Peace Kills

  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 Vas
e 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.

  Major Bob woke me up the next morning. “The Civil Affairs guys scrounged a truck,” he said. “We’re going to save the modern art of Iraq.”

  It was a hundred degrees by ten A.M. Iraq’s works of modern art tend to the large, also the numerous. We moved them from the mucky basement to the dusty truck as carefully as we could. Seeing a piece from a distance, Major Bob would say, “Now, that’s a really bad Chagall”—but it would turn out to be painted in Chagall’s extremely late period, when he was dead, and would be signed by someone local. “Well,” Major Bob said, “it’s their heritage, not ours.”

  The museum building had been rubbished. A couple of modern sculptures, too big to be hidden, were looking edgy and brutalist and, frankly, improved by the vandalism. Broken glass and shredded exhibit posters covered the entranceway. A young man in a disco haircut, sharply creased pants, and expensive shoes came to the gate. “Can I get into the museum?” he asked.

  The sergeant who was getting his Ph.D. in sociology said, “It’s very closed.”

  We dropped a truckload of art at the National Museum, half a mile away. I stayed behind to talk to Donny George.

  Returning on foot, I got lost. Baghdad was, again, like Washington: I didn’t have to wander far from the edifices to get into a slum. But rather than leaving the poor to the vagaries of outdated housing stock, the Iraqis had built their slums new. The two-story hovels, with one window apiece, were made of cement blocks left unpainted. There were tiny stores along the street. The shelves were vacant. People were loitering. I heard “Hello, American” several times from kids. I got “Welcome, please” from a couple proprietors of empty stores. There were a few hard stares from young men, who muttered after I’d passed. There were a few fewer wan smiles from old people.

  I was in a flak vest that Major Bob insisted I wear for a visit to Baghdad, and my clothes were khaki from dirt. But I was too old to be a soldier, and I didn’t have a television camera, so I couldn’t be a journalist. I don’t know how I appeared to the Iraqis. Mostly I didn’t. I was invisible to the majority of people. Seventeen years before, in Belfast, British troops had had this invisibility. Squadrons in battle gear would patrol the Republican stronghold of Divis Flats, and to the Irish they weren’t there. The British have ended up spending nine centuries in Ireland.

  I found my way back to the Museum of Modern Art. A television crew from Bahrain had arrived. The soldiers were being interviewed about the importance of Iraq’s cultural heritage. An eight-foot canvas depicting an innocent Iraqi being smothered by an American flag and pecked by a bald eagle had just been pulled from the cellar. The TV reporter, Saad al-Hasani, was also an assistant professor of English at the University of Baghdad. I asked him if he knew anything about the “third group” of looters who Dr. George had said were burning libraries.

  Professor al-Hasani had gone to stay with relatives in the country
during the war. His apartment in Baghdad had been looted. He’d expected that. But someone had carried all his books down to the apartment building’s yard and burned them.

  “I teach modern theater,” he said. “My specialty is Samuel Beckett and the theater of the absurd. I’d always had trouble explaining Beckett to my students. They didn’t comprehend the theater of the absurd. Then, after the war in 1991, my students suddenly were starting to understand Waiting for Godot. I could tell by the questions they asked in class, by their essays. It was if they were anticipating something. There was a situation in the air. A student came up to me and said, ‘This is just like Waiting for Godot. Nobody comes. Nobody goes. It’s awful. Nothing to be done.’”

  I told Professor al-Hasani about the book cover in the airport administration-building locker. Would air traffic controllers and aeronautical engineers be reading Godot, too?

  “Of course,” he said.

  That evening at the airport a major and a lieutenant colonel from the Civil Affairs battalion drove the truck around scrounging material to build a latrine. The major was a mechanical engineer. The colonel was an electrical engineer. They argued as if they were married.

  “We can build a lighter frame if we stress the plywood in monocoque construction.”

  “Fuck lightness—compression equals strength.”

  I pounded nails, rather crookedly. It was an innovative outhouse. Cut-down fifty-five-gallon oil drums were set on airport luggage trolleys so that waste cans could be rolled in under the seats.

  “You have seen the backside of war,” the electrical engineer said.

  * * *

  In the morning Major Bob woke me again. “We’re going to the French Quarter with Civil Affairs,” he said. I thought proudly about the written report—for a few minutes. Then the Civil Affairs batallion commander said, “Some Special Forces guys were patrolling through there. They told us it was a mess. We’re only supposed to do an assessment, but we’ve scrounged some tools, and we were scrounging around in the terminal and found a bunch of antibiotics and medical supplies the Iraqis had hidden.”