Dave’s Rants

Robert Fisk on the destruction of ancient treasures in Baghdad by the mob. Mr. Rumsfeld and others may just write this off as the ‘untidyness’ of a new democracy, but me, I think this is yet another completely unnecessary consequence of this unjust war.

They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq’s history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete.

Our feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history ­ only to be destroyed when America came to “liberate” the city. The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation’s thousands of years of civilisation.

Not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul ­ perhaps not since the Second World War or earlier ­ have so many archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces.