Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

1

Militarism and the Breakdown of Constitutional Government

Last week, filled with grief and sorrow for those killed and injured and with anger at those who had done this, I confronted the solemn responsibility of voting to authorize the country to go to war. Some believe this resolution was only symbolic, designed to show national resolve. But I could not ignore that it provided explicit authority, under the War Powers Resolution and the Constitution, to go to war. It was a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the September 11 events—anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit. In granting these overly broad powers, the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration. I could not support such a grant of war-making authority to the president; I believe it would put more innocent lives at risk.

—CONGRESSWOMAN BARBARA LEE ([Democrat from California], the

only member of Congress to vote against the transfer of the war

power to the president for the invasion of Afghanistan),

San Francisco Chronicle, September 23, 2001

One of the oddest features of political life in the United States in the years since the terrorist attacks is how few people have thought or acted like Barbara Lee. The public expresses itself in opinion polls, which some students of politics scrutinize intently, but there is little passion in the society, certainly none proportionate to the threats facing our democratic republic. The United States today is like a cruise ship on the Niagara River upstream of the most spectacular falls in North America. A few people on board have begun to pick up a slight hiss in the background, to observe a faint haze of mist in the air or on their glasses, to note that the river current seems to be running slightly faster. But no one yet seems to have realized that it is almost too late to head for shore.

Like the Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, imperial German, Nazi, imperial Japanese, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Soviet empires in the last century, we are approaching the edge of a huge waterfall and are about to plunge over it.

If the American democratic system is no longer working as planned, if the constitutional checks and balances as well as other structures put in place by the founders to prevent tyranny are increasingly less operational, we have not completely lacked for witnesses of every stripe, domestic and foreign. General Tommy Franks, commander of the American assault on Baghdad, for instance, went so far as to predict that another serious terrorist attack on the United States would “begin to unravel the fabric of our Constitution,” and under such circumstances, he was open to the idea that “the Constitution could be scrapped in favor of a military form of government.”¹ The historian Kevin Baker feared that we are no longer far from the day when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, our Congress will take its last meaningful vote and turn over power to a military dictator. “In the end, we’ll beg for the coup,” he wrote.²

On October 10, 2002, Senator Robert Byrd (Democrat from West Virginia) asked plaintively about the separation of powers, “Why are we being hounded into action on a resolution that turns over to President Bush the Congress’s Constitutional power to declare war? ... The judgment of history will not be kind to us if we take this step.”³ Nonetheless, the following day, the resolution carried by a 77-23 vote in the Senate and 296-133 in the House of Representatives. The Berkshire Eagle editorialized, “The Senate, which was designed by the framers of the Constitution to act as a brake on the popular passions of the day, was little more than a speed bump under the White House steamroller.”⁴ The libertarian writer Bill Winter conjectured that the problem was “the monarchization of America under Bush.”⁵ Adam Young, a Canadian political commentator, wondered, “How did the chief magistrate of a confederated republic degrade into the global tyrant we experience today, part secular pope, part military despot, part pseudo-philosopher-king and full-time overbearing global gangster?”⁶ Indeed, that is the question for all of us.

Former British foreign secretary Robin Cook noted that “[a] 11 the checks and balances that the founding fathers constructed to restrain presidential power are broken instruments.” Cook observed the hubris and megalomania that flowed from this in John Bolton, then the number three official at the State Department (subsequently ambassador to the United Nations). When asked about possible incentives that might cause Iran to end its nuclear ambitions, Bolton replied, “I don’t do carrots.” Cook accurately predicted that members of the Bush administration “will ... celebrate their [2004] election victory by putting [the Iraqi city of] Fallujah to the torch,” as they did that very November.⁷

Marine general Anthony Zinni, General Franks’s predecessor as Cent-corn commander in the Middle East, worried about the way the Pentagon was further expanding its powers at the expense of other agencies of government. “Why the hell,” he asked, “would the Department of Defense be the organization in our government that deals with the reconstruction of Iraq? Doesn’t make sense.”⁸ One anonymous foreign service officer supplied an answer to Los Angeles Times reporter Sonni Efron, “I just wake up in the morning and tell myself, ‘There’s been a military coup,’ and then it all makes sense.”⁹ Even the president himself was a witness of sorts to the changes under way, baldly asserting at a White House press conference on April 13, 2004, that he was “the ultimate decision-maker for this country”—a notion that would have appalled the authors of the Constitution.¹⁰

I believe that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have led the country into a perilous cul-de-sac, but they did not do it alone and removing them from office will not necessarily solve the problem. The crisis of government in the United States has been building at least since World War II. The emergence of the imperial presidency and the atrophying of the legislative and judicial branches have deep roots in the postwar military-industrial complex, in the way broad sectors of the public have accepted the military as our most effective public institution, and in aberrations in our electoral system. The interesting issue is not the damage done by Bush, Cheney, and their followers but how they were able to get away with it, given the barriers that exist in the Constitution to prevent just the sorts of misuses of power for which they have become notorious.

Historian Carol Berkin in her book A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the Constitution argues that the nation’s “Founders—including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania and dozens of others—envisioned a supreme legislative branch as the heart and soul of America’s central government.... America’s modern presidency, with all its trappings, would be unimaginable to men like Madison, Washington, and Franklin. Of all those historic figures at the 1787 [Constitutional] Convention, perhaps only Alexander Hamilton would relish today’s playing of ‘Hail to the Chief.’ “¹¹

The intent of the founders was to prevent a recurrence of the tyranny they had endured under Britain’s King George III. They bent all their ingenuity and practical experience to preventing tyrannies of one, of the few, of a majority, of the monied classes, or of any other group that might obtain and exercise unchecked power, often adopting institutional precedents from the Roman Republic. Inspired by the French political philosopher Montesquieu’s discussion of the “separation of powers” in his On the Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748, the drafters of the American Constitution produced a sophisticated scheme to balance power in a republic. The most basic structure they chose was federalism, setting up the states as alternatives to and limitations on the power of the national government. Congress was given that quintessential parliamentary power—control of the budget—without which it would be merely an ornamental body like the “people’s congresses” in communist-dominated countries. Congress was also charged with initiating all legislation, making the final decision to go to war, and if necessary getting rid of an unsatisfactory president by impeachment, something also achievable through periodic elections. To moderate the power of Congress somewhat, the Constitution divided it into two quite differently elected and apportioned houses, each capable of vetoing the other’s decisions.

Both houses of Congress must ultimately pass all laws, and the president, who is entrusted with implementing them, is given a veto as well. The Congress, in turn, can override a presidential veto with a two-thirds vote, and even when Congress and the president agree on a law, the Supreme Court, exercising the function of interpreting the laws, can still declare it unconstitutional. The president and members of Congress must be re-elected or leave office, but judges serve for life, although Congress can impeach them. The president nominates the heads of the cabinet departments, who serve at his pleasure, as well as all judges, but the Senate must approve them.

Over time, this balance-of-power spirit came to influence other institutions of government that the Constitution did not mention, including the armed forces, where competition among the services—the army, navy, air force, and Marine Corps—dilutes somewhat the enormous coercive power entrusted to them.¹² To prevent a tyranny of the majority, the Constitution authorizes fixed terms and fixed times for elections (borrowed from the Roman Republic) as a way to interfere with the monopolization of power by an individual, an oligarchy, or a political party.

Unfortunately, after more than two centuries (about the same length of time that the Roman Republic was in its prime), this framework has almost completely disintegrated. For those who believe that the structure of government in Washington today bears some resemblance to that outlined in the Constitution of 1787, the burden of proof is on them. The president now dominates the government in a way no ordinary monarch possibly could. He has at his disposal the clandestine services of the CIA, a private army unaccountable to the Congress, the press, or the public because everything it does is secret. No president since Harry Truman, having discovered what unlimited power the CIA affords him, has ever failed to use it. Meanwhile, the “defense” budgets of the Pentagon dwarf those of the rest of the government and have undermined democratic decision making in the process. Funds for military hardware are distributed in as many states as possible to ensure that any member of Congress who might consider voting against a new weapons system would be accused of putting some of his constituents out of work.

When in May 2005, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld listed a large number of unneeded domestic military bases that he wanted to close as an economy measure, the affected communities promptly erupted in protest and began frantic lobbying efforts to “save” their particular installations. Advocates of keeping the bases open phrase their arguments in terms of national security, but the true reason is jobs, jobs, jobs.¹³ As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote at the height of the Cold War, “It is no secret that the billions of dollars demanded by the Pentagon for the armaments industry are necessary not for ‘national security’ but for keeping the economy from collapsing.”¹⁴

“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” It is not precisely clear who first spoke these immortal words—Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, or the antislavery abolitionist Wendell Phillips—but during the Cold War and its aftermath, Americans were not particularly vigilant when it came to excessive concentration of power in the presidency and its appendages, and we are now paying a very high price for that. From the founding of the republic to the moment of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address in 1961, some of our leaders have warned us that the greatest threat to our republican structure of government is war, including its associated maladies of standing armies, a military-industrial complex, and all the vested interests that develop around a massive military establishment.

