Not meddling, just fiddling

With a regime changed in Baghdad, it was an ancient civilisation?s turn to be a war victim. That was not, however, how it was planned.

With a regime changed in Baghdad, it was an ancient civilisation’s turn to be a war victim. That was not, however, how it was planned. With the initial hiccups of unexpected resistance out of the way and jubilant Iraqis welcoming the self-described ‘liberators’, a seamless transition from despotic rule to dependable democracy was supposed to have been on the cards.

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Instead, there has been mindless anarchy. Once the juggernaut of war starts rolling, even those behind the wheel lose control over the brakes of law and order. The American forces who had watched and helped topple remnants of Saddam Hussein’s past — whether it be in the spontaneous pulling down of the dictator’s statues or hunting out Ba’ath party apparatchiki — have now been left watching a very different spectacle: Iraqis ransacking Iraq.

The most devastating display of the sacking of Baghdad by its own people has been the looting of priceless artefacts — most of them more than 7,000 years old — from the National Museum. This has to rank with the blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in Afghanistan as a mind-numbing example of wanton destruction. The job of the American forces was to defeat the ‘enemy’ — not to police a lawless State where a political vacuum has suddenly ushered in anarchy. It’s clear that the possibility of such a scenario never crossed the minds of the ‘We’re-against-Saddam’s-regime-not-against-Iraqis’ brigade in Washington. And even if it did, with the ‘job in hand’ accomplished and Donald Rumsfeld beaming, it is unlikely that the Americans would be having sleepless nights over Iraqis pillaging ‘their own’ city and history.