Peace Kills (21 page)

Inside, materials were marble, alabaster, mahogany, teak, and mother-of-pearl, elaborately handcrafted by badly skilled workmen. The main reception room was four floors high. A crystal chandelier hung down past two tiers of balconies. I paced off the shadow it cast on the floor. The chandelier was the size of a two-car garage. If a reason to invade Iraq was wanted, felony interior decorating would have done. Imagine Liberace as an inner-city high school basketball star who'd just signed an NBA contract and converted to Islam.

Returning to the airport from the palace, Major Bob and I saw civilians being searched at one of the checkpoints. A
village that housed Iraqi airport workers was inside the airport security perimeter. Some of the villagers had fled during the war. Now they were coming back. But they had to be frisked first.

For propriety's sake, the women were asked to frisk themselves. They patted their chadors, or their jeans and T-shirts, with both hands from ankles to shoulders, maintaining a neutrality of expression that was admirable in a forced Macarena.

Najah Raheem, age fifty-one, had been hired by the Army to interpret at the checkpoint for three dollars a day.

“What did you do before the war?” Major Bob asked him.

“I was an air traffic controller.”

“I'm probably living in your office,” Major Bob said.

Najah suggested that we go to the village, called “the French Quarter” because it was built originally for the airport's French construction crews. “They will be eager to talk to you in the French Quarter,” Najah said.

“They” was a formidable woman in black who had several of what seemed to be the village elders meekly in tow and any number of small boys and girls peering from behind her cloaks. “Three hundred families!” she said. “Many big families. Smallest families have five children. Ten days—no water, no electricity, no food, no cars.”

One of the elders was brought forward to say, “The water main is broken” and “There are no wells.”

“Is
this
the new Iraq?” the formidable woman said. “No schools. All night it is dark. We need
one
generator. There is no money. No doctor.” She pointed to an old man. He had sores on his feet. He displayed them. “No insulin,” the woman said.

Major Bob wanted to know if there had been any looting or threats of violence in the village. “Are you safe?” he asked.

“Safe?” she replied. “Too safe! Ignore safe!”

Major Bob went to the Army Engineers. “We've got a little hearts-and-minds situation in our own backyard,” he said. The officer on duty looked harried. The engineers knew about the problems in the French Quarter, but the French Quarter was hooked into the airport, and they hadn't been able to get the airport's main power and water systems working. Anyway, orders would have to come from above.

“Which means a written report,” Major Bob said, eyeing me. Major Bob is an infantry officer by training and inclination. But the Army thinks about its field officers what Harvard MBAs think about themselves: they can run anything. “I get to rotate out of public affairs next year,” said Major Bob.

The most tendentious journalists don't write to accomplish much except getting read. The most meticulous factchecking departments don't check actual knowledge. It's remarkable how much about pipelines and electrical grids one reporter can be ignorant of. The report was delivered, and it joined, electronically, a queue of complaints, demands, and emergency appeals.

I went into Baghdad, tagging along on military errands. The city looked more like the target of a trash collectors' strike than the target of shock and awe. There were burned-out military vehicles here and there, but garbage was everywhere. The destruction from the air attacks had been highly specific, though wholesale within its specificity. Uday Hussein's Olympic
training facility and supposed personal headquarters was erased, the rubble too flat even for low hurdles. The surrounding walls were untouched. An Interior Ministry building was a ten-story cinder, like the readable ash from a sheet of burned newspaper. Damage caused by the armor attack on the city was noticeable because it was newer, crisper, and more clean-edged than the general deterioration of Baghdad..

The men in the streets were sullen, and they were enthusiastic, and they were both. They stood with their buddies, glaring at American soldiers, and then rushed up to those soldiers to try to sell them something or change money. The women in the streets looked put-upon and harassed. Keeping the kids from playing on the tanks was just one more damn thing. The little boys carried ballpoint pens and wanted to have their arms signed by the soldiers.

