Monday, April 14, 2003 :::
 
The Looting. The mind recoils at the thought of such destruction. Many of the earliest records and artifacts from the very cradle of civilization, destroyed beyond repair. The entire office infrastructure of a country, pillaged by her own people. The tools necessary for any kind of functioning modern government in a city of 5 million people, gone. The strange, recurrent proof of the insanity of crowds immediately offers itself as an explanation, but is that enough? Some thoughts...

The first villain, Saddam. Strange, the silence of so many protest groups over Saddam's looting of his own country. Not only were oil funds used for perverse military ends while the people starved, but everything was reduced to the drab uniformity so favored by socialists. In a long profile in the Wall Street Journal, an Iraqi exile and his grown son, both hydroengineers, described how they have, for years, been planning the restoration of the marshes between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They were beautiful once, and gave life to the region's most fertile area. Saddam drained them for some maniacal public works project. Cuneiform tablets from ancient peoples are priceless; food and water for people living right now are far more valuable...Yes, yes, I know we did the same thing in the Northwest. Those dams are going away without a change of regime. They were planned and built in the 1930's, when centralized state planning was all the rage, and the US government was able to produce a study extolling the economic stragies of Tojoist Japan, Fascist Italy, Nazi German, and the Soviet Union. People who think that way should not be allowed near the pristine wilderness. Or near people.

Was the impulse purification? I read up a fair amount on Islam in the months following 9/11, and the theme of destroying earlier pagan structures recurrs throughout the history. When the Wahhabi's established control over the Arabian peninsula over two hundred years ago, the first thing they did was destroy two mosques that were too ornate. V.S. Naipaul found people, in Indonesia, which is 95 percent Muslim or more, who thought that the next stage in the development of Islam there was the destruction of the Buddhist temple ruins which form the backbone of Indonesia's tourist industry. And the successful invasion of an Islamic country by an infidel army is a sign that the leader was a bad Muslim. Saddam was expressly secularist, building the Mother of All Battles Mosque only when he needed support against the US. Yes, the crowd was insane with desperation, but did someone, or some group, get the inspiration to destroy the pagan remains that may have brought the invasion down on their heads?

They may have been copying the French. When Jacques Chirac came to power, he actually tried to imitate Margaret Thatcher and free the French working people from the control of the au-paire state. Fisherman in Northwestern France wanted to keep their subsidies, however, and set fire to a historic town hall, destroying records dating back to the 14th Century in the process. Or maybe it was the Chinese they were copying. I read a survey of Chinese art once, and was stunned at the amount of blood. Much of what we know about the art from many periods comes from written descriptions, or inferior copies. Often, when new dynasties took over, they destroyed all signs of the previous one. One emperor, in a fit of piety at the end of his life, destroyed 250 THOUSAND works of art that he himself had commissioned. What is this impulse in man?

Westerners who need to do some rethinking. Those who turned their eyes from Saddam's tyranny. Those who blamed the starvation on anything other than Saddam's brutal socialism. Those who wanted to believe that US troops would not be welcome. Those who compared the legal, properly and publicly adjudicated, openly conducted electoral mess in Florida and Saddam's "re-election" with a 100 percent vote. Those who feel that people are happiest when everyone is at the same impoverished level...the only similar riots in modern America have occurred in exactly those areas where there is virtually no private property, no privately-owned business, no source of income other than the State. Is there a lesson here?

Conservatives should have expected it. Conservative thinkers of all stripes are the ones who, rightly, pride themselves on their unflinching look at what leaders actually believe and what conditions actually prevail in other countries. To the "neo"-conservatives in particular goes pride of place in describing conditions under socialist regimes. They should have known what might have happened. That includes me. And the Administration should have sent in far more people, to protect our boys from harm, and because the final rape of the country by its own people undoes the caution and care that went into executing "shock and awe."

Isn't it interesting that American troops are not being attacked? So the fury of the crowd is really directed at Saddam and thirty years of Ba'ath destruction.

And at the German embassy, the Chinese Embassy, and the French Cultural Center. I guess the Iraqi people were exercising their permanent veto power.

Much of the office stuff was stolen anyway. By the government. So now it is distributed throughout the country. The nature of markets dictates that it will make its way back, but it will be a brutal business. Just like the system that reduced the Iraqi people to such desperation.

One thinks first of the people, and their suffering. But the loss of the museum was a real tragedy.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:19 PM


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What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.