Restoring the Arch of Ctesiphon?

The U.S. military plans to assist regional Iraqi autorities in the "restoration" of a ruined brick arch. According to the story written by Pvt. Jared Gehmann of the 82nd Airborne, the Arch of Ctesiphon was built nearly 16 centuries ago and was formerly a popular tourist attraction in this part of Iraq.

Iran and the Blogosphere

Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post interviews Juan Cole about the recent events in Iran and Cole's new book, Engaging the Muslim World.

Cole believes that the election was stolen by Ahmadenijad but doubts that Mousavi has the backbone to take power. A similar and even better developed discussion by Asbed Kotichikian was just posted today at Whirled View.

I cannot pretend to have nearly the expertise on Iran and the Middle East exhibited by these scholars. Based purely on many years of following elections at home and overseas, I do not view the Iranian electoral process as particularly aberrant in its corruption. We have situations much closer to home which produce voter dissatisfaction and maintain corrupt governments.

I do strongly support the right of all people to assemble and petition their government to hold free and fair elections among other grievances.

Africa-gate, Plumber-gate, and Martin Eisenstadt

Many bloggers, myself included, have fallen for a hoax! Martin Eisenstadt, pictured above, was believable as a Republican foreign policy expert, pundit, and lobbyist given the doings of the party in power during the past eight years. Whoever has been perpetrating the hoax finally went overboard, however, when claiming to be the source of the leaks to the press about Sarah Palin's knowledge of Africa.

I posted a You Tube video in which "Eisenstadt" described a purported effort to start a casino in the Iraq Green Zone. The same video had been posted previously by Raed Jarrar. It is still being hosted by "asukajunk," a Japanese blogger, as well as by "youkaysam."

So here is a tip of my hat to "Martin Eisenstadt" and "youkaysam" for keeping political discourse lively and entertaining.

Addendum, 11/13: Independent filmmaker Eitan Gorlin has been "outed" as the real man behind "Martin Eisenstadt" the wizard. The story ran in the New York Times as well as online at Huffington Post and Guanabee.

No Looting In Iraq?

It all started with a story by Martin Bailey in The Art Newspaper, and it was really the headline as much as the actual story that drew fire. As reported by Mr. Bailey,

An international team of archaeologists which made an unpublicised visit to southern Iraq last month found no evidence of recent looting—contrary to long-expressed claims about sustained illegal digging at major sites.

Mr. Bailey did also mention that the archaeologists only visited eight major sites in southern Iraq: Ur, Ubaid, Eridu, Warka, Larsa, Tell el-Ouelli, Lagash and Tell el-Lahm. However, he also clearly expressed his view that the extent of looting has been exaggerated both by reporters and by archaeologists. A similar view has been even more directly expressed in a blog commentary by Dr. Dorothy King -

The false claim of looting - along with the claim that the US could have prevented the thefts from Baghdad Museum - has been a major part of the anti-War propaganda.

Whether pro- or anti-war, it is clear that propaganda and political advocacy do color our perception of the illegal digging and trade in antiquities which have occurred both before and after the United States deposed Saddam Hussein by military force. Issues about protection of cultural resources cannot be separated from political and military issues in Iraq and other countries of the Middle East. Archaeology and protection of cultural resources are deeply embedded within the ongoing political and religious conflicts.

Relying both upon her own inspection of aerial photographs and upon research by Dr. Elizabeth Stone, Dr. King supports the gist of the Bailey piece in concluding that most looting on the major sites occurred prior to the start of the current Iraq war. Opposing views on the issue are being expressed, however, by David Gill, Larry Rothfield, and a number of other scholars posting to the Iraq Crisis discussion list. A first hand account of looting in southern Iraq presented by the Director of Antiquities in Nasiriya Province, Dr. Abdulamir Hamdani, can be viewed online at Safe Corner.

What a blogstorm!

What Happens in the Green Zone, Stays in the Green Zone

Interview on Iraqi television with Martin Eisenstadt, advisor to John McCain.

Hat Tip to Raed Jarrar.

