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1016Cette analyse de Gabriel Ash, publiée par YellowTimes.org, est intéressante, aussi bien dans son aspect objectif que dans son aspect polémique. Elle concerne le sac du Musée National de Bagdad, qu’elle présente comme une action tacitement voulue par les Américains. Elle présente cette action comme une action contre la mémoire historique de l’Irak, contre l’identité de l’Irak. C’est-à-dire qu’elle donne à la guerre contre l’Irak une radicalité qui répond à certaines ambitions théoriques de certains des théoriciens de cette guerre, notamment les idéologues néo-conservateurs qui veulent une restructuration de la région selon le modèle démocratique.
L’idée, si elle est bien loin d’être absurde, contraste avec les conditions de la guerre : la guerre est bien loin de représenter les destructions radicales qui devraient accompagner un tel projet et les psychologies irakiennes sont bien loin d’avoir subi le choc qui devrait également accompagner un tel projet. (Ce cas est important, qui différencie de façon décisive le “projet irakien” des cas allemand et japonais de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, qui furent présentés comme inspirateurs.) En fait, il y a un contraste saisissant entre les ambitions théoriques américaines et les modalités d’application, qui sont réduites aux dimensions des modalités d’intervention US actuelles, interdisant effectivement qu’on retrouve les conditions de la Deuxième Guerre.
D’autre part, une chose doit, selon nous, être mise en cause dans la démarche de Ash : le parallélisme entre le comportement américain et le comportement de tous les conquérants. C’est une chose de faire figurer des richesses de la mémoire et des arts d’autres pays (conquis ou pas) dans des musées comme le British National et le Louvre, c’en est une autre de livrer ces richesses à la rapacité nihiliste et à la pauvreté intellectuelle des “lois du marché”. Cette équivalence n’est pas, à notre sens, acceptable. Le comportement US, s’il y a eu effectivement préméditation pour le pillage du Musée National de Bagdad, ressort d’une forme postmoderne d’un comportement bien connu, qui est celui de la barbarie, c’est-à-dire quelque chose qui est en-dehors de l’histoire et qui nie la spécificité de l’histoire (éventuellement pour la transformer en quelque chose d’autre, comme on l’a vu plus haut).
Ces réserves étant à l’esprit, on est d’autant plus à l’aise pour considérer avec un réel intérêt l’analyse que fait Ash de l’aversion évidente, quasiment “naturelle”, des Américains pour la mémoire, — ou, plutôt, des dirigeants du système américaniste. C’est là un point qui leur est complètement spécifique, qui tient à leur conception du monde, à leur place également très spécifique dans l’histoire, — ou leur refus d’occuper une place dans l’histoire justement. Ce qu’on dira également est que la médiocrité de l’actuelle équipe au pouvoir, qui n’est pas un accident mais qui correspond effectivement à un certain degré de décadence, voire de subversion de la puissance US, rend très difficile l’accomplissement du projet implicitement décrit dans toute sa radicalité. Le résultat pourrait donc être, effectivement, qu’en voulant supprimer la mémoire irakienne pour mieux remodeler ce pays à l’image a-historique que conçoit l’Amérique, on ait fait une certaine “place nette” pour le retour de forces (religieuses notamment) qui s’appuient complètement sur cette mémoire, mais plus dans sa dimension religieuse.
Cette médiocrité de l’équipe dirigeante se retrouve chez divers commentateurs qui la soutiennent. C’est le cas, ici, de la commentatrice ultra-conservatrice Ann Coulter, qui, dans un de ses textes critiquant les libéraux, écrit incidemment à propos du sac du Musée de Bagdad. On appréciera également l’esprit historique de l’analogie avec la libération de Paris, avec l’affirmation qu’enfin au moins les Américains « came in and imposed democracy on them » (Coulter parle des Français après août 1944). Coulter “dérape” sans doute lorsqu’elle ridiculise les quelques “poteries” irakiennes volées dans le Musée National, en précisant qu’il ne s’agit tout de même pas d’oeuvres de Rodin (« We're not talking about Rodins here »). Puisque Rodin a l’air d’être pour elle une référence de la suprême qualité artistique en matière de sculpture, il serait temps qu’elle s’aperçoive qu’il est Français. Dans tous les cas, il s’agit effectivement, devant une telle médiocrité des connaissances et du jugement, de constater que l’entreprise d’éradication de la mémoire des Américains que décrit Ash est, paradoxalement mais heureusement limitée par cette extraordinaire médiocrité et cette extraordinaire petitesse des esprits qu’on voit ainsi se manifester.
