The brutalities of the Iraq war accumulate so fast it is difficult to keep track. But in this season of fifth- year anniversaries, one largely forgotten crime demands to be recalled, in part because it relates directly to the politics of memory itself. Five years ago this week, US troops stood by as looters sacked the Iraq National Library and Archives - one of the oldest and most used in the world. In Arab countries the old expression was “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.”

American troops were under orders not to intervene. Library staff who requested protection from the GI’s were told, “We are soldiers, not policemen”. American military orders did, however, extend to guarding the Ministry of Oil, and the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein’s secret police.

The selective passivity of US forces was not only ethically questionable, but also a violation of international law. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954) makes clear that libraries should not only be spared attack in wartime but also actively protected.

Despite the sack of a major cultural institution and the collapse of the society around it, the library struggles on, continuing a long tradition of resurrection from the ashes of war. The world’s first library was located in Mosul, in Northern Iraq. It was built in the 7th century BCE and produced the first known catalog in history. In 1927 a British archeological team unearthed it and, for “purposes of preservation”, carried off many of its artifacts - including the oldest known copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the first great work of world literature.

Iraq’s intellectual golden era came later and coincided with the Abbasid Dynasty ( 750-1258 ) whose capital was established at Baghdad. In 832, the construction of the Byat al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) established the new capital as an unrivaled center of scholarship and intellectual exchange.

The tradition of research there brought advances in astronomy, optics, physics and mathematics. The father of algebra, Al-Khawarizmii, labored among its scrolls. It was here that many of the Greek and Latin texts we accept as the foundation of Western thought were translated, catalogued and preserved. And it was from Baghdad that these works would eventually make their way to medieval Europe and help lift that continent from its benighted, post-Roman intellectual torpor.

In 1258, the Mongols descended on Baghdad and emptied the libraries into the Tigris, ending the city’s scholarly preeminence enjoyed for nearly 500 years. “Hence the legend developed,” as one scholar wrote, “that the river ran black from the ink of the countless texts lost in this manner, while the streets ran red with the blood of the city’s slaughtered inhabitants.”

The current Director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive, Dr. Saad Eskander, estimates that over three days, beginning on April 11, 2003, as many as “60 percent of the Ottoman and Royal Hashemite era documents were lost as well as the bulk of the Ba’ath era documents…. [and] approximately 25 percent of the book collections were looted or burned.” Other Iraqi manuscript collections and university libraries suffered similar fates.

Since then, Iraqis have once again tried to rebuild their library. The occupying powers have played along, but like so much about the Iraq War, their effort has been marked by ineptitude, hypocrisy and a cruel disregard for Iraqi people and culture.

Early in the occupation, L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), demonstrated an unwillingness to provide the basic funds necessary for the reconstruction of Iraq’s educational and informational infrastructure. Dr. Rene Teijgeler, senior consultant for Culture for the Iraqi Reconstruction Management office at the American Embassy in Baghdad, left his position in February of 2005, not having “the supplies of ready cash that could be used to acquire something as simple as bookshelves.” His position was left empty.

So the library staff have looked elsewhere, occasionally finding pieces of the old collection for sale there on Al Mutanabi street, home to Baghdad’s booksellers.

Many dedicated people have offered important solidarity. In Florence, the city government underwrote construction of a conservation lab. The Czech government funded the training of Iraqi archivists. With the exception of invaluable training sessions organized by private educational institutions such as Harvard University, American support has been limited to a relatively small number of individual scholars, a few dedicated nonprofit agencies, nominal USAID support and the cooperation of a handful of private
corporations. The British National Library has provided recently published English-language social science texts and donated microfilm copies of its colonial administrative records from its last occupation of Iraq. But the replacement of physical documents largely ends here.

It would be unfair and frankly absurd to blame American librarians and their shrinking budgets, rising legal costs and increasingly costly dependence on proprietary databases for the state of Iraq’s infrastructure. But the increasingly unstable position of American libraries is actually part of the same logic that produced that war. The disdain for cultural institutions does not stop at the border–bombs there, budget cuts here.

