Cultural Cleansing in Iraq

Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered

Raymond W. Baker, Shereen T. Ismael, Tareq Y. Ismael

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780745328126
• eBook ISBN: 9781783718283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Why did the invasion of Iraq result in the destruction of culture and murder of intellectuals? Convention sees accidents of war and poor planning in a campaign to liberate Iraqis. The authors argue instead that the invasion aimed to dismantle the Iraqi state to remake it as a client regime. Post-invasion chaos created conditions under which the cultural foundations of the state could be undermined. The authors painstakingly document the consequences of the occupiers' wilful inaction and worse, which led to the ravaging of one of the world's oldest recorded cultures. Targeted assassination of over 400 academics, kidnapping and the forced flight of thousands of doctors, lawyers, artists and other intellectuals add up to cultural cleansing. This book lays to rest claims that the invasion aimed to free an educated population to develop its own culture of democracy.

PART I

Formulating and Executing the Policy of Cultural Cleansing

1

ENDING THE IRAQI STATE

Raymond W. Baker, Shereen T. Ismael, and Tareq Y. Ismael

Just days after the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz declared that a major focus of US foreign policy would be “ending states that sponsor terrorism.” Iraq was labeled a “terrorist state” and targeted for “ending.” President Bush went on to declare Iraq the major front of the global war on terror. American-led forces invaded with the express aim of dismantling the Iraqi state.

Mainstream social science has yet to come to terms with the full meaning of “ending states” as a policy objective. Social science in the era of post-World War II decolonization has focused for the most part on the study of state-building and development. The primary axis of contention among development scholars and policy makers has been between one school espousing state-driven development models and a second advocating neo-liberal market approaches. Little has been written by either school on the question of state-destruction and de-development. Such outcomes have generally been seen as the by-products of war and civil-strife, rather than as desirable policy outcomes. Critical scholarship has challenged the adequacy of such dominant views. Critics draw attention to such phenomena as covert regime subversion, targeted assassinations, death squads, and ethnic cleansing. Such phenomena tend to be dismissed by the mainstream as representing criminal excess rather than explicit state policies. However, the preeminent superpower the United States, and its junior partner Israel, have had a hand in such activities for many decades. This important historical record of such activity tends to be reduced to CIA/Mossad excesses and the product of operating in a “tough neighborhood,” plagued by supposed age-old conflicts and religious extremism. In light of Iraq, such dismissals or rationalizations no longer suffice. It is now imperative to recognize that there are precedents for violence aimed at undermining or destroying states, though it is the magnitude of the destruction in Iraq that makes unavoidable the recognition and analysis of state-ending as a deliberate policy objective.

The consequences in human and cultural terms of the destruction of the Iraqi state have been enormous: notably, the deaths of over 1 million civilians;¹ the degradation in social infrastructure, including electricity, potable water, and sewage systems; the targeted assassination of over 400 academics and professionals and the displacement of approximately 4 million refugees and internally displaced people. All of these terrible losses are compounded by unprecedented levels of cultural devastation, attacks on national archives and monuments that represent the historical identity of the Iraqi people. Rampant chaos and violence hamper efforts at reconstruction, leaving the foundations of the Iraqi state in ruin. The majority of Western journalists, academics, and political figures have refused to recognize the loss of life on such a massive scale and the cultural destruction that accompanied it as the fully predictable consequences of American occupation policy. The very idea is considered unthinkable, despite the openness with which this objective was pursued.

It is time to think the unthinkable. The American-led assault on Iraq forces us to consider the meaning and consequences of state-destruction as a policy objective. The architects of the Iraq policy never made explicit what deconstructing and reconstructing the Iraqi state would entail; their actions, however, make the meaning clear. From those actions in Iraq, a fairly precise definition of state-ending can now be read. The campaign to destroy the state in Iraq involved first the removal and execution of Saddam Hussein and the capture of Ba‘ath Party figures. However, state destruction went beyond regime change. It also entailed the purposeful dismantling of major state institutions and the launching of a prolonged process of political reshaping. Contemporary Iraq represents a fragmented pastiche of sectarian forces with the formal trappings of liberal democracy and neo-liberal economic structures. Students of history will recognize in the occupation of Iraq the time-honored technique of imperial divide et imperia (divide and rule), used to fracture and subdue culturally cohesive regions. The regime installed by occupation forces in Iraq reshaped the country along divisive sectarian lines, dissolving the hard-won unity of a long state-building project. The so-called sovereign Iraqi government, the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), established by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), was founded as a sectarian ruling body, with a system of quotas for ethnic and confessional groupings. This formula decisively established the sectarian parameters of the “new Iraq.”

