Report #16 - Robbing The Cradle

by Jerry Levin

Amman, Jordan

April 16, 2003

During the first days of the investiture of Baghdad, while allied military forces were massively and exclusively protecting the Oil Ministry Building and the Palestine Hotel, where the Occupation Administration was establishing itself, the soldiers and marines were protecting little else. As a result wide spread looting took place at nearly every other critical institution in the city.

Of course, the occupation forces were too few to do the kind of policing that would have prevented the looting, but the choices initially made, as to what they were to protect first, does, I think, furnish credibility to the oft heard charge that the invasion had more to do with "It's the oil, stupid," than with liberating the Iraqi people. Liberating the Iraqi people still appears to have been a means to that end.

Way down the priority list, it seems, was protecting Iraq's celebrated collections of cultural and historical artifacts going all the way back to the beginnings of agrarian and urban society, despite the fact that it had been known that obsessively acquisitive forces in the cut throat world of antiquity collection and dealing in the United States and elsewhere had designs on the tens of thousands of precious and irreplaceable items in those collections.

For instance an ad hoc group of acquisition minded individuals and potential middle men and women in the United States had been lobbying U. S. officials to get behind an effort to quietly sabotage Iraq's until now very tough laws and regulations concerning retention of its cultural and historical heritage.

As if on cue, on April 12th among the first unprotected buildings looted in Baghdad was the National Archeological Museum; and this happened just one day after UNESCO's (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) Director General, Ko