The classic statement of this threat was by the chief author of the Constitution, James Madison:

Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals, engendered in both. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.... War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it. In war, the public treasuries are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.¹⁵

The United States has been continuously engaged in or mobilized for war since 1941. Using statistics compiled by the Federation of American Scientists, Gore Vidal has listed 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and September 11, 2001, in which the United States struck the first blow. Among these, a typical example was Operation Urgent Fury in 1983, “Reagan’s attack on the island of Grenada, a month-long caper that General [Alexander M.] Haig disloyally said could have been handled more efficiently by the Provincetown police department.”¹⁶ Excluding minor military operations, Drexel University historian and political scientist Michael Sullivan counts only “invasions, interventions, and regime changes since World War II” and comes up with thirty bloody, often clandestine, American wars from Greece (1947-49) to Yugoslavia (1995 and 1999).¹⁷ Neither of these compilations included the wars in Afghanistan (2001-) and Iraq (2003-).

It should be noted that since 1947, while we have used our military power for political and military gain in a long list of countries, in no instance has democratic government come about as a direct result. In some important cases, on the other hand, democracy has developed in opposition to our interference—for example, after the collapse of the regime of the CIA-installed Greek colonels in 1974; after the demise of the U.S.-supported fascist dictatorships in Portugal in 1974 and Spain in 1975; after the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986; after the ouster of General Chun Doo-Hwan in South Korea in 1987; and after the ending of thirty-eight years of martial law on the island of Taiwan in the same year.¹⁸ The United States holds the unenviable record of having helped install and then supported such dictators as the Shah of Iran, General Suharto in Indonesia, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and Sese Seko Mobutu in Congo/Zaire, not to mention the series of American-backed militarists in South Vietnam and Cambodia until we were finally expelled from Indochina.¹⁹ In addition, for decades we ran one of the most extensive international terrorist operations in history against Cuba and Nicaragua because their struggles for national independence had produced outcomes that we did not like.

The unintended result of this record of militarism is the contemporary Leviathan that dominates Washington, threatening our nation with bankruptcy, turning many of the organs of our “free press” into Pravda- like mouthpieces, and disgracing the nation by allowing our young men and women to torture prisoners picked up on various battlefields or even snatched from city streets in allied countries. In using the term “militarism,” I want to distinguish it from defense of country. No one questions the need to raise a citizen’s army and me obligation of able-bodied men and women to serve in it in order to defend the nation from foreign aggression. But the wars listed above are virtually all ones that we entered by choice rather than out of necessity. In many cases, they were shrouded in secrecy, while our political leaders lied to Congress and the public about the need to fight them. The launching of the Vietnam and Iraq wars are only the most blatant examples of presidential deception.²⁰ There are almost certainly several cases currently hidden behind the walls of “classification” in which we secretly fomented the downfall of a government and offered clandestine assistance to the side we favored.²¹ Most recently, these may well include the abortive attempt to overthrow President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in April 2002 and the use of front organizations to bring to power pro-U.S. governments in the former Soviet states of Georgia in November 2003 and the Ukraine in November 2004.

Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and a Vietnam veteran with twenty-three years of service in the U.S. Army, believes, “Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.”²²

How did this come about? As a start, we have indeed fought too many wars of choice, starting in 1898 with our imperialist conquests of the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and our establishment of a protectorate over Cuba, shortly followed by World War I. World War II, while not a war of choice, produced the most complete mobilization of resources in our history and led to the deployment of our forces on every continent. After the victory of 1945, some Americans urged a rapid demobilization, which actually was well under way when the Cold War and the Korean War restored and enlarged our military apparatus. It would never again be reined in, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The inevitable result was a continual transfer of powers to the presidency exactly as Madison had predicted, the use of executive secrecy to freeze out Congress and the judiciary, the loss of congressional mastery over the budget, and the rise of two new, extraconstitutional centers of power that are today out of control— the Department of Defense and the fifteen intelligence organizations, the best known of which is the Central Intelligence Agency. I believe we will never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation, unless we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence collecting to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon. Even if we did those things, the mystique of America as a model democracy may have been damaged beyond repair. Certainly, under the best of circumstances, it will take a generation or more to overcome the image of “America as torturer.”²³

In 1964, Hannah Arendt addressed a similar problem when she tried to plumb the evil of the Nazi regime. Her book Eichmann in Jerusalem dealt with the trial of the former SS officer Adolf Eichmann, who was charged with organizing the transport of Jews to death camps during World War II. She subtitled her book A Report on the Banality of Evil but used that now famous phrase only once, at book’s end, without explaining it further.²⁴ Long after Arendt’s death, Jerome Kohn, a colleague, compiled a volume of her essays entitled Responsibility and Judgment. What made Eichmann both evil and banal, Arendt concluded in one of those essays, was his inability to think for himself.

“Some years ago,” she wrote, “reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of the ‘banality of evil’ and meant with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was perhaps an extraordinary shallowness. However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.”²⁵

Arendt was trying to locate Eichmann’s conscience. She called him a “desk murderer,” an equally apt term for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld—for anyone, in fact, who orders remote-control killing of the modern sort—the bombardment of a country that lacks any form of air defense, the firing of cruise missiles from a warship at sea into countries unable to respond, such as Iraq, Sudan, or Afghanistan, or, say, the unleashing of a Hellfire missile from a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle controlled by “pilots” thousands of miles from the prospective target.

How do ordinary people become desk murderers? First, they must lose the ability to think because, according to Arendt, “thinking conditions men against evil doing.”²⁶ Jerome Kohn adds, “With some degree of confidence it may be said that the ability to think, which Eichmann lacked, is the precondition of judging, and that the refusal as well as the inability to judge, to imagine before your eyes the others whom your judgment represents and to whom it responds, invite evil to enter and infect the world.”²⁷ To lack a personal conscience means “never to start the soundless solitary dialogue we call thinking.”²⁸

If an individual’s thinking is short-circuited and does not rise to the level of making judgments, he or she is able to understand acts, including evil acts, only in terms of following orders, doing one’s duty, being loyal to one’s “homeland,” maintaining solidarity with one’s fellow soldiers, or surrendering one’s will to that of the group. This phenomenon is common in some forms of political life, as Arendt demonstrated in her most famous work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, but it is ubiquitous in military life, where, in order to prevail in battle, soldiers have been conditioned to follow orders instantly and to act as a cohesive group. In such roles, “Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention which all events and facts arouse by virtue of their existence.”²⁹ This is one reason why democratic republics must be particularly vigilant about standing armies and wars of choice if, that is, they intend to retain their liberties.

At Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, some American soldiers had become so inured to the torture of Iraqi inmates that they made a screen saver of naked Iraqi captives stacked in a “pyramid” with their tormentors looking on and laughing in the background.³⁰ By contrast, on January 13, 2004, Sergeant Joseph M. Darby of the army’s 372nd Military Police Company turned over a computer disk of similar photos from Abu Ghraib of American soldiers torturing Iraqis to the army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He said that the photos “violated everything that I personally believed in and everything that I had been taught about the rules of war.”³¹ Sergeant Darby had not stopped thinking.

No Pentagon civilian or American officer above the rank of lieutenant colonel has so far been prosecuted for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib and other acts of torture and murder in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, another proof that, as a consequence of our half century of devotion to war, we unintentionally abandoned our republican checks on the activities of public officials and elevated the military to a position that places it, in actual practice, beyond the law. In so doing, what we have created is a large corps of desk murderers in our executive branch and the highest ranks of our armed forces. These people have replaced their ability to think and judge with “cliches, stock phrases, and adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct.” For example, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shrugged off the defilement and looting of ancient monuments and museums in Baghdad as the American occupation of that country began by saying, “Stuff happens,” and then joking that he did not think there were that many ancient vases in Iraq.³²

It is, of course, natural for political and military leaders to try to put favorable interpretations on their policies. In the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, this has meant making statements that consist of little more than flat contradictions of evidence or specious reinterpretations of law. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, for example, has tried to legalize the Bush administration’s decisions to torture prisoners of war by arguing that a “new paradigm renders obsolete [the Geneva Conventions’] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”³³ But the allegedly new paradigm is apparent only to Gonzales, and in any case he lacks the authority to nullify a ratified treaty.

Richard Myers, a four-star air force general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared categorically to Fox News, “One thing we don’t do is we don’t torture,” as if that disposed of the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison.³⁴ In speaking to our European allies about extensive evidence that the CIA was operating secret prisons and torturing the inmates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “With respect to detainees, the United States Government complies with its Constitution, its laws, and its treaty obligations. Acts of physical or mental torture are expressly prohibited. The United States Government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees. Torture, and conspiracy to commit torture, are crimes under U.S. law, wherever they may occur in the world.” She mentioned that there had been cases of the “unlawful treatment” of prisoners, but added that “the horrible mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib that sickened us all ... arose under the different legal framework that applies to armed conflict in Iraq.”³⁵ She failed to explain what the nature of this different legal framework actually is or how this squares with a ban on torture “wherever [it] may occur in the world “

Commenting on the unauthorized bombing of civilian villages in Afghanistan, former secretary of state Colin Powell said on German TV, “We spent a huge amount of money and we are putting our young men and women on the line, every day, to put in place a form of government that was decided upon by the Afghan people. And we are helping them to rebuild and reconstruct their society. That pattern is the American pattern. We’re very proud of it. It’s been repeated many times over, and it will be repeated again in Iraq.”³⁶

As Arendt suggests, it is precisely when such absurdities and flights from reality replace clear thinking that evil enters the picture. What follows are but three illustrations of the consequences of the failure of our political and military leadership to think: the systematic killing of unarmed civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq; the creation of a global network of both known and secret prisons around the world in which our troops or intelligence agents routinely torture the inmates; and the way the military’s attitudes at the time of its 2003 assault on Baghdad led to the destruction and desecration of some of the world’s oldest known human artifacts.

