Why is it Libertarian seems to be the only one with a halfway decent grasp on the concept here?
Okay, let’s break it down. First off, I agree, the destruction of the relics is a goddam tragedy. I’m no historian, my personal interest in history goes back to about mideval England at best. However, I’m aware of older civilizations, such as the Sumerian or Egyptian. I may not know much about them, but I have a vague idea of a few who’s and where’s.
Yes, it was a stupid, terrible act to destroy such irreplaceable objects, The Declaration is merely a few hundred years old- I’d liken the Iraqui destruction more akin to hauling off Tutankham’s coffin and melting it down for dental fillings or to have a machine gun gold-plated. It’s idiocy, pure and simple, and it’s a great loss.
… BUT…
Consider the tactical situation. Baghdad has more or less fallen, but the city is by no means “secure”. There are still snipers on rooftops, and from the previous weeks’ events, the soldiers still had to be very, very careful to be sure which were the sheep and which were the goats.
Suicide bombers, stragglers from the Republican Guard, armed and angry civillians and others that hadn’t quite gotten the message that Saddam was out, could- and did- cause all sorts of problems.
Yes, it’s true that few of those groups or individuals could have inflicted any serious damage, but all it takes is one Iraqui irregular with an old AK to shoot a soldier. Sure, we might cut him in half immediately afterward with a 25mm chain gun on a Bradley, but that doesn’t make our soldier any less dead.
Security for the coalition forces was paramount. All else came in a very distant second. No general or unit commander would risk any of his men unnecessarily. And ‘unnecessarily’ means doing something besides his unit’s primary task- which at that time was to secure the city (or at least his particular block) and sweep out the remaining loyalists and Republican Guards.
All other tasks came secondary to this.
The oil fields so many of you are whining about were a pre-war tasked objective. Saddam was known to be emplacing explosives and sapper charges at the wellheads in order to deliberately sabotage them against the invading coalition forces. It is also a tactic Hussein’s forces used when being driven out of Kuwait- and so it was a definite, known, expected risk. A major risk as well- as the burning wellheads take a great deal of time and effort to extinguish, make flights overhead more difficult, spew metric tons per day of toxic pollutants, and hamper invading forces.
Next, manpower was badly limited. I’m sure you’ve read the articles expressing how our own supply lines were stretched out, how some Marines were down to being issued just one MRE a day rather than the usual three since supplies were so hampered?
I’m sure you read how we bypassed entire towns full of loyalists mainly because we din’t have the time, supplies or manpower to stop and mop up each and every one?
Baghdad is a city of five million roughly the size of Cincinnatti. Every available man-jack was going to be needed to “take” it, even against such light resistance (and such resistance was not expected by all.)
News articles two weeks ago were wringing their hands about how Baghdad was going to be a bloodbath, there were going to be armed civillians in every doorway, soldiers with rifles in every window. We were going to have to take the city street by street and even room-by-room.
Well guess what- while the museum was being looted, the unit commanders were still thinking that, and were seeing enough scattered resistance that they were unlikely to assume otherwise.
The city was, by no means, secure. It is still not totally secure even today. There is still the risk of snipers or the occasional irregular popping out to fire a shot.
It only takes one bullet, and as I noted earlier, no commander is going to risk his men unnecessarily.
US Forces held relatively secure “pockets” in the city. The museum, unfortunately, was not one of them. Keep in mind, again, the size of the city- if your detachment holds a several-block perimeter and a relatively safe road leading back to your own ‘rear’, you do not- I repeat, do NOT dispatch a half-dozen troops to go two or three or four more miles into the as-yet-unsecured part of the city, and tell them to hold a museum against a mob of looters.
That, regardless of your feelings for the antiquities, is utter stupidity.
If they had a “mission”, perhaps. Maybe. Go in, grab this guy or that computer or this object and get back here, possibly. You do NOT send them out to secure and hold a huge building against a large mob of unknown composition for several days.
That is an excellent way to see your toops get captured or killed.
The looting took place over at least two days. How long might it have taken for word that a mere six or eight coalition troops were guarding a building, some four or five miles from their own “front lines”, to get back to a small group of irregulars or loyalists? Two hours? Maybe four?
And the next day, when the CNN headline screams Six Marines Killed Guarding Museum how many of you would have then said “pity. At least those ancient Sumerian vases are safe”?
Again, the unit commanders had a long list of jobs to do, first and foremost was “don’t get killed”. Next was “Don’t get your troops killed” and just under that was “don’t shoot unarmed civillians”. Then comes ‘don’t get out of contact with your unit’ and ‘maintain your weapon’.
About fifty or sixty items down, below “keep batteries in your night vision goggles” and “use foot powder to prevent fungus”, might have been “if you have time, it’s safe to do so, your unit commander says it’s okay, and you don’t have anything else to do, try and keep looters from stealing stuff.”
Yeah, it’s damned easy to say, “Why didn’t those govermnent fuckups send out some toops to keep this from happening? It’s a tragedy!”
Rule Number One in War is “Don’t Get Killed.” Sending antyhing less than a full detachment out into an unsecured zone, at a time when every able body was desperately needed for current tasks, on what was essentially an errand, would have been damn-fool stupid and very likely to result in completely unnecessary casualties.
Again, I agree the destruction is a crying shame and an irreplaceable loss. But neither Bush, nor the soldiers, nor General Franks nor the US forces in general are at any measure responsible. Not 10%, not 1%, not two-tenths of one percent… ZERO.
As others have said, even some hospitals have no US protection- and I’m certain it’s for the very same reasons- lack of people, supplies and time. Should we have taken men off tasks deemed more important than protecting hospitals to secure the museum?
The building was looted by Iraquis, at a time when the US forces lacked the time, manpower or security to prevent it. It was purely, completely and totally the fault of the Iraqui looters themselves.
Yes, in the following weeks we will likely restore some semblance of order, and I’m sure that some of the artifacts will be returned. I’m also sure that some are lost forever- either destroyed or will never be recovered. (There are still various works missing from WW2 looting, for example.)
But if I were a unit commander and I had the choice between securing the objective my superiors ordered- even if it was the Oil Ministry- and sending out half a dozen or a dozen troops deep into unsecure territory to try and hold a building of zero military or governmental importance, and have damn good chances those troops were going to get killed doing it…
… Well, there’s really no choice, is there?
