And so it continued, the taking of Baghdad, five years ago today. On April 11 the ransacking of the museum had begun, an act of fury wrought by mobs of people who had been oppressed by Saddam Hussein. On April 12 the museum was still being burned and pillaged. Desperate curators pleaded with the U.S. military to scare off the looters, but the military had no time for such things (they did cordon off and defend one public building – the oil ministry). Thousands of years of history gone, lost, scattered to the winds. U.S. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld’s response was – these are his precise words: “Stuff happens.”
I do think the invaders meant well. We honestly believed we were doing good, helping a people to fight against tyranny. But here’s a question: If somebody came to save our own country from an evil tyrant, someone who truly cared for us, for our democracy, our civilization, our history and its dignity, how would we feel if they then looked on, unconcerned, as the original copies of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were torn out from their cases and ripped into pieces, the Lincoln Memorial razed, the Statue of Liberty toppled (with pieces of the torch made available to a black market of the curious)? What if the Smithsonian Museum were ransacked, and everything scattered or destroyed, from the Wright brothers’ airplane to Mr. Rogers’ orange sweater?
We might try to get inside the mind of our well meaning friends who were idly standing by, watching, while such things happened, these helpful foreign saviors with their guns and serious expressions. Perhaps we’d ask ourselves “What could they be thinking? Aren’t they even curious about us, this nation of people they wish to save? What is it about our culture, exactly, that they value?” And we might not be able to find any answers.
And yet this was all a prelude. In a sense it was a warning, a lead up to the following day, a kind of test to see whether the U.S. actually valued the culture it was attempting to liberate, or whether it was, in fact, even paying attention. The following day would be worse.
I am reminded of Yeats’ poem The Second Coming, which he was moved to write in the wake of the devastation wrought by World War I:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?