During World War II in East Asia, the Imperial Japanese Army contrived one of the worst euphemisms ever used to mask criminal acts— namely, “comfort women” (ianfu) to refer to the women and girls abducted in occupied countries and sent to the front lines to serve as prostitutes for Japanese officers and soldiers.³⁷ This phrase will probably haunt Japan until the end of time. A comparable term invented by the United States military is “collateral damage,” meaning its killing of civilians and the destruction of private property while allegedly pursuing one or another of its unilaterally declared acts of “liberation.”

“Broadly defined,” says a U.S. Air Force training manual, “collateral damage is unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment, or personnel occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities. Such damage can occur to friendly, neutral, and even enemy forces.”³⁸ This military euphemism has been substituted for plainspoken words that might induce guilt in airmen when they bomb and strafe defenseless communities or in soldiers when they kick down doors of private homes, rush in pointing assault rifles at women and children, and sometimes rob residents under cover of searching for enemies or contraband. The military also certainly hoped that its adoption of such a neutral, inoffensive expression for ones that might offend or suggest unpleasantness would strengthen the resolve of its soldiers and perhaps prevent them from being held accountable for war crimes.

“Collateral damage” is nowhere recognized, or even mentioned, in humanitarian international law. In fact, intentional attacks of any sort on civilians are prohibited under “Common Article 3,” which applies to all four Geneva Conventions. The United States has signed and ratified the Geneva Conventions (although it never ratified two supplemental protocols of 1977 that spelled out the international rules of war in greater detail). Common Article 3 prohibits “at any time and in any place whatsoever” violence, including murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture, and outrages to human dignity against protected persons—that is, “persons taking no active part in hostilities,” such as civilians, the wounded, and prisoners of war. “Such persons are, in all circumstances, entitled to respect for their honor and religion, and must be protected against insults and public curiosity. No physical or moral coercion shall be exercised to obtain information from them or third parties. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.”³⁹

Among the gravest contemporary instances of “collateral damage” were the sanctions enforced against Iraq between 1991 and 2003 and the slaughter of Afghan and Iraqi civilians in the wars waged by the United States after 9/11. On May 11, 1996, the CBS television program 60 Minutes made famous one of the more notorious statistics in the history of Iraqi-American relations. In an interview with then secretary of state Madeleine Albright, correspondent Lesley Stahl said, “We have heard that a half million children have died as a result of the sanctions [in Iraq]. That’s more than died in Hiroshima.” Then Stahl asked, “Is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.” Osama bin Laden cited just this statistic as one of the reasons al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11. In her 2003 memoir, Madam Secretary, Albright amended her comment this way: “I must have been crazy; I should have answered the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaw in the premise behind it. Saddam Hussein could have prevented any child from suffering simply by meeting his obligations.”⁴⁰ Her clarification, however, was even more disingenuous than her earlier indifference to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. As a former ambassador to the United Nations, she was certainly fully informed about the sanctions program and its impact.

During the Gulf War of 1991, the United States drove Iraq from Kuwait but stopped short of invading Iraq itself. Nonetheless, President George H. W. Bush and his national security adviser, General Brent Scow-croft, were determined to do everything in their power to make postwar Iraq ungovernable, to stimulate revolt within the country, and to force Saddam Hussein from office. During the war itself, the United States dropped some ninety thousand tons of bombs on Iraq in the space of forty-three days, intentionally destroying the civilian infrastructure, including eighteen of twenty electricity-generating plants and the water-pumping and sanitation systems.⁴¹ Dr. Thomas Nagy, a professor at George Washington University, analyzed a large number of declassified Defense Intelligence Agency documents on the bombing and concluded that American officials were well aware that the purposeful destruction of Iraq’s civilian water sanitation systems would cause increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mortality.⁴² The primary document, “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” dated January 22, 1991, argues that Iraq’s rivers “contain biological materials, pollutants, and are laden with bacteria. Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur.” Later documents state that the sanctions imposed after the war explicitly embargoed the importation of chlorine in order to prevent the purification of drinking water.

A Washington Post analysis of the air war published on June 23, 1991, quoted typical, although unnamed, Pentagon strategists on the bombing campaign, one of whom suggested that” [t]he definition of innocents gets to be a little bit unclear.... They do live there, and ultimately people have some control over what goes on in their country.” Another air force planner asserted, “We wanted to let people know. Get rid of this guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding. We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that, and we’ll fix your electricity.”⁴³ In 1995, Colonel John A. Warden III wrote in Airpower Journal, “[Destruction] of these [electric power] facilities shut down water purification and sewage treatment plants. As a result, epidemics of gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid broke out, leading to perhaps as many as 100,000 civilian deaths and a doubling of the infant mortality rate.”⁴⁴ A team from the Harvard School of Public Health suggested in May 1991 that “at least 170,000 children under five years of age will die in the coming year from the delayed effects” of the bombing.⁴⁵

The bombing itself violated international humanitarian law and made the United States liable to charges of war crimes. Article 54 (2) of the “Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol 1), June 8, 1977,” explicitly states, “It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as food-stuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.”⁴⁶ As noted earlier, the United States is not a signatory of Protocol 1, but this does not absolve it of the charge that its behavior was profoundly immoral.

The sanctions themselves reinforced and deepened what the bombing began. Jacob Hornberger, president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, quotes State Department officials who helped negotiate U.N. support for our actions as saying that these were the “toughest, most comprehensive sanctions in history.”⁴⁷ On August 2, 1990, the United States and Britain obtained U.N. Security Council Resolution 661 freezing all of Iraq’s foreign assets and authorizing the cutting off of all trade. This embargo lasted until the Anglo-American invasion of 2003. In its history, the U.N. has imposed economic sanctions only fourteen times (twelve of them since 1990), but according to Joy Gordon, the leading authority on the subject, “only those sanctions on Iraq have been comprehensive, meaning that virtually every aspect of the country’s imports and exports is controlled.”⁴⁸ The American and British governments claimed not to have sequestered imports of food and medicine—hence Albright’s pretense that all Saddam Hussein had to do was comply with the U.N. to preserve the health of his people—but the two allies so restricted Iraqi exports that it had no money to buy such necessities. Columbia University professor Richard Garfield, an epidemiologist and one of the leading analysts of the effects of sanctions on Iraq, says that “Iraq’s legal foreign trade was cut by an estimated ninety percent by sanctions.”⁴⁹ In particular Iraq was not allowed to import any of the parts it needed to repair its electrical and water purification systems.

The United States and Britain went to extraordinary lengths to keep U.N. documentation of what was happening inside Iraq from being made public. But the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) nonetheless monitored the situation, and in 1995, its researchers wrote to the Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Society, that 567,000 Iraqi children were estimated to have died as a result of sanctions. That figure may have been an overestimate, but it led to the U.N.’s “oil for food” program in 1996, which was supposed to remedy shortages of food and medical supplies. It did not work out that way, however, because the U.N. banked the proceeds from the Iraqi oil sales it now permitted in New York and skimmed off 34 percent to pay Kuwaiti claims of war damage against Iraq as well as its own expenses. The United States insisted that a further 13 percent go to the Kurdish autonomous area in the north. There was thus much less money available than the public was led to believe.

In addition, the U.S. government reserved the right to veto or delay any items Iraq ordered, exercising that power often and in secret. As Joy Gordon, who teaches philosophy at Fairfield University and is a prolific writer on the Iraq sanctions, noted, “In September 2001 nearly one third of water and sanitation and one quarter of electricity and educational-supply contracts were on hold. Between the springs of 2000 and 2002, for example, holds on humanitarian goods tripled.” Among the items the United States stopped from entering Iraq in the winter of 2001 were dialysis, dental and firefighting equipment, water tankers, milk and yogurt production equipment, and printing machines for schools.⁵⁰

Anupama Rao Singh, the United Nations Children’s Fund representative in Baghdad, observed that food shortages were virtually unknown in Iraq before the sanctions, but that from 1991 to 1998, “children under five were dying from malnutrition-related diseases in numbers ranging from a conservative 2,600 per month to a more realistic 5,357 per month.”⁵¹ Using his 1999 study, “Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children,” as well as other studies and his own later recalculations, Richard Garfield estimated that, through 2000, the sanctions had killed approximately 350,000 Iraqi children.⁵² This is the most widely accepted figure today. When Denis Halliday, the United Nations coordinator in Iraq, resigned in 1998 to protest the effects of the sanctions, he condemned them as “a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq” and called their implementation “genocide.”⁵³ Given that the United States had starved the Iraqis for over a decade and caused the deaths of several hundred thousand of their children, one wonders why former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz and others believed American invading forces would be welcomed as liberators.

