Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [256]
I had uttered more than a thousand words at that press conference before I said “stuff happens,” but they were the only two words that seemed to matter. My point was that in all wars, bad things happen. During World War II, cities across Germany suffered from looting and chaos soon after Allied troops entered. The northern city of Bremen was, as one shocked onlooker described it, “probably among the most debauched places on the face of God’s earth” as liberated Germans looted stores, museums, and government buildings.14 Liberated Iraqis were doing the same thing, filling the temporary vacuum that existed between the old order and the new. What I said was characterized as callous and indifferent. Once I saw how my comments were being interpreted in the media, I realized I had made a mistake.
As it happened, most of what the media had reported about the museum looting—that monstrous “crime against humanity”—turned out to be false. After reports about the looting of the Iraq National Museum first surfaced, CENTCOM’s director of operations, Major General Gene Renuart, dispatched Marine Colonel Matthew Bogdanos to Baghdad to investigate. Though press reports commonly reported 170,000 items stolen, Bogdanos discovered that only a tiny fraction of that was actually looted.15 Somewhere between 3,000 and 15,000 items were later proved missing from the museum collections.16 Those numbers included the state-sanctioned looting, theft, and forgery that Saddam Hussein’s regime had used as a source of revenue for some years.17 The press claims that had become an international sensation, Bogdanos concluded, were “intentionally false, a fiction perpetuated first by some museum staff, and then repeated by the press.”18
I also received firsthand information about the museum from an unusual source. Our informant was a spy who had been in Baghdad prior to the invasion. Days before coalition bombs began falling on regime targets in the capital, he had visited the already closed national museum. He peered through the museum’s windows and found none of the museum’s antiquities on display. Well before the war started, it appeared, the museum curators had put tens of thousands of pieces in safe vaults or taken them out of Baghdad.* This same plan had been used in the Iran-Iraq War and during the first Gulf War. The museum staff also left doors unlocked, which suggested that the director, a Baathist and Saddam ally, intended for the fighters and looters to move about freely in the compound.
A few media outlets belatedly issued some corrections, but not with anything approaching the prominence of their original false reports of extensive looting.† “Officials at the National Museum of Iraq have blamed shoddy reporting amid the ‘fog of war’ for creating the impression that the majority of the institution’s 170,000 items were looted in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad,” noted the Daily Telegraph one month later.20 One museum official tried to explain the confusion: “I said there were 170,000 pieces in the entire museum collection ... not 170,000 pieces stolen... . No, no, no. That would be every single object we have!”21
Those in the press who created and spread the grossly false and harmful stories about the museum looting took no responsibility for the negative pall that quickly engulfed the coalition’s efforts. It was as if the news media had shrugged its collective shoulders and said “stuff happens.”
CHAPTER 34
Catastrophic Success
Before the war, officials in the Department of Defense