comes to the destruction of a whole universe of antiquity, and few here, when they consider Iraqi attitudes toward the American occupation, even take that into consideration. But what we do not care to remember, others may recall all too well.

In late July [43 BC] a centurion from Octavian’s army suddenly appeared in the Senate House. From the assembled gathering he demanded the consulship, still vacant, for his general. The Senate refused. The centurion brushed back his cloak and laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. “If you do not make him consul,” he warned, “then this will.” And so it happened.

—TOM HOLLAND,
Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic
(2003)

War came naturally enough to the British, after so much experience of it, and empire offered them a more or less perpetual battle-field.

—JAN MORRIS,
Heavens Command: An Imperial Progress
(1973)

The English-speaking peoples are past masters in the art of concealing their selfish national interests in the guise of the general good.... This kind of hypocrisy is a special and characteristic peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon mind.

—E. H.
CARR,
The Twenty Years’ Crisis
(1939)

In 1972, Henry Kissinger, then President Nixon’s national security adviser, was in Beijing talking with Zhou Enlai, China’s first postrevolutionary prime minister, about normalizing Chinese-American relations. At one point in their conversation Kissinger asked what the prime minister thought was the significance of the French Revolution. Zhou replied, “It’s too soon to tell.”

Zhou Enlai was not being as enigmatic as this sounds. The two men had been discussing the Chinese revolution of 1949, the most complex
revolutionary upheaval in recorded history. A great deal of time will have to pass before we can begin to appreciate its various meanings, if we ever do. Zhou Enlai was also reminding Kissinger that historical significance is an extremely elusive concept and that comparisons, precedents, analyses, and claims of importance derived from history are almost invariably elements of arguments best judged by their contemporary purposes and whether or not they are persuasive, rather than by their claims of accuracy.

The most famous English-language study of ancient Rome is surely Edward Gibbons
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788). He contended, among other things, that Christianity brought down Rome because it sapped the Roman spirit, was hostile to Mediterranean culture, and displaced Roman imperial pretensions with monasticism and contemplation. Not many people today would buy that interpretation, particularly since the collapse of the Roman Republic into dictatorship preceded by a century the spread of Christianity. Moreover, Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312 AD imposed the autocratic style of Rome on the church as much as it Christianized the Roman empire.
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So long as one is not dogmatic, it is perfectly logical to compare aspects of the American republic some 230 years after the Declaration of Independence with ancient Rome and the British Empire. Pundits of all sorts have been doing so for decades. In fourteen speeches to the U.S. Senate on Roman constitutionalism, in 1993, the venerable Senator Robert Byrd (Democrat from West Virginia) observed, “Many, if not most, of the Framers were conversant with Roman history and with the history of England. They were also familiar with the political philosophy of Montesquieu, whose political theory of checks and balances and separation of powers influenced them in their writing of the Constitution. Montesquieu was also influenced in his political philosophy by the history of the Romans, by contemporary English institutions, and by English history.”
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This is true and a good reason for putting the United States in a class with the Roman Republic as well as the British Empire. But I want to focus on the traditional Roman and British comparisons for other reasons, more germane to our moment. The collapse of the Roman Republic offers a perfect case study of how imperialism and militarism can undermine even the best defenses of a democracy, while enthusiasts for the American
empire systematically prettify the history of the British Empire in order to make it an acceptable model for the United States today.

When it comes to the collapse of Roman democracy, Zhou Enlai’s dictum probably applies. Not enough time has passed to produce a universally accepted understanding of the events. The problem is not one of new materials, since short of a miraculous archaeological discovery, new sources that could alter our basic knowledge about ancient Rome are unlikely to appear. Writers today have roughly the same sources that Shakespeare consulted in writing his plays
Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus,
and
Timon of Athens
—primarily, the Greek historian Plutarch. Contemporary historians can also consult remnants from the works of three Roman historians, Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius. Nonetheless, Rome still inspires utterly contradictory interpretations, providing a classical backdrop for clashing contemporary political projects.

Three contemporary books illustrate the differences of opinion about the Roman Republic’s end that are alive and flourishing today. The British classicist Anthony Everitt’s
Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician
is a worthy example of what might be thought of as Western historical orthodoxy: the view that Julius Caesar was a military populist, the leader of the mob against entrenched representatives of the constitutional order, and a tyrant. In this analysis, Cicero, a senator and consul, acted selflessly to try to preserve constitutional government against implacable forces of corruption and the abuse of military power. “During his childhood and youth,” Everitt writes, “Cicero had watched with horror as Rome set about dismantling itself. If he had a mission as an adult, it was to recall the Republic to order.”
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Everitt’s Cicero reminds one of the remarkable career of Senator Robert Byrd, who first took the oath of office on January 7, 1959. While his state has profited from his powerful position in Washington—a great many public buildings in West Virginia are named “Byrd”—he has also tirelessly tried to educate his colleagues about the concept of a “republic” and why, when working properly, it is a bulwark of democracy.