Save the Torahs?

Jewish manuscripts smuggled out of Iraq since the fall of Saddam are a current topic of active discussion among archaeologists, artifact collectors, and legal experts on the Iraq Crisis discussion list. One of the stories which sparked this discussion is about Rabbi Menachem Youlus, pictured here.

A recent article by Caroline Prince in the Christian Science Monitor describes Rabbi Youlus as the "Indiana Jones" of Rabbis. That he very well may be, for as we have only recently learned, the fictional Indy is no professional but rather a "plunderer." As reported in the Jewish Bugle, Rabbi Youlus is reported to have sold a Torah "liberated" by a United States soldier to a synogogue in Fulton, Maryland for $20,000. In order for the object to be smuggled out of Iraq, it first had to be "dissassembled" into 60 panels. Rabbi Younus also mentioned to the Jewish Bugle reporter some unusual methods of "restoration" -

"Normally we write with a turkey feather or a goose feather, but you can't use it with that type of parchment," said Youlus, explaining he had to use a piece of wood resembling a chopstick.

"It was plenty of work. But the finished product is very nice," he said.

U.S. bombs Iraqi orchards

On Thursday morning, US warplanes dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs on more than 40 targets in Baghdad's southern outskirts. The targets of the renewed and intensive bombing were orchards of citrus trees and date palms alleged to be hideouts for local "al-Qaeda" fighters.

As quoted today by Agence France Presse (AFP) , Colonel Terry Ferrell told a Baghdad press conference via a video link that "we were able to destroy several major improvised explosive devices (roadside bombs)... We were also able to identify and destroy several weapons caches." According to an AP story in today's Boston Herald, we will be stepping up our efforts to "clean al-Qaeda out" with bombing as the 30,000 ground troops in the McCain-Petraeus "surge" are pulled out between now and June.

Orchards like these must take tens if not hundreds of years to establish in a semiarid environment such as central Iraq. The above photo provided with the AFP story also implies that cluster bombs were used for the action, ensuring that there will be future casualties and economic consequences of the action.

Iraq Museum to reopen

Haven't we heard this before? Let us only hope that somebody competent is standing guard this time around.

Terri at A Soldier's Mind has the inside scoop on efforts by State Department cultural heritage liason officer Diane Siebrandt and Lt. Col. Kenneth Crawford of the 2nd “Spartan” Brigade Special Troops Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cav Division to bring this about by working with Amira Emiran, the museum’s newly appointed director.

Update on Friday, 30 Nov 2007 - Derek Fincham of Illicit Cultural Property had a post up Sunday about this with a link to a more detailed and reliable story in The Sunday Times written by Jon Swain. The full name of the museum's newly appointed director is given and there are details about which galleries are being opened and which sculptures will be exhibited. According to Swain,

Visits will be confined to just two galleries on the ground floor containing Assyrian and Islamic treasures that are too large and heavy to be easily removed. The remaining 16 galleries will remain empty and closed and security will be tight.

Riverbend leaves Baghdad

Riverbend, author of a blog which has intermittently chronicled the United States' invasion and occupation of her home city, has left Iraq for Syria. In a post dated yesterday, September 6th, she recounts her family's trip from Baghdad across the border back in July.

Ben Landis of UPI compliments Riverbend on her excellent reporting in his new blog, Iraq Oil Report. Juan Cole notes that Riverbend and her family might not have been able to make it out had they waited until now to leave. Syria just decided to tighten up visa requirements for Iraqis trying to flee there.

Reconstruction of the Al Askari shrine

A Memorandum of Understanding was signed by UNESCO and the Government of Iraq on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 for the reconstruction of the Al-Askari shrine. With a total budget of $8.4 million, the first phase of the project includes preventive works, an assessment of needs, and preparation of a scope of work for the restoration. In addition to the shrine’s Golden Dome and Ali al-Hadi shrine, the two minarets destroyed in the recent explosions on June 13th will be reconstructed. Alhamdulillah!

