Mr. Rumsfeld refers to it as “untidiness”, as long oppressed citizens of Baghdad take to looting in the streets.

But untidiness does not begin to describe the feeling of utter despair as I sat and listened to the news last night. Looting tables and chairs, televisions and radios, all the accumulated junk of a despotic regime, is one thing. This weekend, however, humanity was looted, and we are all made poorer for it.

The National Museum of Iraq housed artifacts, antiquities, and treasures dating back to the dawn of civilization. Ancient wisdom, art, and artifacts from the earliest yearnings of Man.

In two days of mad looting, with despairing curators unable to stop it, it is now all gone. All of it. There is nothing left.

When I first heard this, I admit that I wept. Despite the stories of death and destruction that have accompanied this war, this has hit me the hardest. Perhaps I am desensitized toward the “common brutality” of war, especially after seeing it reported in such intimate detail – the ultimate reality television.

Last week on television I saw Marines walking through the Palaces of Saddam, showing us all the bric-a-brac stored there. Through all this the mighty American military couldn’t manage to post anyone at the Museum to protect it and its treasure. Not one lowly private with a walkie-talkie. No one. Before the war started, there had apparently been assurances from the State Department that the museum would be protected. It wasn’t.

And the looters couldn’t suppress their primal urge to destroy and loot. This is not just a failure of the Americans, but of the Iraqis as well, it is a complete and utter failure.

What is lost is not just the heritage of one nation, one tribe, one people; it is the heritage of every human being alive, that has lived, and that is yet to be born. We have lost a little bit of ourselves. If the greatness of Man is achieved, in part, by his ability to rise up out of the barriers of his temporal existence and embrace and build on the thoughts and vision of those that have strode the earth before him, it is through the preservation, study, and contemplation of what history has left us. When the artifacts of history are destroyed, we doom ourselves to a lesser existence than what might have been. Doomed to repeat the history that is no longer available to us.

Where there was once wisdom and art and wonder, now lies nothing but emptiness.

 -tds
 

April 14, 2003