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 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 2,000 troops to secure northern Iraq's 
 oilfields, and their record on antiquities did not improve when the fighting 
 subsided. At the 6,000-year-old Sumerian city of Ur with its massive 
 ziggurat, or stepped temple-tower (built in the period 2112 - 2095 B.C. and 
 restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century B.C.), the Marines 
 spray-painted their motto, "Semper Fi" (semper fidelis, always faithful) 
 onto its walls.[20] 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 truckloads 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. On October 24, 2003, according to the Global 
 Security Organization, the Army and Air Force built its own modern ziggurat. 
 It "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."[21] 
  
 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."[22] 
  
 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 on a visit in December 2004 that 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."[23] Other observers say that the 
 dust stirred up by U.S. helicopters has sandblasted the fragile brick fagade 
 of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 B.C.[24] 
 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 B.C., 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]."[25] 
  
 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. 
  
 President Bush's supporters have talked endlessly about his global war on 
 terrorism as a "clash of civilizations." But 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 dynamiting of the monumental third century A.D. 
 Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in March, 2001. 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. 
  
 NOTES 
  
 [1.] American Embassy, London, " Visit of President Bush to Northern 
 Ireland, April 7-8, 2003." 
  
 [2.] William R. Polk, "Introduction," Milbry Polk and Angela M. H. Schuster, 
 eds., The Looting of the Iraq Museum: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia 
 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), p. 5. Also see Suzanne Muchnic, 
 "Spotlight on Iraq's Plundered Past," Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2005. 
  
 [3.] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire 
 and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Owl Books, 1989, 
 2001), p. 450. 
  
 [4.] George Bush's address to the Iraqi people, broadcast on "Towards 
 Freedom TV," April 10, 2003. 
  
 [5.] Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, 
 and Logistics, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic 
 Communication (Washington, D.C.: September 2004), pp. 39-40. 
  
 [6.] See Frank Rich, "And Now: 'Operation Iraqi Looting,'" New York Times, 
 April 27, 2003. 
  
 [7.] Robert Scheer, "It's U.S. Policy that's 'Untidy,'" Los Angeles Times, 
 April 15, 2003; reprinted in Books in Flames, Tomdispatch, April 15, 2003. 
  
 [8.] John F. Burns, "Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its Treasures," New 
 York Times, April 13, 2003; Piotr Michalowski (University of Michigan), The 
 Ransacking of the Baghdad Museum is a Disgrace, History News Network, April 
 14, 2003. 
  
 [9.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit, pp. 209-210. 
  
 [10.] Mark Wilkinson, Looting of Ancient Sites Threatens Iraqi Heritage, 
 Reuters, June 29, 2005. 
  
 [11.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit., pp. 23, 212-13; Louise Jury, "At Least 
 8,000 Treasures Looted from Iraq Museum Still Untraced," Independent, May 
 24, 2005; Stephen Fidler, "'The Looters Knew What They Wanted. It Looks Like 
 Vandalism, but Organized Crime May be Behind It,'" Financial Times, May 23, 
 2003; Rod Liddle, The Day of the Jackals, Spectator, April 19, 2003. 
  
 [12.] Humberto Marquez, Iraq Invasion the 'Biggest Cultural Disaster Since 
 1258,' Antiwar.com, February 16, 2005. 
  
 [13.] Robert Fisk, "Library Books, Letters, and Priceless Documents are Set 
 Ablaze in Final Chapter of the Sacking of Baghdad," Independent, April 15, 
 2003. 
  
 [14.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 10. 
  
 [15.] Guy Gugliotta, "Pentagon Was Told of Risk to Museums; U.S. Urged to 
 Save Iraq's Historic Artifacts," Washington Post, April 14, 2003; McGuire 
 Gibson, "Cultural Tragedy In Iraq: A Report On the Looting of Museums, 
  
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