Babylon’s ancient wonder, lying in ruins

[Sea Skimmer]

You can't refute accusations about irresponsible or criminal US army conduct by pointing out that Saddam was worse. This is like the people who tried to dismiss Abu-Ghraib by pointing out that Saddam tortured prisoners more severely.

We damn well can when we are physically building on top of Saddams own work. Anything on the surface would have been destroyed or buried already. We used the site as a base specifically because it was already one of Saddam’s palace complexes just like we used his palaces all over Iraq. The fact that this one had a defensive canal made it all the better as a base I’m sure things would have worked out so much better had we instead taken away farmland from the locals and bulldozed that over, leaving Iraq with yet more unemployed and unable to feed itself then it already was.

http://www.arcent.army.mil/cflcc_today/ ... /16_02.jpg
This is one piece of Saddam’s Palace complex on the site, illustrating the massive scale of his works. That entire mound is artificial. You can also see how close the river water level is to the surrounding land, meaning it flooded many times over the last 3,000 years.

http://image06.webshots.com/6/9/38/8/15 ... BFp_fs.jpg
Here’s another shot showing a second mound Saddam never got around to putting a palace on, as well as the neat and tidy reconstruction of the city in the foreground. Many of the bricks are stamped with ‘Built in the Rein of Saddam The Great’ in Arabic too, which I’m sure did not help encourage anyone to respect the place.

The fact that Saddam used the site for his own purposes BTW, all his palace complexes can be considered military command and control sites, makes it legally open game as fair as military operations and law are concerned.

[Frank Hipper]

While that's beside the point I was trying to make (the Iraqi oil ministry's preservation in light of subsequent events), I fail to see where people's lives were being compromised for the sake of ancient artifacts, despite repeated argumentation of that being so.

If you recall, six years ago the world outrage over the destruction of Buddha statues in Afghanistan was still pretty recent and fresh in peoples' minds. Many people, myself included, were rather disgusted at the way nobody gave a damn about women being oppressed for years but then rose up in anger about the destruction of a bunch of statues. It's the general principle which people need reminding of.

I'm still sickened by reports of the treatement women are recieving in areas of Afghanistan, as I had been for years before the Buddha statue's destruction.

Most people's attention is only grabbed by loud noises and shiny things.

Apparently, the Taliban were well aware of that. Observe how claims of the United States' actual survival being compromised by terrorism are still being proclaimed thanks to the shock value of September 11th.

However, the general principles applying to Afghanistan and the specific situation of looting an Iraqi museum is an ephemeral connection.

Dismissal of the loss of artifacts does not equate to a claim of artifacts being worthless, as well.
I could light a twenty dollar bill on fire to make some sort of demonstration od dismissal, but that wouldn't mean that bill is worthless to me.

It means it's worth less to you than whatever amusement you got from setting it on fire, which does say something about how little you value it.

In that case, arguing in favor of security for the Oil Ministry while ignoring the museum says what?

[Darth Wong]

In that case, arguing in favor of security for the Oil Ministry while ignoring the museum says what?

It says that people think the oil ministry is more important than the museum, obviously. I guess we have to ask what the consequences would have been if they had gone the other way, and see how people would have been affected.

[Darth Wong]

We damn well can when we are physically building on top of Saddams own work.

I'm not an expert on these fortifications, and I won't pretend to be. But I find it hard to believe that one can construct anything without going below the surface, and the more substantial the construction, the deeper one must go below the surface. Also, I don't see how this excuses looting of the site and smuggling of artifacts out of the country.

[Frank Hipper]

In that case, arguing in favor of security for the Oil Ministry while ignoring the museum says what?

It says that people think the oil ministry is more important than the museum, obviously. I guess we have to ask what the consequences would have been if they had gone the other way, and see how people would have been affected.

Why a case of one or the other, but not both?

[Sea Skimmer]

I'm not an expert on these fortifications, and I won't pretend to be. But I find it hard to believe that one can construct anything without going below the surface, and the more substantial the construction, the deeper one must go below the surface.

Not really. All those concrete blastwalls you see all over just sit on the surface. Its better that way so a blast will knock them over (still leaving the wall segment as an anti vehicle barrier) before it will shatter them into a hail of lethal concrete chunks. You have to build up in Iraq since the water table is very close to the surface anywhere people actually live. That actually impeded Saddam himself from building the bunkers he wanted in downtown Bagdad. The end solution was to put a very heavily overbuilt building on top as a burster.

Most of the barracks and support buildings we build are just on shallow concrete slabs and since the whole site was already churned over that’s unlikely to be making things worse. We utilized a large number of Saddams palace buildings for when we needed larger structures. I can’t help but wonder if the reported ‘bulldozed hills’ are in fact the mounds Saddam built up too. Big as they are we certainly could have destroyed them, actually returning the site to something more like it was originally. The Google earth photos and most photos in general are only from 2004.

