FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK:

WHEN SCHOLARS CRY WOLF

Someone needs to say this, so I guess it may as well be me.

The tone of the press has changed during the last week regarding the Iraq antiquities looting. An example is David Aaronovitch's editorial in the Guardian from 10 June, "Lost from the Baghdad museum: truth," which you should read in its entirety if you haven't already. In it he says,

So, there's the picture: 100,000-plus priceless items looted either under the very noses of the Yanks, or by the Yanks themselves. And the only problem with it is that it's nonsense. It isn't true. It's made up. It's bollocks.

He closes,

Furious, I conclude two things from all this. The first is the credulousness of many western academics and others who cannot conceive that a plausible and intelligent fellow-professional might have been an apparatchiks of a fascist regime and a propagandist for his own past. The second is that - these days - you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed.

I passed the article onto the IraqCrisis list and it generated some other references and some discussion (follow the links for the next couple of days after my message). Francis Deblauwe wrote:

Now that the media are again running with a minimalist version of what happened in Baghdad ("only 33 artifacts still missing," as in Nightline (ABC) last night), I want to return to the urgent need for media relations by the ANE academic community. I think it's not enough to tape interviews with the various news outlets and educate and give interviews to journalists, and just hope that they'll quote us in the correct context. As I already hinted at on May 15 ([Iraqcrisis] media slipping into 'only tens of artifacts missing still' ), we really need to be smarter than this and get out of this purely reactive mode. Wasn't, for instance, the ACCICH set up for this kind of purpose? Please, I know we are all very busy coordinating assitance to Iraq but if we let public opinion, Congress and other legislative bodies get the impression that it wasn't so bad after all, then the funding could become much more problematic, no matter what the reality on the ground in Iraq is!

Worried and feeling powerless out here in the Midwest US,

Francis Deblauwe

And Cindy Ho wrote:

We are all thankful that many objects from Baghdad have indeed been spared. But isn't it true that the Warka Vase and the Warka face are still missing? [The Warka Vase has since been returned but is damaged. � JRD] Weren't the ceramic lions smashed? Didn't we see pictures of broken statues strewn all over the floors of the Museum along with archival documents and files? Aren't archaeological sites being looted? Can anyone consider this less than a tragedy?

Regardless of the magnitude of the loss, everything the scholars said about the importance of the collections is still true. Present day Iraq is still the cradle of civilization. The illicit antiquities trade is still thriving. If anything, this near catastrophe only underscores the vulnerability of cultural treasures.

Let's not allow media confusion detract us from the real issue: looting goes on every day, all over the world. We must not allow the recent report of the "exaggerated" loss comfort us into complacency. If the events in Iraq were a near catastrophe, it is a wake-up call, an unfortunate window of opportunity to bring some attention to an age-old and ongoing problem.

As an ordinary citizen who is concerned about our collective heritage, I ask the academic communities to unite together and join forces with the media and advertising industries to create a global awareness campaign. Tell the world about the importance of preserving cultural antiquities. Only our collective action can keep this tragic situation alive in the minds of everyone, from government and law enforcement officials, and to the perpetrators themselves.

Cindy Ho
SAFE (Saving Antiquities For Everyone) www.Safenow.net

Both Francis and Cindy make some important points, but they skirt around something that needs to be faced. The academic world blew it in response to the looting in Iraq. Too many people cried wolf too soon and they have seriously undermined our credibility with the outside world. A case in point (one that could be multiplied) is the ASOR (American Schools of Oriental Research) Statement on Baghdad Museum, 4/16/03. It begins:

The looting of the Iraq Museum (Baghdad) is the most severe single blow to cultural heritage in modern history, comparable to the sack of Constantinople, the burning of the library at Alexandria, the Vandal and Mogul invasions and the ravages of the conquistadors.

This rhetoric is not only inflated, it is over the top and embarrassing. It appears likely that some thousands of artifacts from the museum were looted or destroyed, perhaps as many as ten thousand. This is a terrible tragedy, but a Mogul invasion it is not, and exaggerating its scale like this can lead to no good. There were hints days before this statement - indeed on the very day the looting was announced - that the scale of the looting might be less than the initial reports, but this information is ignored. The invoking of Alexandria, Constantinople, etc. is not only overblown, it compares like with unlike in that these other lootings were by the invaders whereas it was the people being invaded who carried out the looting in Iraq. The statement goes on to say:

It took place under the eyes of U.S. military forces in contravention of the Hague Convention on the preservation of cultural property in time of war and the stated policy of the Department of Defense, which had written to the Society for American Archaeology regarding the safeguarding of cultural property in Iraq that "U.S. armed forces... conduct all their operations in accordance with the law of armed conflict, including those provisions of the 1954 Convention and 1999 Protocol that reflect customary international law."

Again, this is based on early reports by Robert Fisk and others to the effect that the allied troops just stood by and let the looting happen. But when reporters spoke to the commander of the tank battalion that actually fought in the area, it came out that Fedayeen had been holed up around the museum, and perhaps in it, and were shooting from it, and the U.S. soldiers took considerable casualties fighting them. Support for this version of the story has been offered by architectural historian Dan Cruikshank (see Aaronovitch's article above) and Fisk's original report even hints at evidence for it. According to this account of events, the troops had other things to worry about than museum looting, like being shot at. Why did ASOR uncritically take the initial, unverified reports as true? Why didn't they say that if it was at all possible the troops should have defended the museum, but it may not have been possible, and that the events needed to be investigated? Come to think of it, two days earlier (14 April) some of us did say that. Was it really prudent to hint that the U.S. forces had committed a war crime? Is this really likely to increase sympathy for our cause among the public or with the government?