Broken glass and twisted window gates from looting were all over the sidewalks. Improvised stalls of tradesmen were all over the sidewalks, too. How much of the trade was in loot I couldn't tell. The citizens of Baghdad were selling a lot of cigarettes and two-liter bottles of Fanta orange soda to one another. They were busy, though not with brooms and mops. I did see one man washing his car, however.

And there was another man, standing by his car in a long line at a gas station, who hid his AK-47 under his
dishdashah
as we drove by. The sound of AK-47s being shot could be heard at a distance from wherever American troops happened to be. Some of the shooting was rhythmic, celebratory “happy fire.” Some was not, and came in single shots or short, discordant bursts. The gunfire increased after sundown.

If Kuwait is Houston without Enron, Baghdad is Washington, D.C., without Pierre L'Enfant. Wide boulevards have been plopped down anywhere amid an absurdity of monuments and
monumental buildings and monumentally bad taste. A photograph of the soccer stadium could convince tabloid readers of an alien invasion. To commemorate victory (of which there was none) in the Iran-Iraq war, Baghdad's parade ground has a pair of boxcar-size hands popping out of the ground, holding crossed swords in a pot metal arch seventy feet high. And there's an identical arch at the parade ground's other end, to commemorate victory some more. The arches were untouched by the recent conflict. They formed a moving testimony to the discipline, training, and self-restraint of the U.S. Army's tank gunners.

An American armored battalion had occupied another Baghdad monument, a hundred-foot-tall split onion dome with both dome halves covered inside and out in bright-blue glazed ceramic tile. “We call it ‘the tits,'” said a sentry at the monument's gate.

“Do you know what that is?” asked a reproving captain in whose Humvee I was riding. “It's the tomb of the Iraqi Unknown Soldier.”

“Yes, sir,” a second sentry said. “You'll find the colonel somewhere over by the eggshells.”

Actually, the Unknown Soldier memorial was back across the river, at the crossed-swords parade ground. The dome sections (which more closely resemble baboon butt cheeks) memorialize
known
Iraqi soldiers—the million or so killed in the war with Iran. Their names and military units are inscribed in profusion around the structure's base, and inside, glass cases are full of the soldiers' belongings. This “Martyrs' Monument” is dedicated to ordinary Iraqis, although, according to the armored battalion's colonel, the only people allowed to visit it under Saddam's rule were members of the
Baath Party. One section of the interior was reserved solely for Saddam and his immediate family.

Saddam's family, or their moral ilk, had been using the Martyrs' Monument as a chop shop for stolen automobiles. An Iraqi carpenter hired to repair the car-thief damage was scared to go into the forbidden Saddam zone.

The looting of antiquities from the Iraq National Museum was not a good example of America's failure to protect Iraq's heritage. Dug in on the museum's grounds were squadrons of paramilitary
fedayeen
—not a part of Iraq's heritage that needed preserving. And do you shoot looters? A man running down the street with a two-hundred-pound head of Nebuchadnezzar in his arms can't hurt you. If you shoot someone who's got a Winged Lion of Assyria, he'll turn out to be a museum curator taking it home for safekeeping—or it will be a plastic Winged Lion of Assyria lawn ornament.

American tanks were guarding the National Museum with horse-gone, barn-door-closed acuity. I asked a tank crew, “Do you shoot looters?”

“Our operational orders are supposed to be secret,” one crew member said.

“No,” said another.

The looting of antiquities was not a good example of much of anything, considering where the objects in museums come from in the first place. Also, many of the most valuable archaeological treasures were hidden by the museum's staff. Others were trickling back to the museum. The Sumerian Sacred Vase of Warka was restituted by its thieves in June. According to
USA Today
, “The men returned the
vase because they realized its importance to Iraq's heritage, officials said.”

The official in charge the day I was at the museum, the director of research, Dr. Donny George, said, “Starting from yesterday we've stopped talking to the media.” Television camera crews, news photographers, and other journalists had swept through the museum, grabbing images of pillage and snatching quotes from the staff.