« Now the biggest mishap liberals can seize on is that some figurines from an Iraqi museum were broken – a relief to college students everywhere who have ever been forced to gaze upon Mesopotamian pottery. We're not talking about Rodins here. So the Iraqis looted. Oh well. Wars are messy. Liberalism is part of a religious disorder that demands a belief that life is controllable.
» At least we finally got liberals on the record against looting. It seems the looting in Iraq compared unfavorably with the ''rebellion'' in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict. When ''rebels'' in Los Angeles began looting, liberals said it was a sign of frustration – they were poor and hungry. As someone noted at the time, apparently they were thirsty as well, since they hit a lot of liquor stores. Meanwhile, the Iraqis were pretty careful about targeting the precise source of their oppression. Their looting concentrated on Saddam's palace, official government buildings – and the French cultural center.
» However many precious pots were stolen, it has to be said: The Iraqi people behaved considerably better than the French did after Americans liberated Paris. Thousands of Frenchmen were killed by other Frenchmen on allegations of collaboration with the Nazis. Subsequent scholarship has shown that charges of ''collaboration'' were often nothing more than a settling of personal grudges and family feuds. This was made simple by the fact that so many Frenchmen really did collaborate with the Nazis. The French didn't seem to resent the Nazi occupation very much. Nazi occupation is their default position. They began squirming only after Americans came in and imposed democracy on them. »
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When Titus destroyed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in 71 A.D., he took back to Rome its treasures, including the most famous one, the Menorah. His proud brother had the image of the plunder carved on a triumphal arc. Empires have always punctuated conquests with triumphalist looting. The British Museum and the Louvre are no less commemorations of Western civilization as of Western empires plundering the riches of their subjugated peoples.
Looting the culture of the enemy is symbolic of victory, a kind of ''consummation'' of the new imperial relation of domination. Conquest requires the assent of the conquered, who must therefore be humiliated. Seeing the victor in possession of the symbols of one's former pride and sovereignty is supposed to send a message to the conquered: the gods have forsaken them.
In ancient Mesopotamia, wars were always between gods. Victory was always the victory of one god over another. That was also the logic of Titus when he plundered and burned the Jewish Temple. Things have superficially changed since back then. But wars are still not settled until the ''god'' of the victor wins the obedience of the defeated, whatever that god is now called.
Seen in this light, the looting of Baghdad's National Museum was almost de rigueur. True to its god, the U.S. empire didn't send its soldiers to loot the museum. It adopted a ''laissez-faire'' attitude. The forces of the state stood by as the looting was conducted by ''private enterprise.'' Iraq's heritage was not crated to the Metropolitan Museum. Instead, it ended up in the possession of Washington's supreme god -- the market.
Was it planned? It depends on what one means by planning. The Pentagon, we know, discussed the likelihood of the museum's looting and chose to take no preventive steps. The local commanders were told about the looting in progress and also ignored it. It is clear the decision makers didn't mind the plunder. This wasn't oversight, just as reducing the budget for terrorism prevention before September 11 wasn't an oversight. In both cases, there were documented warnings that were willfully ignored.
Conspiracy theories are bound to surface. I am, however, more inclined toward seeing the looting of the museum as the product of ingrained attitudes that mesh fortuitously with the ideology of Washington.
The National Museum of Baghdad had to go. The institute represented too many things that Washington would rather forget. The museum represented the antiquity of civilization in Baghdad. It was an institutional place that belied Washington's patronizing attitudes toward Arab culture. Moreover, as holder of documents and artifacts from the oldest cities in the world, Baghdad's museum represented the unity of world civilization. It had to be a prime target for those who wanted to fancy themselves in a ''clash of civilizations,'' or better still, a clash between civilization and the desert. Above all, the museum was a place of collective memory.
Gore Vidal called the U.S., ''the United States of Amnesia.'' The makers of U.S. culture are averse to memory. Memory brings pain, imposes obligations, and makes political manipulation more difficult. ''History is bunk,'' Henry Ford told America in a fit of wishful thinking. In truth, collective memory is necessary for effective resistance. Without it, one cannot have political goals and desires; one cannot have a political identity; therefore, one cannot resist. Without memory, one is reduced to desiring only that which has just popped up into consciousness. Without the memory of past struggles, victories and frustrations, one can only be an obedient worker-consumer.