Anyway, it is very hard for me to see the damage being done even by major construction being worse then if the site was just left open and could be looted by people with trucks and heavy equipment for seven years straight.

Also, I don't see how this excuses looting of the site and smuggling of artifacts out of the country.

Well, under that wonderful western free world legal system we pretend we all like, that’d be crimes committed by individuals, and would and should be investigated and prosecuted as such. Too bad that will be near impossible because artifacts stolen by US troops are going to be largely indistinguishable from all the stuff looted by other people already over the last 200 years. The easiest stuff to theft date would come from the Saddam era reconstructions too.

[Sea Skimmer]

Why a case of one or the other, but not both?

Because the US had limited forces in the city, and was still fighting lingering Saddam loyalists at the time? Remember once Bagdad fell many US troops immediately had to turn north and head for Tikrit and central Iraq which had still seen no US forces. If anyone could be spared to guard a museum, well, we could also instantly find a combat mission for them like securing an ammunition dump. Guarding static locations eats of manpower at a hell of a rate, and you’ll never manage ever. Iraq now has over 600,000 security personal plus 100,000 US troops and still cant do it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

As much as the destruction of such a site is a shame, in all honesty it sounds like it had more or less been defiled by Hussein as a vanity project. Replacing ancient Babylonian bricks with ones inscribed with an ode to himself?

That is an interesting example of values dissonance: today, we agree that Saddam Hussein should not have done that, but the ancient Babylonians who built the city in the first place would probably have expected such behavior from a ruler. Weird.

This does not excuse Hussein's behavior, let alone the behavior of the people who set up the military base there during the occupation. I'm confident that everyone, including the ancient Babylonians, would disagree with making a parking lot for Humvees out of the ruins.

Well, honestly, the ancient Babylons, giving humvees, would have happily made a parking lot out of Ashur, so let's not be too hasty. On the other hand nothing excuses even half of what this report says was done. Though we're not the first in the modern era to do it, either; the British heavily shelled the ancient walls of Ctesiphon in 1915 which the Ottomans were using as positions for their advanced pickets of their main defensive entrenchments which they themselves had built through the old city, with their command headquarters in the ruins of the old Parthian palace coming under abortive attack from British river gunboats. For that matter if we move further afield, the Chinese themselves deployed troops along the Great Wall to fend off the Japanese in the 1930s, leading to its being heavily shelled.

One might decry it, but if the ruins of Babylon (and ancient cities were ALWAYS carefully sited for the defensive--remember the sheer scale of Babylon's walls) offered a good defensive position, and indeed they did, it makes perfect sense to turn it into a fortified encampment. Ultimately, that's what cities initially were--fortified encampments. They were therefore built on the ideal ground for a fortified encampment... And most of the factors which go into making a region ideal ground for fortifications don't change over even thousands of years. Another example is how for example the Japanese fortified the ancient Citadel of Mandalay in Burma in WW2. The British, when on the counter-offensive to drive them out of Burma, proceeded to bring up very heavy guns to direct-fire at nearly point blank range into the citadel, but it proved such a strong defensive position against even modern fire that it succeeded in resisting that and only fell when, in a feat worthy of a medieval siege that it had been built for, the British managed to send parties through the drainage system.

Which brings us to the point that though we may condemn this, if I was actually commanding a unit deployed in that area which needed a fortified position, I would invariably order my troops to dig in along the citadel of Babylon because it maximizes the defensive firepower and positional advantage of the unit (and thus the chance to save the lives of one's soldiers) under my command... This is doubtless exactly the thought process that led to the camp. The inexcusable part was the lack of care taken with the ruins once they were turned into a fortress; the fort as it was should have been respected and ideally the commanders should have made their homes in restored ruins as a symbol of that.

I blame this primarily on the fact that history and a sense of appreciation for past military epochs, that the sense of erudition and culture which was instilled in military officers in the curriculum of older periods, is no longer replicated today, in favour of a more businesslike approach to the art of war. Almost universally, officers were once also historians and had respect for the places around them even as they used them out of necessity in their operations, and many, many historical works were published by military officers. These days we have none of that and I think the lack of attention in the modern military academy to the historical dimension is in part to blame with the relatively callous handling of the American fortification of Babylon.

[loomer]

It's interesting to read what people like Alex Jones' followers think of the US presence in Babylon. They're universally against it, but not because it's valuable land for its historical significance or because of the war itself, but because apparently it has some kind of significance for the supposed New World Order, or lets them perform ancient magical rituals.

Frankly, I kind of wish it was true. It'd be much less disheartening than having the place damaged for the current loss:gain ratio if the place meant that they could do ridiculous things like ride demons from hell into battle.