Desert Solitaire

Playing cards have a long history as tools for boosting morale, instilling a sense of mission, and even implanting operational details in the minds of American troops serving abroad. During World War II, a deck was issued with silhouettes of Allied and Axis fighter planes, and faces of generals and politicians of the former regime were on a deck supplied to soldiers early in our invasion of Iraq. Now the troops there will be playing with a new deck which carries an archaeological message.

Archaeologist Laurie Rush, employed at Fort Drum in upstate New York, helped to develop the cards according to an article in the July/August issue of Archaeology magazine. In the archaeological deck of cards, each suit has a theme: diamonds for artifacts, spades for digs, hearts for "winning hearts and minds," and clubs for heritage preservation. Derek Fincham, who writes the always informative blog "Illicit Cultural Property," managed to acquire one of the decks. Derek mentions a few favorite cards:

The seven of clubs shows the Ctesiphon Arch and says "This site has survived 17 centuries. Will it and others survive you?"

The five of clubs says "Drive around, not over, archaeological sites".

The two of hearts shows ruins at Samarra and says "Ninety-nine per cent of mankind's history can be understood through archaeology."

Conflict over the Archaeology of Conflict

Dorothy King has what I think is an excellent post up on her blog about last November's conference at University College London on "Archaeology in Conflict." Minor criticisms of her blog post have been appearing on academic discussion lists. She does refer to Anwar Sadat's predecessor in Egypt, Gamel Nasser, as "an Islamist" whereas Nasser was actually the quintessential Arab nationalist who promoted strong secular power in Arab nations. She has also (apparently inadvertently) stepped into the middle of a controversy among the survivors of the recent Balkan conflicts over the destruction of both Orthodox and Islamic monuments. It seems to me that neither should have been destroyed, just as the United States has no business tearing apart Iraqi art and monuments that glorify Saddam Hussein. Unfortunately, artworks and buildings are symbols that sometimes stand for what the fighting is all about.

The ArchNet for architects and architectural historians has a discussion forum regarding Conflict and Natural Disasters, and several detailed inventories of damage to monuments in the Balkans have been posted there by list participants. There is also a new international research network for "conflict archaeology." I hope that the flurry of interest in this topic is not an indication that archaeologists are going to have to work more frequently in the midst of military conflicts. Certainly, archaeologists are going to continue to have plenty of conflicts, many of them quite petty.

The Assemblage has a new piece by Will Anderson, commenting on Matthew Bogdanos' NYT op-ed which I discussed in a previous post.

Fighting for Iraq's Culture

Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, author of Thieves of Baghdad, had an op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times¹ repeating his call for Europe to do more to crack down on the trade in antiquities looted from Iraq since the beginning of the U.S. invasion. He also advances a new challenge to European archaeologists to have their nations recruit guards for the archaeological sites which they have excavated.

I do not expect much to come of Bogdanos' proposal, and I doubt that he expects or wants much from the Europeans himself. As Bogdanos notes, providing security for archaeological sites would be viewed by the Iraqis, Iraqi expatriates, and the rest of the world as a statement in support of the war. We should however acknowledge the assistance of both Poland and the Czech Republic in providing professional archaeologists and experts in cultural property.

Bogdano calls for a humanitarian effort to protect a cultural heritage rich with common ancestry that predates the splits among Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite. This is a noble proposal but one which I am certain he himself recognizes will fall on deaf ears given that it comes from a colonel in the U.S. Marine reserves. We can only hope that cultural treasures like the "Lion attacking a Nubian" shown above will be well cared for by whatever museum or private collector manages to obtain them through the illegal antiquities trade.

¹Bogdanos, Matthew, 2007, "Fighting for Iraq's Culture," New York Times, March 6.