One staff member sat atop what archaeologists call—or will call in a thousand years—a midden pile. The museum's lobby was heaped with crumpled records, letters, bills, and receipts. File cabinets had been pulled into the open space and their locks had been shot open. The locks had been shot open even on some newly delivered file cabinets, empty and still in their shipping wrappers. The staffer, an older man, smoothed pieces of paper. If it was an important piece of paper, he put it in a folder and sighed. If it wasn't, he threw it away and cursed. Every now and then a janitor would shove the discarded papers back into the unsorted pile. The rest of the museum staff sat around.

I'd come to the museum with soldiers from a Civil Affairs battalion. They were reservists with nonmilitary skills—firemen, policemen, engineers. One sergeant was getting his Ph.D. in sociology. With aid agencies yet to arrive, Civil Affairs had the job of fixing everything in Iraq that didn't need to be killed, although Civil Affairs had guns, too. Dr. George gave the soldiers a tour of the museum, and, uninvited, I went with them.

The galleries were a crime scene, but the parts of the museum that weren't open to the public were the scene of something else. Windows were broken. Furniture was
smashed. Copiers, coffeemakers, typewriters, and telephones had been thrown around the rooms, and bullets had been fired into ceilings and walls. Bookshelves had been pulled over, and books and publications had been ripped and tossed. Archive photos were torn. Microfilm was unspooled and festooned like the remains of a ticker-tape parade in negative.

Rows of ancient pots had been staved in. Drawers' worth of carefully cataloged scholarly fragments had been further fragmentized. “Be careful,” Dr. George said, “because you might be stepping on antiquities.” Thousands-of-years-old crunches sounded under our feet.

The restoration studio was ruined. Tools were bent and broken. This wasn't looting. A gold Lyre of Ur had been stripped of its gold leaf; the lyre itself was on the floor. “Vandalism” was not the word. The Vandals controlled the Mediterranean with their sea power and forced the Roman emperor Valentinian III to make peace. They must have had brains. The people who did this to the National Museum were brainless enough to have gone to college with me. I remember just such a scene visited upon a persnickety landlord of off-campus housing. But I don't think the worst of my keg buddies would have trashed America's heritage. The looted Sumerians themselves, back from the dead and drunk as the lords they were, couldn't get this worked up at a museum.

One of the broken statues looked kind of Greek. “Hellenistic period,” I said, in a lucky guess, to Dr. George. He smiled at me and began answering my media queries before I'd had a chance to make any.

“There were three groups of looters,” Dr. George said. “First there were the experts.” He explained that they had come equipped with glass cutters and battery-operated saws
with stone-cutting blades. They knew what they were after and didn't take replicas or objects that had been overrestored. “Then there were the opportunists.” He said that they took whatever they could and did most of the damage. “But then there is a third group—I don't know who they are. I don't understand. They are determined to burn all the libraries and archives in Baghdad, in all the colleges, at Baghdad University. They burned the central library. They burned all the postgraduate studies at the colleges. They burned the library here at the museum—just the library, not the other parts.”

While I was interviewing Dr. George, curators from another museum arrived. This was the Museum of Modern Art, formerly known as the Saddam Hussein Museum of Modern Art, now renamed (for the moment, at least), as were the Saddam International Airport, the Saddam City housing project, the Saddam Hospital, and so on. It takes a certain kind of name to name everything after yourself. “P.J.” wouldn't do: Pajama International Airport, Pajama City, Museum of Modern Pajamas.

The Museum of Modern Art had been looted, too. “Three or four hours ago we were chasing the looters,” one of the curators said. But the staff had managed to get most of the museum's collection locked in the basement. Now, however, Baghdad's sewage system was backing up. Sewage was flooding into the museum cellar, and Iraq's entire collection of modern art was in peril.

The curators appealed to the Civil Affairs soldiers. “We need trucks,” one of the curators said, “to bring the paintings here, where they will be guarded.” The men from the Museum of Modern Art said it was America's responsibility.
They said it was America's duty. They didn't say it was America's fault. But they were thinking it. And I was thinking that among the things America
didn't
bomb in Baghdad were the sewer outlets into the Tigris.