In the wake of 9/11, a new threat to civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan materialized in the form of random killings by America’s often poorly led and unaccountable armed forces. These victims were “shot by snipers, strafed by helicopters, buried under the rubble of their houses by bombs, incinerated by fire, and left to rot in the streets of cities like Fallujah [Iraq] to be gnawed on by dogs.”⁵⁴ The military keeps no public record on their numbers—what Boston Globe journalist Derrick Jackson calls “this atrocity of silence”—but the evidence indicates that in Iraq in the first years after the invasion such killings by Americans amount to between twice and ten times the people slain by insurgents’ bombs.

On June 2, 2005, the Iraqi Interior Ministry announced that, over the previous eighteen months, insurgent violence had claimed the lives of some 12,000 civilians, whereas the estimates of the numbers killed by the American military ranged from a low of 21,000 to over 40,000.⁵⁵ In July 2005, Dr. Hatim al-Alwani, head of the Iraqiyun humanitarian organization in Baghdad, released his group’s estimate that the total number of Iraqis killed from all causes since the U.S. invasion was 128,000, including those who died in the U.S. assaults on Fallujah. A year later, the American public began slowly to awaken to the U.S. military’s lax discipline in using lethal force against civilians. Serious cases of out-of-control marines executing the elderly, women, and children at Haditha, Ishaqi, and elsewhere amounted to the equivalent in Iraq of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.⁵⁶

William Langewiesche, a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, wrote from Baghdad, “However vicious or even sadistic the insurgents may be, they are acutely aware of their popular base, and are responsible for fewer unintentional ‘collateral’ casualties than are the clumsy and overarmed American forces.”⁵⁷ Dahr Jamail, one of the BBC’s correspondents in Iraq, reported, “Coalition and Iraqi security forces may be responsible for up to sixty percent of conflict-related civilian deaths in Iraq—far more than are killed by insurgents, confidential records obtained by the BBC’s Panorama programme reveal.... One of the least reported aspects of the U.S. occupation of Iraq is the oftentimes indiscriminate use of airpower by the American military.”⁵⁸

The American press only rarely, and then usually anecdotally, describes the deaths of civilians killed by American troops. American newspapers and television broadcasts routinely remove pictures of non-combatants killed by U.S. forces even though they do not flinch from showing the bodies of people killed by insurgents. One reason may be surmised from an October 2001 set of instructions a Florida newspaper issued to its staff: “DO NOT USE photos on page 1A showing civilian casualties from the war on Afghanistan. .. . DO NOT USE wire stories that lead with civilian casualties. . . . They should be mentioned further down in the story. If the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, DO IT.”⁵⁹ The American press has similarly never reported on the nightly use of “flash bombs” fired by Apache helicopters to light up the fields along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. These high-tech American bombs have burned thousands of acres of fields and decimated groves of date palms. Hovering helicopters have also made it impossible for Iraqis to sleep on rooftops in the sweltering summertime, as was their custom in order to escape the stifling heat.⁶⁰

There are no “official” statistics on this mayhem because, as former Centcom commander General Tommy Franks put it, “We do not do body counts.” (Franks was speaking of the war in Afghanistan but also making policy for the subsequent war in Iraq.) Such a statement signaled to the civilian populations of Afghanistan and Iraq that the United States did not care how many local citizens it killed. However, as Maria Ruzicka, an American peace activist who was killed on April 16, 2005, on the road to Baghdad International Airport, had discovered, it is also a lie. The U.S. military does do body counts, but only publicizes them when they are of propaganda value to the American side.⁶¹

American soldiers and contractors working in the war zones are authorized to use lethal force at their own discretion whenever they feel threatened. The soldiers are unaccountable for their acts to any authority except their military superiors, and the contractors are, so far as I can ascertain, simply unaccountable. The U.S. military itself invariably conducts its own investigations into any charges of excessive use of force, and these investigations are normally oriented toward covering up what happened. As one knowledgeable human rights observer in Iraq put matters, “The American troops have adopted an atmosphere of impunity. Arrogant and violent behavior goes unpunished and continues.”⁶² Patrick Cockburn, a journalist for the Independent of London with long experience in Iraq, adds, “Every Iraqi has stories of friends or relatives killed by U.S. troops for no adequate reason. Often they do not know if they were shot by regular soldiers or by members of western security companies whose burly employees, usually ex-soldiers, are everywhere in Iraq.”⁶³

In Afghanistan, there are relatively few unofficial estimates of the numbers of civilians killed by U.S. forces and no official ones. In December 2001, Robert Fisk, the veteran journalist of the Islamic world, reported that high-level bombing of Afghan villages by B-52s had claimed some 3,700 victims.⁶⁴ After that time, there were mostly reports of individual deaths, including a Red Cross account of 52 people, half of them children, killed by bombing in eastern Afghanistan on December 29, 2001; 16 villagers killed on January 23, 2002, by U.S. forces at Hazar Qadam; and 14, including women and children, killed when a U.S. jet attacked a vehicle on March 6, 2002, in eastern Paktia province.

On June 30, 2002, a U.S. AC-130 gunship attacked a cluster of six villages a hundred miles north of Kandahar in Uruzgan province. In the village of Karakak, the aircraft sprayed a wedding ceremony being held at night to escape the heat with hundreds of bullets. The Americans repeatedly claimed that their planes had come under antiaircraft fire and that they were only retaliating. However, a U.S. Special Forces investigation on the ground found no antiaircraft gun or expended cannon shells. What they did find were forty-eight bodies, all but three women and children. Afghan officials believed that the United States either relied on intelligence from Afghan informers who were perhaps settling personal scores or were simply shooting up the area in hopes of killing Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the overthrown Taliban regime, who was raised less than a mile from the village. The Americans later admitted the raid was a mistake and promised to build schools, roads, and hospitals and drill wells in the district but there is no evidence that they ever did so.⁶⁵ The “independent” Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly asked the U.S. military to obtain Afghan authorization before carrying out attacks, but American officials up to and including President Bush have refused all such requests.⁶⁶

American killings of civilians have been on a far greater scale in Iraq because that country is more populous and urbanized, and the war and insurgency there have proved much more intense than in Afghanistan. On October 28, 2004, physicians and other researchers affiliated with Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities in the United States and the al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad published a report in the British medical journal the Lancet that concluded, “The risk of death from violence [in Iraq] in the period after the invasion was fifty-eight times higher than in the period before the war.... We think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths, and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. . . . Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children.”⁶⁷

Some other nongovernmental analysts believe this estimate may be too high. The London-based group Iraq Body Count puts the total of civilians killed by foreign troops at between 34,711 and 38,861 as of May 1, 2006. However, it counts only deaths directly reported by the media or mentioned by official groups.⁶⁸ The Lancet’s estimate was based not only on an elaborate survey of households but on a comparison of mortality rates in the first nearly eighteen months after the invasion with the almost fifteen-month period preceding it. As the authors note, “The major causes of death before the invasion were myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular accidents, and other chronic disorders whereas after the invasion violence was the primary cause of death.” They excluded the city of Fallujah from their investigation because it was too dangerous to do research there. “We estimate that 98,000 more deaths than expected happened after the invasion outside Fallujah and far more if the outlier Fallujah cluster is included.”⁶⁹

During the “shock and awe” barrage of cruise missiles and other airborne weaponry that opened the war, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his aides planned to try to kill “high value targets” (HVTs), including Saddam Hussein and General Izzat Ibrahim, Iraq’s number two official. According to the plans, Rumsfeld personally had to sign off on any airstrike “thought likely to result in the deaths of more than thirty civilians.” The air war commander, Lieutenant General T. Michael Moseley, proposed fifty such raids and Rumsfeld signed the orders for each and every one.