Preserving Ancient Irbil, Iraq

National Public Radio (NPR) here in the United States broadcast a piece yesterday on the displacement of residents who live within the historic, walled citadel in Irbil, Iraq. This is the most recent of several stories that have appeared since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom on the archaeology of Irbil, located within the Kurdish region of northern Iraq in the foothills of the Zagros mountains. The American archaeologist Robert Braidwood, who some have speculated to have been the prototype for "Indiana Jones," referred to this area as the "hilly flanks" of the Fertile Crescent. The Fertile Crescent itself, birthplace of the Sumerian civilization, is in central Iraq along the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

The citadel in Irbil is what we sometimes call a "palimpsest," created by at least five archaeological cultures spanning at least nine thousand years. Interviewed in 2005 by James Glanz of the New York Times, the archaeologist John Russell summarized the sequence as follows:

with its location in a rain-fed plain near the confluence of two rivers and the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, Irbil could have been the site of one of the earliest villages in the world. The first hunter- gatherer settlement could have started as early as 9300 B.C., followed by early pottery makers, the proto-Hassuna, by 7000 B.C. And unlike the arid regions to the south, the rain remained relatively steady in Irbil over the millennia, so there was no compelling reason to abandon a settlement.

By 1400 B.C., as cultures came and went, Irbil became one of the most important cities of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrian Empire collapsed after a siege in 612 B.C. The Persians took over and were defeated in turn by Alexander the Great at Gaugemala, west of Irbil, in 331 B.C. About a millennium later, the Ottomans swept through after sacking the Abbasids, a Sunni Muslim dynasty centered in Baghdad. And in 1918, as the Ottoman Empire was crumbling, the British Army entered the city without resistance, and finally the modern nation of Iraq was born, with all the consequences that the world is now facing.

The Czech firm GEMA Art Group assessed the architectural monuments of the Irbil citadel in 2005 for UNESCO. Their proposal for the project, with a brief summary of the site's culture history, can be downloaded here. One of the primary objectives of the UNESCO project was to identify a structure that could be used as a focal point for the rehabilitation of the citadel at large and as a hosting place for cultural activities.

Only around 5000 people lived within the walls of the citadel in 2005, and that number had been declining in preceding decades. According to yesterday's NPR piece by Ivan Watson, local authorities evacuated all but one of the 828 families living there last month.

Each family was given a plot of land and $4,000 for new homes. They've been relocated to a barren plain about 25 miles east of Irbil, where an entire new neighborhood is under construction. The homes there are made of gray cinderblock, but that hasn't stopped them from naming their neighborhood "the New Citadel."

The old citadel, however, is now empty. Doors were left wide-open, and forgotten belongings — a woman's shoe, a child's schoolbook, empty packets of cigarettes and garbage — are scattered on the ground. The one family allowed to remain in the city is responsible for tending to the water tower, which supplies the city below. Aziza Kadr lives with her husband and children in the tower's shadow.

"I feel lonely here," she says. "It was very sad when all our neighbors left."

WE CAN WIN IN IRAQ AND WE MUST!

The above map is from a report entitled "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq" by Frederick W. Kagan¹, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This is apparently the "war plan" that President Bush has been waiting for and will base much of his "way forward" speeches on. It will be interesting to see whether he uses any of these maps speckled with American flags, and what the Iraqi politicians and bloggers will think about those once they get hold of Kagan's report.


Here is Kagan's timetable for the proposed "troop surge":

1. Deploy (by March)


2. Prepare (by June)


3. Clear critical terrain (by September)


4. Transition to Iraqi Control

How large should the surge be?

• 4 to 5 Additional U.S. Brigades operating in Baghdad


• 2 U.S. Brigades operating N and S


• 4 Iraqi Army Brigades operating N and S

Here are the "problems" in Baghdad which Kagan identifies and which he believes will be solved by the proposed troop surge:

• Jaysh al-Mahdi (Muqtada! Muqtada!)


• Badr Corps and other Militas


• Shia "vigilantes"


• Al Qaida in Iraq


• Sunni Baathist/Military


• Sunni "vigilantes"

I suspect that most Baghdadis would probably put the U.S. troops and corrupt Iraqi police up at the top of this list.

That all seems pretty straightforward, although it will be interesting to see how close the president sticks to the talking points. There are many "contingency plans" built in, including the prospect that the present Iraqi government may collapse and need to be replaced with a "national unity government" of American design. In addition to Kagan, the list of contributors to his "Iraq Planning Group" does include one general as well as noted neoconservative thinkers such as Michael Rubin.