Iraq has a lot to forget in order to become a well-mannered U.S. protectorate. Iraq must forget how the U.S. helped the Baath party take control. It must forget how the U.S. drove Saddam Hussein to militarize and supported him in the war against Iran in order to punish Iranians for throwing off the U.S. puppet regime of the Shah in 1979. Iraq must forget how good the relations between Saddam and the White House were before 1991. It must forget how the U.S. allowed Saddam to massacre the rebelling Shiites in 1991. It must forget a decade of murderous sanctions and half a million children who could have been alive today but for U.S. foreign policy. It must forget the thousands who died from U.S. bombs. It must forget it is a country that was already a victim of colonialism before.
Is it surprising that the plan to reshape Iraq along American lines would begin with an attack on its collective memory? On the contrary, if it were at all possible, the Pentagon would have completely outlawed the use of the past tense in Arabic.
This did not require a conspiracy. All it required was that all those who mattered share a set of cultural understandings and idioms:
First, for the American conquerors, the past is always a ''minefield,'' a ''can of worms,'' an impediment to ''pragmatism'' (i.e. going along with the powers that be), etc. Americans watched in horror at the masses of blood- covered Shiites commemorating the death of Imam Husseyin in Karbala. This is what collective memory looks like. Scary!
Second, preserving the past is a waste of money, a way of encouraging ''bureaucracy'' and something that matters only to academics who are, anyway, ''anti-American.''
Third, this is Arab culture and past, i.e., in contemporary Americanese, ''terrorist'' culture. Why spend resources on protecting that?
And so, Iraq's past was ''privatized.''
If the U.S. gets its way, everything else Iraq has, and in particular oil, will also be privatized soon. That is at least the plan. It is described as creating a strong system of ''private property.'' But Iraqis don't have the money to buy their own natural wealth from the U.S.. It will go to either foreigners or thieves (or both). The major impediment to this planned looting of Iraq's oil and water (sorry, ''privatization,'' c.f. the ''privatization'' of Russia, Argentina, etc.) is Iraq's various pools of collective memory. The U.S. will face growing opposition by Iraqis who refuse to forget the many good reasons not to trust U.S. goodwill.
There are, however, two contradictions at the heart of the American occupation of Iraq that will contribute to its unraveling.
First, cost: Forgetting is expensive. The same Henry Ford who said history is bunk invented high-wage consumer capitalism. It is doubtful that the U.S. is capable of exporting high wage capitalism to Iraq. Not only is every dollar that goes to Iraq a liability for Bush's tax-cutting domestic plans, but the corporate contractors who will get that money will try to leave as little as possible of it in the hands of Iraqis. Privatization has yet to produce a single example of generating a widespread boost in wealth. It would be a true miracle if Iraq becomes that first example.
Second, the state: The neo-cons who masterminded the war believe in a minimal ''laissez-faire'' state. Yet it might take a Saddam-style tyranny to suppress opposition to a U.S. puppet regime. Rather than ushering Iraq into a neo-liberal nirvana, the weakness of the state is bolstering alternative collective memories that are potentially just as hostile to the U.S. Already, the Shiite religious community is emerging as a major network of resistance to the occupation. The old-school Machiavellians, who used to run U.S. foreign policy, were free from too strong ideological commitments. Bush I had remorselessly allowed Saddam to quash the Shiite rebellion in 1991. Bush I also ridiculed the anti-statist economic theories of the right as ''Voodoo economics.''
The neo-cons, on the other hand, will have to overcome opposition from pragmatists and prove that they can win in Iraq on their own neo-liberal terms. They will have to create a system that is repressive enough to protect international capital from Iraqis, yet open enough to convince the world that Iraqis love being free and poor. And they will have to do it on the cheap.
What if neo-con fantasies prove impossible to implement? Evil tongues have lashed out saying the Pentagon has no exit strategy. That is simply not true, and Afghanistan provides the model. The U.S. army can perhaps fight two wars at the same time, but the U.S. media cannot. The Pentagon exit strategy from Iraq is, therefore, war with Syria and/or Iran.
[Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel. He is an unabashed ''opssimist.'' He writes his columns because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword - and sometimes not. He lives in the United States. Gabriel Ash encourages your comments: gash@YellowTimes.org]
YellowTimes.org is an international news and opinion publication. YellowTimes.org encourages its material to be reproduced, reprinted, or broadcast provided that any such reproduction identifies the original source, http://www.YellowTimes.org. Internet web links to http://www.YellowTimes.org are appreciated.
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