Excerpted from The Nation

Image: “Al-Mutanabi Street, 5 March 2007″, by textile artist, Eileen Doughty. See more of her work at Doughty Designs

A Marine, the War, and a Dog Named Lava

During the first week of the battle for Fallujah, Marines securing an abandoned warehouse heard a strange sound. What they found was a “ball of fur not much bigger than a grenade.” The battalion adopted the puppy, and this is the inspiring story of their struggle to keep him alive and ship him back to the States.

An excerpt from the book, by Jay Kopelman:

I heard someone say once that guilty people live violent lives. At the time, I didn’t really get it, but if what they meant was the way guilt waits in ambush, traps your well-trained sense of control and then tortures you into confessions you’d just as soon not make, I now understand.

I mean, I guess it’s guilt. That’s one part of my confession. Maybe it’s just what the therapist calls post-traumatic stress, even though I’ve only been home for a week, or maybe some chemical imbalance brought on recently by any number of issues or maybe just residue from the sleeping pills still floating through my blood stream, but hell, what else besides guilt has the capacity to beach land so much fear?

Anxiety, maybe. Anxiety assumes less culpability, implies less of an offense, offers more of an excuse. Or compulsiveness. Along with nightmares, flashbacks, moodiness, alcoholism and depression, they said something about a compulsive disorder that could send your brain cells scurrying into all sorts of witless directions, and between checking incoming email, praying for the phone to ring and counting the paces between one wall and the next, it seems entirely plausible.

But then, so did getting Lava out of Iraq in the first place, and how impeachable was that offense after Allah, Jehovah, Jesus, Lady Luck and Santa Clause made it pretty clear it wasn’t on their list of things to do this year?

I check the email again. Nothing. It’s the middle of the day there in Baghdad, the middle of the night here in California and no time in particular everywhere else in between. Something must have gone wrong.

I mean, what else besides guilt would drive a man to do what I did back there? Obsession, perhaps, but that implies a lifetime of prescription slips from the therapist and besides, not everyone involved in the rescue—the Marines, the journalists, the Iraqis, the personal security guys — could be crazy. Maybe they could. Nothing seems right-side-up anymore and hasn’t for some time now.

I think the pacing is what’s getting to me. The back-and-forth unearths all kinds of radioactive crap I don’t want hanging around. Like a lot of faces. Weird, dreamy faces. Faces of stray dogs I fed at the Syrian border. Faces of embedded journalists in Fallujah with terror dripping down them like sweat. Faces of Iraqis smashed into the street like ripe banana meat under your boot and the question of whether a face is really a face if there’s no one home behind it.

Mostly, though, faces of people who risked their lives to try and help save Lava. They bother me the most, and that’s the second part of the confession. I think we all let the mangy, little flea-bitten refugee get to us—as if compassion was some sinister germ intent on infection—and now that we’ve all been bitten by the contagion, now that it comes down to the end, now that all other roads of escape are closed for good, I feel responsible to them to make sure Lava gets out alive.

Maybe the little shit is dead already. Or maybe they didn’t make it through and he’s now lost on the streets of Baghdad wondering where everybody went.

There were so many times when I figured the best thing for the little guy was to just shoot him in the head—yeah, yeah, I know how that sounds—but really, I mean I couldn’t stand the thought of him joining the other stray dogs who hobbled around on three legs looking for bodies to eat. I remember after the initial bombing in Fallujah, there were dead Iraqis all over the place and seeing dogs feasting on the remains and thinking this must be the only place on Earth where the dead nourished the living and how screwed up that seemed. Now I pray that if Lava doesn’t make it through, he’ll find a body somewhere in Baghdad to keep him alive for just one more day.

Which brings me to the third part of the confession: No matter how bad things get, it’s still better to be alive. And I want Lava to stay alive. I want to know he’s breathing and leaping after dust balls and chasing imaginary enemies in his sleep. I want him to be alive, because then there’s still hope that he’ll make it here to California and get to be an American dog who runs on the beach and chases the mailman instead of strangers with guns. I want him to be alive almost more than anything I can think of.

The fourth part of the confession is that when the phone finally rings, I don’t want to answer it…

Lava’s story on CBS News

A Soldier’s Gift: Sgt. Peter Neesley and his dogs, Mama and Boris