In the twilight world of history and hypocrisy

More people weigh in on the cruel insanity of this reckless adventure by Bush and courtiers. Veteran British journalist Felicity Arbuthnot tells at the World Socialists Web Site why she expects the war-cum-massacre will go nuclear and then reflects on what archeological destruction and cultural loss we can expect, even if the conflict remains conventional and as brief as Gulf War I.
Arbuthnot says of Bush and Blair and the antiquities at risk:

We are told that these two are Christian leaders, but they forget that this is Mesopotamia. This is where Abraham, father of three of the great religions, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, was born at Ur. The great ziggurat is still there. This is the first major city on earth and it still gives you goose pimples, it’s so beautiful. This where the land of milk and honey came from.

Just down the road there is another ancient site at Qurna where the Garden of Eden is supposed to have flourished. Nearby is Babylon, where you can still visit the sites of the Hanging Gardens and you can see part of the original site of ancient Babylon from 6, 000 or more years ago, where Hammurabi devised the first domestic laws to protect women and children, their safety and their rights to property. You can go further south to Basra, known as the Venice of the Middle East where the two biblical rivers, the Tigres and the Euphrates meet at Shatt al Arab, where Sinbad left for his magical journeys.

St. Matthew is believed to have been buried at a monastery named after him, which in Arabic is Deirmatti. It’s a very ancient thirteen-century monastery on top of a mountain. Nearby there’s another monastery called St. George’s, where every spring Christians of all denominations have a festival.
Are these two Christian leaders really going to wipe out this extraordinary land of Mesopotamia? Are they going to wipe out Christian history? The whole country is a world heritage site.

Elsewhere, in a sober reflection on the morality of cultural destruction, Simon Jenkins of The Times of London talks of Philistines prosecuting wars to save civilization. He opens with an examination of the dubious excuses offered by the perpetrators for the needless fire bombing of Dresden at the end of World War II and the ruminates on what it means for Iraq and the cradle of civilization:

The impending 48-hour blitz on Iraq — 800 cruise missiles and thousands of conventional bombs — will fall not just on people but also on the world’s most vulnerable historic sites. History could hardly present a greater irony. Six thousand years ago, Mesopotamia saw the earliest manifestation of Western culture. It is now to see the latest. An estimated 10,000 archaeological sites remain, most as yet unexcavated. Many will now be excavated for the first and last time.

The destruction of cultural and religious monuments in war is explicitly prohibited by the Hague Convention (1954), which Britain and America refused to ratify for fear it might inhibit their air forces.

The Sumerian city of Ur, dating back 6,000 years, was first revealed by the British archaeologist, Sir Leonard Woolley. Its great ziggurat and sacred court are now pitted with 400 shells from a misguided strafing and bombing raid by an American jet in 1991. They were intended for the nearby Tallil air-base, which the US afterwards protested should not have been sited so near the monument. Yet the base was put there not by Iraq, but by the British.

The BBC’s Dan Cruickshank recently returned from making a film about these monuments, appalled at their vulnerability. He visited Uruq, with its White Temple, mosaic court and marble carvings. He filmed King Hammurabi’s capital at Babylon, once the greatest metropolis in the world, with the remains of Nebuchadnezzar’s gateway still standing. Another Iraqi base lies near the 4,000-year-old city of Hatra. Royal Nineveh and Nimrud are in the line of advance from Turkey. So is Ashur, the ancient capital of Assyria. Just north of Baghdad is the spiral minaret of 9th-century Samarra.

We have, of course, written previously about Samarra and challenged the poetic symbols thereto attached,

Please, go to the Arbuthnot and Jenkins links and read the articles in their entirety -- unless, of course you find yourself already apoplectically enraged at the looming catastrophe being touched off by an attention span-challenged, spoiled, pretzel-choking rich kid who has sneaked into his father's gun cabinet and found a loaded shotgun to play with.