As it turned out, none succeeded. The March 19, 2003, attempt to kill Saddam Hussein and his sons at the Dora Farms compound south of Baghdad was a major fiasco. American intelligence reported Saddam there in an underground bunker that would require particularly large bombs. He was not there, however, nor was any bunker, but the air force killed a lot of Iraqi civilians. Similarly, an April 7 raid in the Mansur district of Baghdad killed only innocent bystanders. The deaths accomplished nothing except to show off America s lethal, high-tech weaponry. Marc Garlasco, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who headed the “high-value targeting cell” within the Pentagon, described the entire campaign as an “abject failure” and added, “We failed to kill the HVTs and instead killed civilians and engendered hatred and discontent in some of the population.”⁷⁰

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, commented on these and later destructive attacks, “American behavior and self-perceptions reveal the ease with which a civilized country can engage in large-scale killing of civilians without public discussion.... The American fantasy of a final battle, in Fallujah or elsewhere, or the capture of some terrorist mastermind, perpetuates a cycle of bloodletting that puts the world in peril. Worse still, American public opinion, media and the [2004] election victory of the Bush administration have left the world’s most powerful military without practical restraint.”⁷¹

As a second example of the administration s failure to think and make moral judgments, consider the global network of military prisons it has created in which inmates are routinely tortured. On May 17, 2004, the Army Times reported that around the halls of the Pentagon a caustic label had emerged for the enlisted soldiers shown in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison photos: “the six morons who lost the war.”⁷² I would suggest that there were actually seven morons, not six, and they were not enlisted men. The seven are President George W. Bush; his former legal counsel and subsequently attorney general of the United States Alberto Gonzales; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard B. Myers; Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq until mid-2004; Major General Geoffrey Miller, commander at Guantanamo until April 2004, when he took over Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; and Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Senator John W. Warner (Republican from Virginia).⁷³

These are the people who disgraced the United States and did nothing about it when the details of Abu Ghraib in particular began to be revealed to the public. As the Israeli court that sentenced Adolf Eichmann to death insisted: “The degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hand.”⁷⁴ This is as true in cases of official torture as it is for genocide.

President Bush was directly responsible for removing the legal restraints against torture. On the evening of September 11, 2001, in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he returned to Washington and at 8:30 p.m. addressed the nation from the Oval Office. Following his speech, he met with his senior officials concerned with the crisis in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. According to Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism chief for both Presidents Clinton and Bush, who was there, Bush entered the room and said, “I want you all to understand that we are at war and we will stay at war until this is done. Nothing else matters. Everything is available for the pursuit of this war. Any barriers in your way, they’re gone. Any money you need, you have it. This is our only agenda.” In the ensuing discussion, according to Clarke, “Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution. Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room. T don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’ “⁷⁵ As Timothy Garton Ash has observed, “We got off on the wrong foot on the very first day.”⁷⁶

Without question Secretary Rumsfeld heeded what the commander in chief told him. Later that autumn, during the interrogations of John Walker Lindh, our first post-9/11 torture victim, Rumsfeld instructed his legal counsel to order the military intelligence officials to “take the gloves off.” In the early stages of his interrogation under torture, Lindh’s responses were cabled to the Pentagon hourly followed by return orders to keep up the pressure.

Lindh was then a twenty-year-old, white, middle-class American citizen from Marin County, California, who had converted to Islam, gone to Yemen and Pakistan to study religious texts and Arabic, and traveled to Afghanistan in August 2001, barely a month before the 9/11 attacks. The CIA found him, badly wounded, in a prison of one of the Northern Alliance warlords, our allies in the war against the Taliban.

His American captors stripped and humiliated him, denied him medical treatment, and tortured him for information about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. According to Richard A. Serrano of the Los Angeles Times, who was shown secret military documents detailing the treatment of Lindh, he “was being questioned while he was propped up naked and tied to a stretcher in interrogation sessions that went on for days.”⁷⁷ Attorney General John Ashcroft threatened to try Lindh as a traitor but in the end settled for a guilty plea on charges of aiding the Taliban and a twenty-year sentence rather than let Lindh’s lawyers seek testimony from captives held at Guantanamo about his torture. As part of his plea bargain, Lindh was forced to sign a statement saying: “The defendant agrees that this agreement puts to rest his claims of mistreatment by the United States military, and all claims of mistreatment are withdrawn. The defendant acknowledges that he was not intentionally mistreated by the U.S. military.” As journalist Dave Lindorff observes, Lindh “remains almost certainly wrongfully imprisoned.”⁷⁸

Thus began practices that would ultimately infect and contaminate virtually all aspects of the “war on terror.” Thanks to the research of Alfred W. McCoy, who has studied the history of U.S. government torture and the CIA’s application of it from the early days of the Cold War, its use was not unknown in American clandestine operations.⁷⁹ In collaboration with the British, the CIA invented new forms of mental torture that relied on inducing terror, which often did irreversible psychological damage, in addition to such techniques as “water-boarding” or what our Latin American military allies call the “submarino.” It involves being held under water until you think you will die. There was, however, great nervousness about using these techniques because laws and international treaties passed and signed during the middle and late years of the Cold War had clearly made torture a crime. Bush and Rumsfeld ordered these restraints removed, and all the old methods were soon back in use in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, and at secret CIA prisons around the world.

Bush’s responsibility for legalizing torture came in two key decisions. The first was his September 17, 2001, Memorandum of Agreement, or “finding”—jargon for a presidential directive authorizing a particular CIA covert operation. This vastly expanded the CIA’s activities worldwide, including its payments to the Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan to resume the civil war against the Taliban with American air support. Bush also authorized the global pursuit of al-Qaeda “permitting the CIA to conduct covert operations [in some eighty countries] without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation” and—most important—removed ail constraints and safeguards over the CIA’s already existing program of “extraordinary rendition.”⁸⁰

The latter term is a euphemism for abducting people anywhere on Earth, including inside the United States, and secretly flying them to countries whose police and intelligence personnel are more than happy to torture them for us or where the United States runs its own secret prisons for doing so. Such countries and territories reportedly have included Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Diego Garcia, Pakistan, and unidentified Eastern European nations. The military or the CIA also run some twenty-five prisons in Afghanistan and seventeen in Iraq.⁸¹ Rendition is a violation of international law, since the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted December 10, 1984, and ratified by the U. S. Congress in October 1994, specifically says, “No state . . . shall expel, return, or extradite a person to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” The Geneva Conventions also contain articles stipulating the same prohibition.⁸²

Bush’s most fateful decision on torture, however, came in a presidential memorandum drafted by John C. Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, and endorsed by Alberto Gonzales, then counsel to the president. Dated January 18, 2002, the memo was (without evident irony) entitled “Humane Treatment of al-Qaeda and Taliban Detainees.” On February 7, it was disseminated to the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the attorney general, the director of the CIA, the national security adviser, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to the memo, captives from the battlefields of Afghanistan need not be given prisoner-of-war status and the U.S. government would therefore not abide by the provisions of the Geneva Conventions governing prisoners of war.⁸³ This key decision opened the door to the torture of captives at Bagram Air Base in Kabul, Afghanistan, then at Guantanamo naval base, Cuba, and most infamously at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Why did Bush do it? It was, in a sense, an admission of guilt. Once he got caught up in his own rhetoric about the “global war on terror” and had issued orders to the CIA and military to act secretly against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, I believe he felt that he had to protect his agents from being charged under the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law that carries the death penalty. By declaring captives to be “illegal combatants,” a term that does not exist in international law, and asserting that the Geneva Conventions simply did not apply to them, he freed his agents to torture and do as they pleased. As one intelligence official told New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh, “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’“⁸⁴

Had the president restricted his target explicitly to the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, which had carried out the 9/11 attacks, and moved against it through law enforcement means, the Geneva Conventions would indeed not have come into play and the whole issue of torture could have been avoided. He would have received global cooperation (including from the governments of most Middle Eastern countries) and would surely have been more successful in countering the threat of terrorism than through the route he actually chose. There is widespread agreement among officials in the field, including FBI agents stationed at Guantanamo, that information extracted under torture is usually worthless, that torture largely compels its victims to say what the torturer wants to hear, and that the use of torture precludes building a legal case against a particular captive. Moreover, the people rounded up in Afghanistan usually did not have valuable information, since most of them had been turned over to the Americans by Northern Alliance warlords for the bounties the United States was paying.⁸⁵ In October 2004, the deputy commander at Guantanamo, Brigadier General Martin Lucent, said to the press that most of his 550 prisoners had revealed nothing of value: “Most of these guys weren’t fighting, they were running.”⁸⁶

The president seems to have authorized torture largely for its symbolic value—the desire of his administration and its neoconservative backers to show the world that the United States was indeed a new Rome, that it could act with impunity unchecked by any established norms of international law. It was the first sign of the administrations determination to overawe the world with American power, soon enough embodied in the new strategy of “shock and awe”—the name the military gave its opening cruise missile and bombing salvos against Baghdad in March 20 03.⁸⁷ Bush himself said to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, “I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that [sic] was going to do whatever it took to win. No yielding. No equivocation. No, you know, lawyering this thing to death, that we’re after ‘em. And that was not only for domestic, for the people at home to see. It was also vitally important for the rest of the world to watch.”⁸⁸

“There are only two ways to govern,” writes Naomi Klein, the award-winning Canadian journalist, “with consent or with fear.”⁸⁹ Under George Bush, the United States decided to rule Afghanistan and Iraq through fear, and from this naturally followed disappearances without charges, indefinite detentions, torture, and “extraordinary renditions.” David Brooks, the right-wing pundit for Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Times, accurately predicted that after 9/11: “We will care a lot more about ends—winning the war—than we will about means. We will debate whether it is necessary to torture prisoners who have information about future biological attacks. We will destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders, and continue fighting. In an age of conflict, bourgeois values like compassion, tolerance, and industriousness are valued less than the classical virtues of courage, steadfastness, and a ruthless desire for victory.”⁹⁰

The president’s indispensable partner in these operations was his then legal counsel (subsequently attorney general) Alberto Gonzales. In order to protect the president from being charged with illegally ordering the torture of captives, Gonzales gathered around him a remarkable coterie of right-wing lawyers from various branches of the government. These included the Korean-American scholar John Yoo, then assistant attorney general; Timothy Flanigan, deputy counsel to the president; Patrick F. Philbin, deputy assistant attorney general; William J. Haynes, general counsel for the Department of Defense; and Jay S. Bybee, assistant attorney general.⁹¹ With sophistry and ideological fervor these legal specialists prepared briefs—”torture memos”—for the president and the secretary of defense claiming, among other things, that “[i]n order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign, [the statutory prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority. Congress lacks authority under Article I [of the Constitution] to set the terms and conditions under which the President may exercise his authority as Commander-in-Chief to control the conduct of operations during a war.”⁹² In fact, article 1, section 8 of the Constitution expressly states: “The Congress shall have Power to declare War and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.”

As Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel, editors of The Torture Papers and leading authorities on these machinations, argue, “The ‘torture memos’ ... deliberately disregard, even nullify, the balance-of-powers doctrine that has defined the United States since its inception.”⁹³ Harold Hongju Koh, dean of Yale University’s law school and a former assistant secretary of state, says, “The notion that the president has the constitutional power to permit torture is like saying he has the constitutional power to commit genocide.... It’s just erroneous legal analysis.”⁹⁴ Gonzales’s lawyers nonetheless argued for a “unitary executive” theory of presidential power, which essentially suggests that, in time of war (as they also insisted the president’s self-proclaimed “war on terror” was), the president as commander in chief has almost uncontestable powers to do more or less as he pleases, whatever Congress or the courts may say.

Perhaps the most shortsighted aspect of this claim to absolute presidential power is that it leads unavoidably to the president’s liability under the concept of “command responsibility”—the doctrine that a military commander is legally liable for all abuses and atrocities committed by his troops whether he knows about them or not. After World War II, the United States put Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita, the so-called Tiger of Malaya and subsequently commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines, on trial. A U.S. war crimes tribunal found that he had failed to uphold “command responsibility” for his troops, who had massacred thousands of innocent civilians in Manila in early 1945, even though the defense established that he had no knowledge of the crimes. Because Yamashita was tried by a military court, he appealed his case directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld his conviction by a vote of 5 to 3, thereby establishing the doctrine of command responsibility in American law. Justice Frank Murphy warned in dissent, “In the sober afterglow will come the realization of the boundless and dangerous implications of the procedure sanctioned today.... Indeed, the fate of some future President of the United States and his chief of staff and military advisers may well have been sealed by this decision.” In other words, American constitutional law already establishes the grounds on which President Bush could be held accountable for his failure to exercise command responsibility in cases of torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere.⁹⁵

As Justice Murphy suggested, the issue of command responsibility applies equally well to the president’s underlings, Secretary Rumsfeld and Generals Myers, Sanchez, and Miller. Rumsfeld’s potential liability is, however, greater than just being the highest official in charge of the Department of Defense who failed to stop torture when he learned about it.⁹⁶ According to the journalist Seymour Hersh, in late 2001, Rumsfeld personally created a highly secret “special access program” (SAP) that directed American special forces units to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate high-value targets. Code-named “Copper Green,” the SAP “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence” and was at the root of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Both President Bush and General Myers were fully informed about these operations.⁹⁷

In addition, Rumsfeld personally reviewed and signed off on many of the techniques of humiliation, abuse, and torture that would be brought into play at the American prison at Guantanamo. In one case, in a November 27, 2002, memo on acceptable interrogation methods, he personally scribbled in the margins: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing [as a technique at Guantanamo] limited to 4 hours?”⁹⁸ Of course, Rumsfeld was not naked and handcuffed when he stood working at his upright desk in the Pentagon.

In December 2003, before army investigators received the first photos of torture practices at Abu Ghraib, now retired colonel Stuart A. Huntington reported to the generals in Iraq that units of Army Rangers, members of Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and other special forces working with the CIA were torturing their detainees. Major General Barbara Fast, the highest-ranking intelligence official in Iraq, had commissioned Huntington, a veteran of the murderous counterinsurgency Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War, which was the model for Rumsfeld’s SAP, to look into charges of abuse by Copper Green operatives. Huntington concluded that such measures would imperil rather than aid U.S. efforts to quell the Iraqi insurgency. When Huntington was told by one officer at a high-value-target detention center in Baghdad that prisoners taken by the highly classified units showed signs of having been beaten, he asked whether the officer had alerted his superiors to the problem. The reply was, “Everyone knows about it.”⁹⁹

When on May 6, 2004, the press questioned Rumsfeld about his responsibility for widespread military torture in Afghanistan and Iraq, he replied, “My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture.... Therefore I’m not going to address the torture word.”¹⁰⁰ Unfortunately, Rumsfeld’s attempt to trivialize what he had authorized did not cause the problem to disappear. It only got worse and ultimately implicated the high command.

All the torture took place during General Richard Myers’s term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He knew and approved of everything that was done, including a December 2002 list of new interrogation techniques signed off on by Rumsfeld that were to be used on al-Qaeda captives held at Guantanamo Bay. These techniques included sleep and food deprivation, degrading treatment such as having female soldiers in their underwear grab and kick detainees’ genitals and rub their breasts against them, insulting detainees’ religious beliefs by having women smear them with fake menstrual blood, and using agonizing “stress positions” to try to get them to talk.¹⁰¹

After the torture photos were turned over to army criminal investigators, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior military commander in Iraq, appointed Major General Antonio M. Taguba to investigate the situation at Abu Ghraib. Given army standards of inspecting itself that prevailed in Iraq at that time, General Taguba conducted an unusually thorough and unbiased examination. He documented numerous incidents between October and December 2003 of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton abuses.”¹⁰² General Myers, who was both Sanchez’s and Taguba’s superior, reacted to the investigation by, first, trying to prevent details of the torture at Abu Ghraib from being released to the American public and then claiming that he had simply been too busy to get around to reading Taguba’s report. In April 2004, Myers called Dan Rather, the CBS News anchorman, and persuaded him not to break the story of the Abu Ghraib tortures for at least two weeks, and in May, four months after Taguba’s report had been completed, Myers told Fox News that he had still not read it.¹⁰³

General Myers was certainly aware of another January 2004 internal army report of abuses committed by the army’s 101st Airborne Division in December in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. The army kept this document secret until March 25, 2005, when it was released under a Freedom of Information Act suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The 101st Airborne’s behavior is important because it demonstrates that the acts of abuse and torture going on at Abu Ghraib were not—in one of General Myers’s favorite phrases—the work of a few “bad apples.” The January 2004 report is also among the few internal documents that directly charge the military with using torture. It says, “There is evidence that suggests 311th MI [the 311th Military Intelligence Battalion] personnel and/or translators engaged in physical torture of the detainees.” The investigating officer, whose name was blacked out of the released documents, wrote that the guards at the Mosul facility came from three infantry units of the 101st Airborne and “were poorly trained and encouraged to abuse prisoners.”¹⁰⁴ No one in the division was punished for the abuses over which General Myers held command responsibility, as he did for the cover-up that lasted until the ACLU intervened.

Given his overall command of the armed forces, General Myers was also directly responsible for setting up the torture regime at the Guantanamo prison and then exporting it to Iraq. The first commandant at Guantanamo after 9/11 was Brigadier General Rick Baccus, an officer in the Rhode Island National Guard. He ran the facility as a conventional prisoner-of-war camp, which irritated Pentagon civilian officials, who wanted to implement a whole list of aggressive new interrogation techniques.¹⁰⁵ In October 2002, General Myers removed General Baccus, allegedly for “coddling” detainees, and replaced him with Major General Geoffrey Miller, a former artillery officer who had never before held a post connected in any way to intelligence work; and yet Miller was now ordered to increase the flow of “actionable intelligence” from Guantanamo.

