Tuesday, 22 April 2003

I went to the Louvre once. It's a huge place, with thousands of priceless art treasures; the ones I remember best are the Mona Lisa (of course), the "Winged Victory" statue— and an unremarkable, undecorated, ordinary little clay pot, something you or I might have made on a pottery wheel in an art class… but this one was nine thousand years old.

I've been to the Smithsonian too, but I was twelve years old at the time: I remember the Hope Diamond and Charles Lindbergh's plane, but not much else. I think the Smithsonian's collection of Really Old Stuff was less impressive than the one at the Louvre, but of course the Louvre has a lot less Americana (i.e., it has none), and in any case I'm not sure that old pottery would have impressed me as a twelve-year-old. Looking back, though, I think about that ancient vase more often than I think of the Mona Lisa, or the "Spirit of St. Louis," or anything else I saw in either museum. It makes me wonder which random Coke bottle out there will survive the next nine millenia and end up in a museum, for no other reason than that it escaped destruction for such a long time.

I think about these things when I read about the looting of Iraq's national museum—or, worse, of the outright destruction of many ancient treasures. Iraq was one of the first places in the world, if not the first, where humans made permanent settlements, developed agriculture, and began the long, slow, painful climb to indoor plumbing and Joe Millionaire; I imagine the Baghdad Museum must have had one of the world's finest collections of antiquities. At best, those artifacts are now being smuggled out of the country and sold into private collections; at worst, they're gone forever.

It's tempting to put such tragedies into perspective, and ask whether anyone would have made the Faustian bargain that left Saddam free to continue slaughtering a thousand Iraqis a week but kept the museum intact. Or, perhaps, the more relevant question would be to ask whether preserving the museum was worth, say, risking the lives of ten American soldiers by diverting them to protect a building with little to no military value. Arguably the answer to the latter question was "yes" in hindsight: Capturing and protecting the museum should have been assigned the same priority as driving tanks down a boulevard in view of the television cameras, and for the same reason. Neither act was particularly useful from a purely military force-on-force perspective, but both were important to the "psyops" campaign to demoralize and weaken our foes. I'm sure that if we had secured the museum, the anti-American elements of the media would have simply wailed a bit louder about the state of Baghdad hospitals and the lack of electricity—but, nonetheless, protecting the museum would have deprived our opponents of a PR weapon, and for that reason alone we should have done it.

So, then, let me be especially snarky and issue a memo to the troops: When taking Damascus or Pyongyang, please remember to secure the museum. It might also be handy to call up a few M*A*S*H units after the fall of a major city, in case the civilians express their pent-up rage at the fleeing dictator and his cadre by looting their hospitals along with their homes and offices. Thank you. (P.S.: Nice job delivering this to Saddam.)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:00 am. comments.