Found in Asian Times, July 9, 2005, by Chalmers Johnson,
Note from Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch: The World Monuments Fund has placed Iraq on its list of the Earth’s 100 most endangered sites, the first time that a whole nation has been listed. The destruction began as Baghdad fell. First, there was the looting of the National Museum. That took care of some of the earliest words on clay, including, possibly, cuneiform tablets with missing parts of the epic of Gilgamesh. Soon after, the great libraries and archives of the capital went up in flames and books, letters, government documents, ancient Korans and religious manuscripts stretching back centuries vanished forever. What we’re talking about, of course, is the flesh of history. Worse yet, the looting of antiquity, words and objects not only never ended, but seems to have accelerated. From well organized gangs of grave robbers to American engineers building bases to American soldiers taking souvenirs, the ancient inheritance not just of Iraqis but of all of us has simply headed south. Though less attended to than the human costs of the war, such crimes against history are no small matter, as Chalmers Johnson indicates below. [1] Continue Reading…