Today I propose to open an entry on the Iraq war. I will not mention the military occupation of civilian massacres, systematic torture and the plunder of natural resources. There are many ways to destroy a village and one of them goes through the destruction of its history and cultural heritage, destruction aimed to erase the historical legacy of the changing flow of Iraqi history. But the big warlords forget a small detail: the annihilation of Iraqi history is the destruction of our history because you no matter who likes it, the origin of agriculture, state and so rhetorically what we call civilization surguió located somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates .
In the words of William R. Polk, founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, " was there 7,000 years ago in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, which started life as we know it today: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and above all developed the skill of writing. " In fact, it is associated elsewhere in the Bible, with the exception of Israel, with more history than Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer), and Mesopotamia - different names for the territory that the British began to call "Iraq" shortly before of the First World War to the point that most of the first books of Genesis take place in enclaves located in Iraq, for example, Genesis 10:10 and 11:31; Daniel 1-4, and II Kings 24 .
is not the first time in the course of a war we proceed to the destruction of heritage culture of a people, in fact, one could argue that this is a recurrent activity designed to further humiliate the losers if that is possible. But with Iraqi cultural plunder and annihilation have been intentional and unnecessary as an exceptional case. In the era of televised warfare, the guided missiles that theoretically minimize the number of victims of targeted attacks and "collateral damage", the cultural annihilation of the vanquished still valid.
On April 10, 2003, in a televised speech, President Bush acknowledged that the Iraqi people "heir of a great civilization that contributes to all mankind. " Only two days later, under the complacent eyes of the U.S. Army, the Iraqis began to lose that heritage in a swirl of looting and burning which included the looting of Baghdad's National Museum, the fire in the Library and National Archives and Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowments. Some disasters that were, according to Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist at Boston University, "the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years" . Although Eleanor Robson of All Souls College, Oxford, he went further to ensure that "we must go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale ". However, U.S. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game and said "freedom is untidy ... Free people have the freedom to make mistakes and commit crimes" .
Until April 2003, around the site of Ur, a city of more than 3.ooo years old located near Nasiriyah, was still being investigated by an international group of archaeologists who were forced to leave the country a few days before war. The U.S. military chose the land immediately adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base with two runways of 4,000 and 3,200 meters long respectively and four satellite camps. In doing so, military engineers moved more than 9,500 truckloads of earth to build 32,500 meters square of hangars and other facilities for aircraft and drones. Completely ruined the area, the literal heart of human civilization, for any archaeological research or future tourism. On October 24, 2003, according to Global Security Organization, the Army and Air Force built its own modern ziggurat "opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility co-located a Pizza Hut, says that there is another Burger King restaurant so that more soldiers of both sexes who served in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget their homework in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent that returns home ".
U.S. behavior elsewhere in Iraq was not better. In Babylon, U.S. and Polish forces built a military depot, despite objections from archaeologists. John Curtis, the authority over Iraq's numerous archaeological sites of the British Museum, reported on a visit in December 2004 in which saw "cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to chisel out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate and a floor of 2,600-year-old rammed by military vehicles. " Other observers say that the dust raised by U.S. helicopters had eroded the fragile brick façade of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 BC. Moreover, the archaeologist Zainab Bahrani said "between May and August 2004, the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both sixth century BC, collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters. Nearby , machinery and heavy vehicles are parked on the remains of a Greek theater from the era of Alexander of Macedonia (Alexander Great) ".
Supporters of the Iraq war have talked endlessly about his global war against terrorism as a "clash of civilizations" . But the civilization we are destroying in Iraq is part of our own heritage and world heritage. Before the invasion of Afghanistan, condemned the Taliban for blowing up the monumental third century Buddhist statues in Bamiyan DC in 2001. They were two gigantic statues of remarkable historical value and the barbarism involved in their destruction was proclaimed in headlines and horrified commentaries in the world. Today, governments that proclaim aladiles of freedom and direct democracy more serious crimes when it comes to the destruction of a whole universe of antiquity, but few seem to take this into account although it may be well recorded in the memory of others.
In the words of William R. Polk, founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, " was there 7,000 years ago in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, which started life as we know it today: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and above all developed the skill of writing. " In fact, it is associated elsewhere in the Bible, with the exception of Israel, with more history than Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer), and Mesopotamia - different names for the territory that the British began to call "Iraq" shortly before of the First World War to the point that most of the first books of Genesis take place in enclaves located in Iraq, for example, Genesis 10:10 and 11:31; Daniel 1-4, and II Kings 24 .
is not the first time in the course of a war we proceed to the destruction of heritage culture of a people, in fact, one could argue that this is a recurrent activity designed to further humiliate the losers if that is possible. But with Iraqi cultural plunder and annihilation have been intentional and unnecessary as an exceptional case. In the era of televised warfare, the guided missiles that theoretically minimize the number of victims of targeted attacks and "collateral damage", the cultural annihilation of the vanquished still valid.
On April 10, 2003, in a televised speech, President Bush acknowledged that the Iraqi people "heir of a great civilization that contributes to all mankind. " Only two days later, under the complacent eyes of the U.S. Army, the Iraqis began to lose that heritage in a swirl of looting and burning which included the looting of Baghdad's National Museum, the fire in the Library and National Archives and Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowments. Some disasters that were, according to Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist at Boston University, "the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years" . Although Eleanor Robson of All Souls College, Oxford, he went further to ensure that "we must go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale ". However, U.S. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game and said "freedom is untidy ... Free people have the freedom to make mistakes and commit crimes" .
Until April 2003, around the site of Ur, a city of more than 3.ooo years old located near Nasiriyah, was still being investigated by an international group of archaeologists who were forced to leave the country a few days before war. The U.S. military chose the land immediately adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base with two runways of 4,000 and 3,200 meters long respectively and four satellite camps. In doing so, military engineers moved more than 9,500 truckloads of earth to build 32,500 meters square of hangars and other facilities for aircraft and drones. Completely ruined the area, the literal heart of human civilization, for any archaeological research or future tourism. On October 24, 2003, according to Global Security Organization, the Army and Air Force built its own modern ziggurat "opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility co-located a Pizza Hut, says that there is another Burger King restaurant so that more soldiers of both sexes who served in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget their homework in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent that returns home ".
U.S. behavior elsewhere in Iraq was not better. In Babylon, U.S. and Polish forces built a military depot, despite objections from archaeologists. John Curtis, the authority over Iraq's numerous archaeological sites of the British Museum, reported on a visit in December 2004 in which saw "cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to chisel out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate and a floor of 2,600-year-old rammed by military vehicles. " Other observers say that the dust raised by U.S. helicopters had eroded the fragile brick façade of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 BC. Moreover, the archaeologist Zainab Bahrani said "between May and August 2004, the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both sixth century BC, collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters. Nearby , machinery and heavy vehicles are parked on the remains of a Greek theater from the era of Alexander of Macedonia (Alexander Great) ".
Supporters of the Iraq war have talked endlessly about his global war against terrorism as a "clash of civilizations" . But the civilization we are destroying in Iraq is part of our own heritage and world heritage. Before the invasion of Afghanistan, condemned the Taliban for blowing up the monumental third century Buddhist statues in Bamiyan DC in 2001. They were two gigantic statues of remarkable historical value and the barbarism involved in their destruction was proclaimed in headlines and horrified commentaries in the world. Today, governments that proclaim aladiles of freedom and direct democracy more serious crimes when it comes to the destruction of a whole universe of antiquity, but few seem to take this into account although it may be well recorded in the memory of others.
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