Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [254]
PART XI
The Occupation of Iraq
Baghdad, Iraq
APRIL 9, 2003
As cheering Iraqis in the heart of the capital brought down the over life-sized statue of Saddam Hussein, a scene decidedly less euphoric was occurring in a Sunni neighborhood just across the Euphrates. More than one hundred armed Iraqi soldiers, many wearing civilian clothing, entered the National Museum of Iraq. They took up sniper positions to contest the final advance of American soldiers and Marines into Baghdad and tried to turn the museum into a fortress.
A custodian of Iraq’s long and rich history, the Iraqi National Museum housed a peerless collection that illuminated the beginnings of civilization. The importance of this heritage was lost on no one, least of all the American military. CENTCOM planners had put the National Museum of Iraq high on the coalition’s “no-strike” list.*
Immediately after the regime collapsed in early April 2003, Iraqis across the country released pent-up grievances against the tyranny that had smothered them and impoverished their country for over thirty years by looting from government buildings. Looters ransacked and stripped Saddam’s palaces bare of furniture and decorations. Faucets and toilets in many public buildings disappeared, and wires were pulled from walls to salvage the copper. Stealing back property that was considered stolen from the Iraqi people struck them, evidently, as justified.
The looting made it appear that postwar Iraq was descending into chaos. A camera caught an Iraqi taking a vase out of a building in Baghdad—and that scene was replayed over and over across the world. This was accompanied by images of coalition troops standing by in tanks. The implication? America was fiddling while Baghdad burned.
A flood of disaster stories gushed forth. News organizations wildly asserted that nearly all of the museum’s collection had been looted.1 “[I]t took only 48 hours for the museum to be destroyed,” the New York Times reported, “with at least 170,000 artifacts carried away by looters.”2 But the news stories tended not to blame the Iraqi fighters for breaking into the museum, turning it into a combat zone, and putting its collections at risk. “American troops were but a few hundred yards away as the country’s heritage was stripped bare,” National Public Radio claimed.3 Some even accused American servicemen of participating in the reported heists.4 “You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad of 1258, to find looting on this scale,” said one British archaeologist.5
Across the world, officials, especially those opposed to the war, made a great complaint. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan piled on, issuing a statement “deplor[ing] the catastrophic losses.”6 French President Jacques Chirac, a man of bottomless cynicism whose anti-Americanism had become reflexive, called the alleged museum looting “a veritable crime against humanity.”7 As if the ill-grounded comments of foreign officials were not enough, I then had the experience of turning on the television and seeing my colleague, Secretary of State Powell, in Washington issuing what was in essence a public apology on behalf of the U.S. government about the museum looting, with a promise to recover what was lost.8
Iraq and Afghanistan were the first wars of the twenty-first century—the first where operations were reported in real time on blogs, talk radio, and twenty-four-hour news channels. The public was hearing all kinds of allegations and one-sided, sensational reports. It took a while for the facts to catch up. Contrary to early reports, coalition forces had moved rapidly toward the museum to secure it. When American troops arrived, there were no visible looters. The advance on the building was halted, however, when our troops came under a barrage of sniper fire and rocket-propelled grenades from inside. The American commander on the ground faced a vexing choice. If his troops engaged further with the enemy forces in the museum, he risked destroying portions of the building, including