In pursuit of this, General Miller introduced direct assaults on prisoners, prolonged shackling in uncomfortable positions, loud music, sexual humiliation, the threat of dogs, and many other forms of torment. FBI agents who were assigned to Guantanamo were alarmed by what they witnessed there and reported back to Washington via classified e-mails (some of which the ACLU was able to have declassified):” ‘On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water,’ the FBI agent wrote on August 2, 2004. ‘Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more.’ In one case, the agent continued, ‘the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.’ “¹⁰⁶

The result was that the inspectors of the International Committee of the Red Cross accused the U.S. military of using tactics “tantamount to torture” on captives held at Guantanamo Bay.¹⁰⁷ At the same time, these methods failed to produce good intelligence. Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Christino, an intelligence officer at the Pentagon with twenty years’ experience, told David Rose, author of Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights, “Most of the information derived from interrogations at Guantanamo appears to be very general in nature; so general that it is not very useful.” According to Christino, Guantanamo had not helped to prevent a single terrorist attack.¹⁰⁸

In August 2003, the Pentagon sent General Miller to conduct a ten-day review of prison facilities in Iraq. While there, he talked directly to junior commanders and gave them copies of a manual of procedures used at Guantanamo. Although he has repeatedly claimed that he instructed American officers in charge of the Iraqi prisons that the Geneva Conventions did apply there, even if not in Guantanamo, much harsher procedures began to be implemented at Abu Ghraib soon after his departure. According to Brigadier General Janis L. Karpinski, then commandant at Abu Ghraib, “Miller came up there and told me he was going to ‘Gitmoize’ the detention operations.”¹⁰⁹

On September 14, 2003, a month after General Miller had returned to Cuba, General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq, signed a memo putting Miller’s program at Guantanamo into general practice. Sanchez authorized twenty-nine interrogation techniques, including twelve that exceeded limits in the army’s own field manual and four that he admitted probably violated international law, the Geneva Conventions, and accepted standards on the humane treatment of prisoners. Sanchez’s highly classified memo was released to the public only after a Freedom of Information suit by the ACLU. On the basis of this memo, the ACLU formally asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to investigate Sanchez—whom Hispanic magazine had just named as 2004’s “Hispanic of the Year”—for perjury. In an appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 19, 2004, General Sanchez had said under oath, “I never approved any of those measures to be used ... at any time in the last year.”¹¹⁰

Needless to say, nothing came of the ACLU’s request and the army soon exonerated General Sanchez of all responsibility for the horrors of Abu Ghraib. Nonetheless, on May 2, 2006, the ACLU released a new document it had obtained from the inspector general of the Defense Intelligence Agency under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Dated May 19, 2004, the same day as Sanchez’s Senate testimony, and marked “secret,” the document reports an earlier official investigation into General Sanchez’s role in the Abu Ghraib abuses. It says that he had ordered military inter- rogators to “go to the outer limits” to extract information from prisoners, adding that “HQ [headquarters] wanted the interrogators to break the detainees.”¹¹¹

On March 22, 2004, after seventeen months at Guantanamo, General Miller was put in charge of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He did not stay there long, however, because on November 24, 2004, he was reassigned to be assistant chief of staff for installation management for the army, a desk job back in the Pentagon. On July 1, 2004, the Pentagon also relieved General Sanchez after fifteen months as the top general in Iraq and returned him to his old assignment as commander of the army’s Fifth Corps in Germany. He was replaced in Baghdad by a four-star general, George Casey. In June 2005, the New York Times reported that army superiors believed the Abu Ghraib torture scandal had blown over and were thinking about promoting Sanchez to four stars and giving him the Southern Command in Latin America.¹¹² However, the possibility of a clash with Congress prevented any further promotions for Sanchez.¹¹³ Meanwhile, General Taguba, who had done the initial investigating at Abu Ghraib, was shunted aside, being transferred to the Pentagon and made deputy assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs.

Since the publication of the first photos from Abu Ghraib, the Pentagon has conducted at least ten high-level investigations of itself. In April 2005, the army’s inspector general issued a report that was intended to be the military’s final word on the responsibility of the senior leadership. The entire high command, civilian and military, was exonerated except for Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, a woman and a reserve officer, who was briefly in charge of U.S. prisons in Iraq in late 2003 and early 2004. She received an administrative reprimand and was demoted to colonel.¹¹⁴ As of the summer of 2006, only seven low-ranking soldiers had been charged with anything.

When the issue of official torture first arose, Senator John W. Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, promised that everyone culpable would be held accountable, but he failed to follow through, thereby earning himself a place among the seven morons who lost the war. The Washington Post editorialized, “That the affair would end in this way is even more disgraceful for the American political system than the abuses themselves.”¹¹⁵ But there was still one more disgrace to come. In June 2005, the Senate Republican Policy Committee issued a report claiming that the International Committee of the Red Cross, in daring to criticize U.S. treatment of prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay, had “lost its way.” The senators of the ruling party recommended that the Bush administration cut off all U.S. funds for the ICRC’s operations.¹¹⁶

Burton J. Lee III served as a doctor in the Army Medical Corps and, for four years, as presidential physician to George H. W. Bush. He writes, “Today, ... it seems as though our government and the military have slipped into Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’ The widespread reports of torture and ill-treatment—frequently based on military and government documents—defy the claim that this abusive behavior is limited to a few noncommissioned officers at Abu Ghraib or isolated incidents at Guantanamo Bay. When it comes to torture, the military’s traditional leadership and discipline have been severely compromised up and down the chain of command. Why? I fear it is because the military has bowed to errant civilian leadership.”¹¹⁷ I believe it is fair to suggest that this civilian leadership is suffering from the same lapses in thinking that afflicted the German desk murderers of the 1940s.

A third example of the administration’s inability to think can be found in its criminal attitude toward and treatment of Iraq’s greatest cultural treasures. In the months before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and his senior officials spoke of preserving Iraq’s “patrimony” for the Iraqi people. What he meant by patrimony, at a time when talking about Iraqi oil was taboo, was exactly that—Iraqi oil. In their “joint statement on Iraq’s future” of April 8, 2003, George Bush and Tony Blair declared, “We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq’s natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit.”¹¹⁸ In this they were true to their word. Among the few places American soldiers actually did guard during and in the wake of their invasion were that country’s oil fields and the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. The real Iraqi patrimony, that invaluable human inheritance of thousands of years, was another matter. At a time when American pundits were warning of a future “clash of civilizations,” our occupation forces were letting perhaps the greatest of all human patrimonies be looted and smashed.

There have been many dispiriting sights on TV since George Bush launched his ill-starred war on Iraq—the pictures from Abu Ghraib, Fallujah laid waste, American soldiers kicking down the doors of private homes and pointing assault rifles at women and children. But few have reverberated historically like the looting of Baghdad’s National Museum— or been forgotten more quickly in this country.

In archaeological circles, Iraq is known as the “cradle of civilization,” with a record of cultural artifacts going back more than seven thousand years. William R. Polk, the founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, says, “It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that life as we know it today began: 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.”¹¹⁹ No other places in the Bible except for Israel have more history and prophecy associated with them than Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer), and Mesopotamia (which in Greek means “between the [Tigris and Euphrates] rivers”)—different names for parts of the territory that the British around the time of World War I began to call “Iraq.”¹²⁰ Most of the early books of Genesis are set in Iraq (see Genesis 10:10,11:31; also Daniel 1-4; II Kings 24). There was, however, no country of “Iraq” until 1920, when the British combined the three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Mosul, and Baghdad and set up the puppet Faisal dynasty to govern their new domain. Britain dominated Iraqi affairs until 1958, when the last king, Faisal II, was overthrown and executed by Iraqi nationalists.

The best known of the civilizations that make up Iraq’s cultural heritage are the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sassanids, and Muslims. On April 10, 2003, in a television address, President Bush acknowledged that the Iraqi people are “the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity.”¹²¹ Only two days later, under the complacent eyes of the occupying U.S. Army in Baghdad, the Iraqis would begin to lose that heritage in a swirl of looting and burning.

In September 2004, in one of the few self-critical reports to come out of Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense, the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication wrote, “The larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended.”¹²² Nowhere was this failure more apparent than in the indifference—even glee—shown by Rumsfeld and his generals toward the looting on April 11 and 12, 2003, of the National Museum in Baghdad and the burning on April 14, 2003, of the National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Endowments. These events were, according to Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, “the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years.” Eleanor Robson, a specialist in the history of mathematics in the ancient Near East and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, said, “You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale.”¹²³ Yet Secretary Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game and shrugged it off with the comment that “Freedom’s untidy.... Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes.”¹²⁴

The National Museum of Baghdad has long been regarded as perhaps the richest archaeological institution in the Middle East. It is difficult to say with precision what was lost there in those catastrophic April days in 2003 because up-to-date inventories of its holdings, many never even described in archaeological journals, were also destroyed by the looters or remained incomplete thanks to conditions in Baghdad after the Gulf War of 1991. One of the best records, however partial, of its holdings is the catalog of items the museum lent in 1988 to an exhibition held in Japan’s ancient capital of Nara entitled “Silk Road Civilizations.” But as one museum official said to John Burns of the New York Times after the looting, “All gone, all gone. All gone in two days.”¹²⁵

A single, beautifully illustrated, indispensable book edited by Milbry Polk and Angela M. H. Schuster, The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia, represents the heartbreaking attempt of over a dozen archaeological specialists on ancient Iraq to specify what objects were in the museum before the catastrophe, where they had been excavated, and the condition of those few thousand items that have been recovered.

At a conference on art crimes held in London a year after the disaster, the British Museum’s John Curtis reported that at least half of the 40 most important stolen objects had not been retrieved and that, of some 15,000 items looted from the museum’s showcases and storerooms, about 8,000 had yet to be traced. Its entire collection of 5,800 cylinder seals and clay tablets, many containing cuneiform writing and other inscriptions some of which go back to the earliest discovery of writing itself, was stolen.¹²⁶ Since then, as a result of an amnesty for looters, about 4,000 of the artifacts have been recovered in Iraq, and more than 1,000 have been confiscated in the United States.¹²⁷ Curtis noted that random checks of Western soldiers leaving Iraq had led to the discovery of several in illegal possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the United States found more. Officials in Jordan have impounded about 2,000 pieces smuggled from Iraq; in France, 500 pieces; in Italy, 300; in Syria, 300; and in Switzerland, 250. Smaller numbers have been seized in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad.

