MICHAEL JANSEN
Cultural Cleansing in Iraq Edited by Raymond W.
Baker, Shereen T. Ismael, and Tareq Y. Ismael. Pluto, 296 pp.
$34.95
THIS BOOK argues convincingly that the post- war cultural
cleansing of Iraq is intentional rather than random and haphazard,
the result of chaos and anarchy.
The aim of the policy of cultural cleansing is to remake Iraq
into a US-friendly state and enable Washington’s returned Shia and
Kurd exiles to take and exercise power.
In the first of 10 chapters, the editors contend that the Bush
administration’s objectives were to demonstrate US global dominance
and remake “the strategic Middle East” to suit the US. “To that
end, the invasion of Iraq would display America’s crushing military
power to a world reduced to the status of spectators in a spectacle
of a state’s destruction, marked by massive civilian casualties,
cultural devastation and the pauperisation of its people.”
Subsequent chapters show how Iraq’s state structures were
systematically destroyed along with the independent secular
nationalist socialist regime.
This began with the looting of the country’s museums and
libraries, schools and universities. Although Iraqis carried out
most of the pillage and destruction, the US was responsible for
what took place.
Scholars had warned the White House and Pentagon that this would
happen if vulnerable sites were not protected. Nothing was done
because, according to Barbara Bodine, Washington’s first post-war
ambassador, orders had been issued to the effect that looting
should be allowed to proceed unchecked. In some cases, US troops
broke open the doors of institutions to aid looters.
The US also used major archaeological sites, including ancient
Babylon and Ur, as military bases, inflicting irreparable
damage.
By attacking the country’s history and “collective memory”,
Zainab Bahrani holds that the US sought to undermine the unique
national identity of Iraqis. Their strong sense of history and
culture has made them the most inventive poets, writers and
painters in the Arab world.
The second half of the book focuses on the killing of Iraqi
intellectuals and professionals.
As early as April 11th, 2003, two days after the fall of
Baghdad, a group of university professors and scientists dispatched
an e-mail saying that the occupation forces had drawn up lists of
individuals for detention, harassment and elimination. Since then,
hundreds of university processors, doctors and scientists have been
assassinated, kidnapped, killed or driven into exile.
The murder of Dr Muhammad Rawi, a medical doctor and chancellor
of Baghdad University in July 2003, shocked the country and served
as a warning to others in the intelligentsia.
Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency and the Iranian-founded
Iraqi Badr Corps militia were initially blamed for the killings.
However, the book’s contributors provide solid evidence that the US
and Britain fostered the decimation of the intellectuals because
they would resist foreign domination through Shia and Kurd proxies
who rode into Baghdad on the backs of US tanks.
The vehicle for the purge of intellectuals was the
de-Baathification campaign instituted by Paul Bremer, the US
pro-consul from 2003-2004, and used by successive Shia-led
sectarian governments to target secular nationalist thinkers of
every sect.
The US is
accused of using the “Salvador option”, a strategy evolved in
Central America, to create US-compliant regimes in that
region.
The 13 authors
of this work say the US set out to destroy Iraq’s national
identity, reduce and marginalise the educated class and wipe the
Iraqi slate clean in order to build from ground zero a weak state
which would be dependent on the US.
This experiment in “state ending” has left a black hole at the
heart of the eastern Arab world.
Michael Jansen writes on Middle East affairs for The Irish
Times
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0112/1224262111811.html