In parallel fashion the occupiers have redesigned the nationalistic and state-centered economy to conform to an extreme neo-liberal market model marked by privatization and the opening of the fragile Iraqi market to foreign capital, especially American. Nowhere is this more evident than in the dismantling of Iraq’s national industries. The oil sector in particular has been opened to the domination of non-Iraqi, predominantly US companies. Iraq’s national industries, the backbone of the country’s autonomous national project, have been auctioned off through a wrenching process of privatization, plagued by corruption. Iraq’s central bank has been prohibited outright from financing state-owned enterprise. With the collapse of trade tariffs and tax regimes, Iraq’s private sector has been overwhelmed by foreign competition.

The political and economic reengineering of Iraq under occupation demands critical evaluation. The Iraq invasion, however, brings into view the equally consequential human and cultural dimensions of state destruction as a war aim. State-ending in Iraq was a comprehensive policy. However, its human and cultural dimensions have yet to be as fully documented and analyzed as an integral part of the destruction of the Iraqi state. The horrors of cultural destruction and targeted assassinations in Iraq are still seen for the most part as a mere consequence of war and social disorder. The mainstream narrative bemoans the loss of world class cultural treasures and views the murders of individuals through the prism of human rights violations as “collateral damage.”

Such views obscure more than they reveal. Few would question that state-building has an integral cultural and human dimension. So too, we argue, does state-destruction. To be remade, a state must be rendered malleable. Obstacles to this goal in Iraq included an impressive intelligentsia committed to a different societal model and the unifying culture they shared. The actions of the occupying forces indicate that they understood that the emergence of the new Iraq would require liberation from the grip of the inherited intelligentsia and culture of a unified Iraq. Iraq under occupation would see both human and cultural erasures that advanced these goals. Thus, state destruction in Iraq entailed more than regime change and more than political and economic restructuring. It also required cultural cleansing, understood in the Iraqi case as the degrading of a unifying culture and the depletion of an intelligentsia tied to the old order.² The occupiers acted accordingly.

For this cultural and social dimension of state destruction, however, we do not have the same explicit policy directives as for the project of political and economic remaking. Nor was the process itself as straightforward. The cultural cleansing of Iraq was achieved in large part by inaction. The occupiers fostered and legitimated a climate of lawlessness with the wholly predictable consequence of weakening a unifying culture and eliminating an intelligentsia that had staffed Iraq’s public institutions. One would be hard pressed to find an explicit admission of such aims from the architects of Iraqi occupation. Yet, the issues cannot be avoided simply in absence of an explicit policy declaration along these lines. The parallel cases of Bosnia, Palestine, and the 2008 Israeli rampage in Gaza make it imperative to put the cultural and human dimensions of ideologically-driven state destruction front and center. Talk of incompetent planning and “collateral damage” in the context of a global war against terrorism persuades many precisely because the very idea of deliberate cultural destruction and targeted murders on so wide a scale is so unthinkable to the mainstream.

Ironically, the unembarrassed ideological context within which Iraq was invaded makes it easier to challenge effectively the mainstream inclination to disregard cultural destruction as willed policy. State-ending in Iraq was explicitly intended to have an instructive effect. The invasion of Iraq had the larger purpose of demonstrating precisely how unchallengeable and unrestrained the shock and awe of American power would be to all those forces that stood in its way. Massive loss of life and cultural devastation were acceptable, if not outright desired. For the demonstration of the power of the sole superpower the deaths and depredations were in many ways the most chilling markers. At the same time, ideological forces that set and defined these objectives of state-ending in Iraq stepped out of the shadows and took center stage. To be sure, the real motives behind the assault were covered by the useful talk of “terror” and liberation. However, it was important for the demonstration effect that the assault itself and the havoc it caused be screened as fully as possible. Consequently, there could be no doubt as to what those forces were, no matter the dissimulations that screened their purposes. The ideologically driven aim of state-ending derived from a confluence of influences that included American neo-conservatism and its imperial ambitions, Israeli expansionism and its drive for regional domination, and Western multinationals and their relentless quest to regain control of Iraqi oil.

The Ideological Imperatives for a “New” Iraq

The cultural and social destruction of Iraq was foreshadowed by a decade of ideological statements and policy planning. And with the controversial Presidential election of George W. Bush in 2000, and the casus belli provided by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, this ideological vision was put in practice, Iraq representing the preeminent test case. The neo-conservative policy pursued an objective to “remake” Iraq in order to demonstrate US global military dominance at its “unipolar moment.” The grand objective was the commitment that American global superiority, realized with the collap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Formulating and Executing the Policy Of Cultural Cleansing
• PART II Policy in Motion: The Assault on Iraq’s Incomparable History
• PART III Policy in Motion: The Present and the Future
• Appendix 1: Reflections on Death Anxiety and University Professors in Iraq
• Appendix 2: List of Murdered Academics
• Notes on Contributors
• Index