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Mark,
What with all the Iraq nostalgia this week I wonder if you’d reprint your hilarious column about the looting of the museum in Baghdad from 2003. It seems like the anti-war left took that as an omen of the conflagration to come, but they didn’t know the half of it…the rising against Syrian occupation in Beirut, democracy in Iraq, and the coming end of the mullahs in Iran for starters. It’s nice now that the fascists and nutcases of the region are feeling the heat, instead of fanning the flames.,
Patrick Hardy
Hamilton, Ontario
MARK SAYS: My pleasure. For those who've forgotten, this was the first bout of post-liberation hysteria, when to a man the media fell for an obvious scam about the looting of the Iraqi National Museum. No such looting ever took place. But why let that stand in the way? I regret to say even my then editor Boris Johnson fell for it. As I wrote in May of 2003:
Meanwhile, my colleague Boris Johnson has uncovered an even more artful cabal. The other day in these pages, he suggested that the President, if only in terms of the fine art and antiquities section of his brain, was being secretly controlled by a lobby group called the American Council for Cultural Policy, who'd leant on Bush to facilitate the looting of the Baghdad Museum in order to deliver the Iraqi people's birthright to 'the guest washrooms of Floridian real estate kings'.
I don't know what Boris has against Florida estate agents - possibly he was on the wrong end of some timeshare deal - but his Dalyell-like conjuring of a cabal of sinister Sunshine State realtors all singing Rosemary Clooney's classic 'Cabal-a My House' is so delightful it seems a shame to point out that the great sack of Baghdad is as mythical as the great Jenin massacre of exactly a year ago. The number of missing Baghdad antiquities has now been revised down from 170,000 to somewhere between 25 and 38 - in other words, between 169,962 and 169,975 less than was originally claimed. Are the media being secretly controlled by a cabal of Jews who enjoy making 'em look like idiots every spring?
Indeed. Anyway, here's the column - and don't forget, the SteynOnline Request of the Week appears each Thursday, so do drop a line requesting a favorite column or even a favourite column here.
The same vase, 170,000 times
from The Daily Telegraph, June 14th 2003
Five weeks ago, I wrote in this space that the sack of the Iraqi National Museum was "as mythical as the great Jenin massacre of exactly a year ago". This was apropos my deranged colleague Boris Johnson's endearingly insane claim that the looting of Iraq's antiquities had been planned by a cabal of American art lobbyists.
Well, I swanned off to Iraq for a couple of weeks of sun, sand and anthrax, and returned to find that Boris had changed his story. He still thought some great sack had taken place, evidently declining to take my word that the number of missing items was not 170,000 but 38. But now it wasn't the Florida real estate kings who'd pilfered the stuff. Instead, according to his June 5 column, "respect for the common weal fell so low that Iraqis themselves actually ransacked the national museum". No explanation was attempted for the revised plotline. There was no Victoria Principal moment, with Boris wandering into the shower and discovering that the previous season's columns had all been a bad dream. I suppose his series continuity girl would point out that, despite re-casting the perpetrators, the root cause remained the same: the indifference of the philistine Yank conquerors.
That was the upshot of Simon Jenkins's column in The Times, in which he predicted that 2003 would go down in history as the year of "the destruction of the greatest treasure from the oldest age of Western civilisation, the greatest heritage catastrophe since the Second World War. We who claim to crusade for civilised values could not summon one tank to defend their earliest repository." Etc, etc.
Current official number of missing items: reduced from 38 to 33 and going down faster than proverbial interns in old Bill Clinton jokes.
The one guy to get the Iraqi Museum story right from the get-go turns out to be not a professional journalist, but our old friend, the philistine warmonger Donald Rumsfeld. Rummy observed at the time that the networks kept showing "the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase". But it was the same vase "over and over and over". The same vase, 170,000 times. Rummy was right.
You want a heritage catastrophe? At the very moment the Baghdad Museum was being non-sacked, workers at the University of Toronto threw out 280 boxes of colonial and Indian artefacts dating back to the 15th century. What's left of them is now deep in a landfill in Michigan. I'm a Torontonian, so that's my heritage in there. Any takers?
I thought not. Harder to pin on Bush and Blair.
Interestingly, Toronto is not only more culturally desecrated than Iraq; it's also more diseased. There have been 238 cases of Sars in Toronto, with 32 deaths. There have been 66 cases of cholera in Basra, with three deaths. Basra public health officials, assuming there are any, are doing a much better job of controlling cholera than Toronto public health officials are of controlling Sars. The Ontario health guys, who sound more like a gung-ho Chamber of Commerce, keep announcing they've got Sars licked and then it goes and infects a big bunch of new hospital patients. And meanwhile the Canadian media keep raving about what a great job the Toronto healthcare folks are doing, and then return to ululating about the massive humanitarian catastrophe about to engulf Iraq.
Remember Jayson Blair? Fired from the New York Times because all his stories filed from Tuscaloosa and Pocatello were actually written in his bedsit with a bit of local colour lifted from the internet? What exactly did he do wrong? He copied what everybody else was saying, and it was mostly true and he saved a bundle on expenses.
On the other hand, media organisations spent a fortune sending vast teams halfway across the world to Baghdad to come back with a news event that never happened, and then paid their heavyweight commentators even more dough to amplify the hogwash. I mean, in what way is Simon Jenkins's column any less risible than that Iraqi information minister announcing that the American aggressors' stomachs are now being roasted in hell? And which ought to be the greater media embarrassment - the sacking of Jayson Blair or the non-sacking of the Baghdad Museum?
Ah-ha, you cry, but they still haven't found any WMD! Well, who says? This week, Channel 4 News Diplomatic Correspondent Lindsey Hilsum revealed that before the invasion she'd stumbled on Scuds - you know, the things Saddam didn't have - hidden in residential areas in Baghdad, but she didn't mention it on air because "we would have been thrown out the next day".
Jayson Blair reporting what's happening without going on location: bad. Channel 4 not reporting what's happening but staying on location: fine'n'dandy.
Bear that in mind when Jon Snow sneers at some Pentagon guy about why they haven't found anything yet. Maybe Lindsey found them last month, but she'd rather not say.
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