The 616 pieces that form the famous collection of “Nimrud gold,” excavated by the Iraqis in the late 1980s from the tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud, a few miles southeast of Mosul, were saved, but only because the museum had secretly moved them to the subterranean vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq at the time of the first Gulf War. By the time the Americans got around to protecting the bank in 2003, its building was a burned-out shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all nine floors under it. Nonetheless, the underground compartments and their contents survived undamaged. On July 3, 2003, a small portion of the Nimrud holdings were put on display for a few hours, allowing a handful of Iraqi officials to see them for the first time since 1990.¹²⁸

The torching of books and manuscripts in the Library of Korans and the National Library was a historical disaster of the first order. Most of the Ottoman imperial documents and the old royal archives concerning the creation of Iraq were reduced to ashes. According to Humberto Márquez, the Venezuelan author of Historia Universal de la Destrucción de los Libros, about a million books and ten million documents were destroyed by the fires of April 14, 2003.¹²⁹ Robert Fisk, correspondent of the Independent of London, was in Baghdad the day of the fires. He rushed to the offices of the U.S. Marines’ Civil Affairs Bureau and gave the officer on duty a precise map locating the two archives and their names in Arabic and English. The smoke, he pointed out, could be seen from three miles away. The officer shouted to a colleague, “This guy says some biblical library is on fire,” but the Americans did nothing to try to put out the flames.¹³⁰

Given the black market value of ancient art objects, U.S. military leaders had been warned before the invasion that the looting of all thirteen national museums throughout the country would be a particularly grave danger in the days after they captured Baghdad and took control of Iraq. In the chaos that followed the Gulf War of 1991, vandals had stolen about 4,000 objects from nine different regional museums. In monetary terms, the illegal trade in antiquities is the third most lucrative form of international trade globally, exceeded only by drug smuggling and arms sales.¹³¹ Given the richness of Iraq’s past, there are also over 10,000 significant archaeological sites scattered across the country, only some 1,500 of which have been studied. Following the Gulf War, a number of them were illegally excavated and their artifacts sold to unscrupulous international collectors in Western countries and Japan. All this was known to American commanders.

In January 2003, an American delegation of scholars, museum directors, art collectors, and antiquities dealers met with officials at the Pentagon to discuss the forthcoming invasion. They specifically warned that Baghdad’s National Museum was the single most important site in the country. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute said, “I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected.”¹³² Gibson went back to the Pentagon twice to discuss the dangers, and he and his colleagues sent several e-mail reminders to military officers in the weeks before the war began. However, a more ominous indicator of things to come was reported in the Guardian on April 14, 2003: rich American collectors with connections to the White House were busy “persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq’s heritage by prevention of sales abroad.” On January 24, 2003, some sixty New York-based collectors and dealers organized themselves into a new group called the “American Council for Cultural Policy” and met with Bush administration and Pentagon officials to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws.¹³³ Opening up private trade in Iraqi artifacts, they suggested, would offer such items better security than they could receive in Iraq.

The main international legal safeguard for historically and humanistically important institutions and sites is The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, signed on May 14, 1954. The United States is not a party to that convention, primarily because, during the Cold War, it feared that the treaty might restrict its freedom to engage in nuclear war, but during the 1991 Gulf War the elder Bush’s administration accepted the convention’s rules and abided by a “no-fire target list” of places where valuable cultural items were known to exist.¹³⁴ UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and other guardians of cultural artifacts expected the younger Bush’s administration to follow the same procedures in the 2003 war.

Moreover, on March 26, 2003, the Pentagon’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) headed by Lieutenant General (ret.) Jay Garner, the civil authority the United States had set up for the moment hostilities ceased, sent to all senior U.S. commanders a list of sixteen institutions that “merit securing as soon as possible to prevent further damage, destruction, and/or pilferage of records and assets.” The five-page memo dispatched two weeks before the fall of Baghdad also said, “Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures” and that “looters should be arrested/detained.” First on General Garner’s list of places to protect was the Central Bank of Iraq, which is now a ruin; second was the National Museum of Iraq; sixteenth was the Oil Ministry, one of only two places that U.S. forces occupying Baghdad actually defended (the other was the Interior Ministry). Martin Sullivan, chair of the President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for the previous eight years, and Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and a member of the committee, both resigned to protest the failure of Centcom to obey orders. Sullivan said it was “inexcusable” that the museum should not have had the same priority as the Oil Ministry.¹³⁵

As we now know, the American forces made no effort to prevent the looting of the great cultural institutions of Iraq. Its soldiers, often stationed nearby, simply watched vandals enter and torch the buildings. Professor Said Arjomand, an editor of the journal Studies on Persianate Societies and a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote, “Our troops, who have been proudly guarding the Oil Ministry, where no window is broken, deliberately condoned these horrendous events.”¹³⁶ American commanders claim that, to the contrary, they were too busy fighting and had too few troops to protect the museum and libraries. However, this seems to be an unlikely explanation. During the battle for Baghdad, the U.S. military was perfectly willing to dispatch some two thousand troops to secure northern Iraq’s oil fields, and their record on antiquities did not improve when the fighting subsided. At the six-thousand-year-old Sumerian city of Ur with its massive ziggurat, or stepped temple tower (built in the period 2112-2095 BC, and restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century BC), the marines spray-painted their motto, Semper Fi (semper fidelis, “always faithful”), onto its walls.¹³⁷ The military then made the monument “off limits” to everyone in order to disguise the desecration that had occurred there, including the looting by U.S. soldiers of clay bricks used in the construction of the ancient buildings.

Until April 2003, the area around Ur, in the environs of Nasiriyah, was remote and sacrosanct. However, the U.S. military chose the land immediately adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base with two runways, measuring 12,000 and 9,700 feet respectively, and four satellite camps. In the process, military engineers moved more than 9,500 truck-loads of dirt in order to build 350,000 square feet of hangars and other facilities for aircraft and Predator unmanned drones. They completely ruined the area, the literal heartland of human civilization, for any further archaeological research or future tourism. They did, however, erect their own American imperial ziggurats. On October 24, 2003, according to the Global Security Organization, the army and air force “opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility, co-located with [a] ... Pizza Hut, provides another Burger King restaurant so that more service men and women serving in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget about the task at hand in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent that takes them back home.”¹³⁸

The great British archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan (husband of Agatha Christie), who pioneered the excavations at Ur, Nineveh, and Nimrud, quotes some classical advice that the Americans might have been wise to heed: “There was danger in disturbing ancient monuments.... It was both wise and historically important to reverence the legacies of ancient times. Ur was a city infested with ghosts of the past and it was prudent to appease them.” ¹³⁹

The American record elsewhere in Iraq is no better. At Babylon, American and Polish forces built a military depot, despite objections from archaeologists. John Curtis, the British Museum’s authority on Iraq’s many archaeological sites, reported that, on a visit in December 2004, he saw “cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate” and a “2,600-year-old brick pavement crushed by military vehicles.”¹⁴⁰ Other observers say that the dust stirred up by U.S. helicopters has sandblasted the fragile brick facade of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 BC.¹⁴¹ The archaeologist Zainab Bahrani reports, “Between May and August 2004, the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both of the sixth century BC, collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters. Nearby, heavy machines and vehicles stand parked on the remains of a Greek theater from the era of Alexander of Macedon [Alexander the Great].”¹⁴²

In another example of American indifference to the Iraqi environment, the Marine Corps air base known as “Tikrit South” is located next door to a vast preserve where Saddam Hussein kept a herd of gazelles. The marines shot and ate the gazelles as a supplement to their prepackaged Meals Ready to Eat (MREs). Corporal Joshua Wicksell of Corpus Christi, Texas, declared freshly cooked gazelle to be delicious.¹⁴³ And none of this even begins to deal with the massive, ongoing looting of historical sites across Iraq by freelance grave and antiquities robbers, preparing to stock the living rooms of Western collectors. The unceasing chaos and lack of security brought to Iraq in the wake of our invasion have meant that a future, peaceful Iraq may hardly have a patrimony to display. It is no small accomplishment of the Bush administration to have plunged the cradle of the human past into the same sort of chaos and lack of security as the Iraqi present. If amnesia is bliss, then the fate of Iraq’s antiquities represents a kind of modern paradise.

THE CIVILIZATION WE ARE IN THE PROCESS OF DESTROYING IN IRAQ IS PART of our own heritage. It is also part of the world’s patrimony. Before our invasion of Afghanistan, we condemned the Taliban for their March 2001 dynamiting of the monumental third-century AD Buddhist statues at Bamiyan. Those were two gigantic statues of remarkable historical value and the barbarism involved in their destruction blazed in headlines and horrified commentaries in our country. Today, our own government is guilty of far greater crimes when it comes to the destruction of a whole universe of antiquity, and few here, when they consider Iraqi attitudes toward the American occupation, even take that into consideration. But what we do not care to remember, others may recall all too well.