Once we have secured Baghdad, you may ask, what is next? Kagan does not disappoint -

¹ Kagan, Frederick W., 2006, Choosing Victory, A Plan for Success in Iraq. Washington, D. C.: The American Enterprise Institute.

Juan Cole has written a lengthy piece about the execution for Salon.

Iraqi Museum to Re-Open

Zeyad, blogging at Iraqslogger, reports that the Ministry of Culture has formed a committee to make the necessary arrangements in order to reopen the Iraqi Museum in Baghdad early next year. Over 70 thousand archaeological pieces will be on display, many of which have been recently rehabilitated.

Zeyad's source for the above may have been this announcement from the Iraq Ministry of Culture. The ministry has set up a committee to re-open the Iraqi museum and to provide the necessary supplies, security and "to rearrange again (EXHIBITS?)." Electronic protection and iron gates are mentioned. Also that the museum was able to rehabilitate some of the artifacts and will be showing more than (70) thousand pieces in all museum halls. The opening of the museum will be a major event which will reflect the good image of the reality of the new Iraq.

International Thief Thief

Juan Cole wants this man's head served up on a platter for his federal crimes during Iran-Contra:

Elliott Abrams was involved in stealing Pentagon weapons from US stockpiles, selling them to the Ayatollah Khomeini, and then stealing the Iranian funds so garnered to give to far-right Central American death squads, and then lying about all this to Congress... In 1991, Abrams pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of lying to Congress under oath. Without the plea deal, he was facing felony charges, since what he did was in fact a felony.

Congress pledged that Abrams would never work at a high level in government again. But by the time the Neoconservative cabal in the Bush administration got Bush to appoint him to the National Security Council, there had been so much turn-over in Congress that, one member told me, "no one remembered who Abrams was."

Cole's immediate concern with Mr. Abrams role in the present U.S. administration is that he is one of the last surviving "chicken hawk" neocons, and one of the most extreme and effective. Cole credits Abrams with agitating for taking the "war on terror" beyond Iraq to Iran and Syria.

I.T.T

International rogue

International thief

"You would basically be in the shower and then I would come in and I'd join you and you would have your back to me and I would take the little loofa thing and...."

Wingnuts to the rescue!

Coverage of the war in Iraq by the U.S. media has been criticized by many of us on the left, particularly in light of the Lancet study estimate that at least 550,000 Iraqi deaths have been "overlooked" in casualty reports. In the past week or so, however, there has come a new barrage from the right regarding the reports of atrocities committed against Sunni civilians by militias and death squads closely allied with the current government led by Shia politicians. Leading the charge has been a frequent commentator on Fox television, Michelle Malkin. Following the lead of "Curt" of the blog Flopping Aces, Michelle has been questioning the veracity and even the very existence of an Iraqi source for AP news reports named Jamil Hussein. Now both Michelle and Curt are actually going to Baghdad in search of Jamil, sponsored by the veteran television journalist and creater of the Iraqslogger blog, Eason Jordan.

As copper Curt himself admits, "this is one big media stunt." Greg Sargent recalls that Michelle and Curt have not always been friendly or respectful toward Eason, and their objectives may deviate from what Jordan has in mind. Markos wishes them a safe trip, particularly encouraging Michelle and Curt to venture outside the Green Zone and refuse any offers from U.S. soldiers to provide security. As we have been hearing from Laura Bush, things are truly splendid over there what with all those great new schools!

Meanwhile, Fox's Christmas crusader Bill O'Reilly appears to have scooped the Hussein hit team by showing up at the Camp Striker mess hall in Baghdad for chow. His dinner companion, SFC Vivienne Pacquette of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands seemed to be unaware of O'Reilly's long-standing interest in the West Indies as expressed so graphically in his taped remarks to his former assistant, Andrea Macklis. According to Vivienne, Bill "was very down-to-earth and easy to talk to."