This is one example. There were other academics who also responded publicly in this way to the looting of the museum. Aaronovitch quotes some but not all of them. It is true that they were misinformed and misled by the press reports, but they are not innocent. It was clear from the beginning that a large portion of the press wanted the invasion of Iraq to fail and were desperate to find something going wrong. The same press that spread outrageously inaccurate information about the looted antiquities had all but declared the war a Viet Nam quagmire ten days before Baghdad was liberated. Why would anyone believe what the media said from that point on? Perhaps these academics were against the war too. Fine: that was a defensible moral position. But even if they were, they should have been able to evaluate the antiquities situation objectively. Whatever anyone thought of the war, it would have been perfectly possible to take the line that the looting is a terrible thing, but in the fog of war and its aftermath we would do well to be cautious about mapping out its scale or assigning blame for it until we have solid information. I know it was possible because it's what I did, as you can see in the public archive of this blog.

The looting is a tragedy, but the jumping of some on the hysteria bandwagon has superimposed another on top of it: the academic world has played Henny Penny and the public and the press are responding by treating the original disaster as though it were trivial. The new line is that only a few dozen items were lost, so big deal. (Aaronovitch does not go this far but he does not mention thousands of items either.) If academics had taken a prudent position on the scale and blame for the looting we might now be able to point to the actual damage on the scale of thousands of artifacts and to get some real sympathy and concern from the public. But now everything we say will be diluted by the "twenty-five is not 170,000" meme. If you don't believe me, have a look at the blog of Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit - do a search of the word "looting"), which both reflects and drives a large sector of public opinion, and check out these comments by Howard Kurtz and these in the Charlotte Observer.

Worse yet, I fear that the current looting of archaeological sites in Iraq (and cultural looting elsewhere) may not get the attention it deserves. The early reports are that looting of sites in Iraq is widespread and serious, but could you really blame the public for not bothering about it very much? The war wasn't a quagmire and there weren't 170,000 artifacts looted from the Baghdad Museum. Why should anyone believe that the sky is falling this time? I'm not condoning this attitude and the evidence for the current looting is pretty persuasive, but this is what we're up against.

Iraq's history and antiquities are important to me: they figure in a fair bit of my published work. I hope very much that I'm wrong and that the academic community will get the support it needs from the public and the occupying governments to clean up after the museum lootings and to stop the site lootings. I am encouraged by the positive steps being taken, such as the National Geographic expedition I just linked to. (Note to the expedition: get lots of photographs of the sites that are being reduced to swiss cheese by illicit diggers and get those pictures in the papers and maybe send them to Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds too!) But I also hope that academics will be more careful in the future when faced with similar situations (and there may well be similar situations in coming years) and take a more cautious line until they know what's really going on. I hope ASOR will take down that web page and publish a retraction and correction. And I hope a number of scholars (I won't mention names, but they know who they are and their words are archived) feel a little ashamed of themselves for their premature and overblown public statements. They did neither themselves nor us, their colleagues, nor the ancient heritage of Iraq any favors.

UPDATE: The Washington Post now reports that, contrary to earlier rumors, the Warka Vase has been returned undamaged. (Via IraqCrisis and Francis Deblauwe.) UPDATE (17 June): Maybe not.

UPDATE (15-16 June): Welcome Instapundit and other referred readers. The "About PaleoJudaica.com" page (also linked on your right) tells about this site. The main page is here. If you are interested in ancient history, please visit again.

UPDATE (16 June): Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) comments on this essay here. Andrea Harris (Spleenville) comments on it here. Some clarifications: first, I am a philologist and ancient historian, not an archaeologist (and there's only one of me); second, I don't agree with the "twenty-five is not 170,000"/"the museum looting that wasn't" memes for reasons explained above.
David Appell (Quark Soup) comments here.

UPDATE (17 June): Francis Deblauwe comments here. No permalinks, but once the post moves from "Latest Additions" it should end up archived permanently under "Archive 5, second 1/2 of June 2003." (Note to Francis: how about changing to blog format? A Blogger account is easy to set up.) He writes: "however, in retrospect, it is clear that whatever skirmish�yes, that's what it was�took place at the Museum compound, the US military didn't protect the Museum after this skirmish was long over, and that's the problem, not the initial phase." A skirmish? Okay, but it was a skirmish that lasted three days and left one marine dead and 35 wounded. And Fisk reports that bullets were still flying when he visited the museum on the 12th. It's a fair question to ask what the troops were doing from the 10th to the 12th and I don't know the answer. Lieutenant-Colonel Schwartz's troops were in charge, for example, shortly thereafter of securing the Baghdad Zoo, feeding the animals, and getting a supply line of food to them before they all starved. And during the period in question there were (we now know mistaken) urgent reports by Iraqis of underground prisons full of starving prisoners which had to be investigated. I am willing to consider claims that the troops should have set their priorities differently or that the priorities they did set were clearly unreasonable - bearing in mind they were operating in the fog of war and having to make snap decisions. But I would like a clear accounting of what they actually did and what precisely they should have done instead. (More on along these lines in my original posting on the day the looting was announced.) Until and unless this is provided, they deserve the benefit of the doubt. ASOR jumped to conclusions.