[Simon_Jester]

Which brings us to the point that though we may condemn this, if I was actually commanding a unit deployed in that area which needed a fortified position, I would invariably order my troops to dig in along the citadel of Babylon because it maximizes the defensive firepower and positional advantage of the unit (and thus the chance to save the lives of one's soldiers) under my command...

There's a catch. You're not digging in your troops to await the attack of an approaching enemy army, like the Turks at Ctesiphon or the Japanese at Mandalay. You're trying to occupy territory.

It is still desirable to put your bases on the most defensible ground possible if you're occupying territory. But I don't think that makes it an all-overriding concern, if there is some other reason not to put the base on that particular spot. If there's something special about the hill that offers a commanding view of the surrounding area that would normally discourage one from building helipads on it, and if one is not worried about being attacked by a superior army... then it might make more sense to put the base somewhere else.

I think you have a point about the shift in the focus of the education of military officers, though I can't prove it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

There's a catch. You're not digging in your troops to await the attack of an approaching enemy army, like the Turks at Ctesiphon or the Japanese at Mandalay. You're trying to occupy territory.

The problem is that this kind of thinking led to the failure of the ARVN to heavily fortify Hue, allowing the citadel (which was being used as a divisional headquarters, not a good thing to lose!) to follow into Viet Cong hands during the Tet offensive. And I suspect an example like that, with the consequent extreme difficulty in regaining the position as the Battle of Hue entailed, was very influential in the American mindset (avoid the mistakes of Vietnam at all costs) which is still all-powerful in considering decisions and so on.

It is still desirable to put your bases on the most defensible ground possible if you're occupying territory. But I don't think that makes it an all-overriding concern, if there is some other reason not to put the base on that particular spot. If there's something special about the hill that offers a commanding view of the surrounding area that would normally discourage one from building helipads on it, and if one is not worried about being attacked by a superior army... then it might make more sense to put the base somewhere else.

I think you have a point about the shift in the focus of the education of military officers, though I can't prove it.

Well, I agree that half of what they did was unnecessary, helipads included. It just made perfect sense for the military itself to garrison Babylon in strength, not how they chose to go about doing that.

[Simon_Jester]

The problem is that this kind of thinking led to the failure of the ARVN to heavily fortify Hue, allowing the citadel (which was being used as a divisional headquarters, not a good thing to lose!) to follow into Viet Cong hands during the Tet offensive. And I suspect an example like that, with the consequent extreme difficulty in regaining the position as the Battle of Hue entailed, was very influential in the American mindset (avoid the mistakes of Vietnam at all costs) which is still all-powerful in considering decisions and so on.

OK, but at this point we're analyzing the psychology (why does the US military do this?) as much as the logic (does it make sense to do this?)

I think the best answer would have been to put a base or two near the ruins of Babylon, string razor wire and barriers around the perimeter, and patrol the place with infantry and, where it would not be too archaeologically messy, vehicles. Control access, make it impractical for anyone to sneak large forces into the area a la Hue, but don't start leveling the place to make room for helipads.

Of course, this is manpower intensive, and our illustrious leaders saw fit to occupy the country with little manpower, so that would most likely have been ruled out in the planning session.

Well, I agree that half of what they did was unnecessary, helipads included. It just made perfect sense for the military itself to garrison Babylon in strength, not how they chose to go about doing that.

Yes, but once you put a US military base somewhere, helipads are more or less inevitable, as are large parking lots and heavy vehicle traffic.

[Broomstick]

I can't help but think that quite a bit of these sites look, to the untutored eye, like crumbly brick building ruins, largely indistinguishable from, say, a crumbly brick ruin of an apartment building build in 1960, or 1970, or 1980, such as the troops might have seen all over Iraq prior to coming to the Very Important Archaeological Site. That doesn't make the destruction OK, it does make it more understandable why and how it happened.

[Thanas]

^One would think they would be briefed about it.

[Tanasinn]

Taking the army's claim that they moved in to protect the site at face value, it's small wonder what happened. I doubt your average military officer has much concern for mouldering bricks and etched rocks with concerns like building a defensible, functional base at the front of his or her mind. Soldiers looting artifacts isn't surprising, either - they're not angels to begin with and the military doesn't pay the lower ranks spectacularly. That's to say nothing of any ideas of entitlement that could easily pop up when you're fighting a war.

The grimly funny thing about this is, assuming the army did place themselves for the preservation of the site, they probably caused even more damage than would have otherwise occured. A soldier is not an archaeologist and a base is not a dig site, so little wonder severe damage resulted.

[Thanas]

^I wouldn't go that far - looters in Iraq are way more devestating than the US army. Of course, they could have gone about protecting the sites a lot more faster/better.

[Broomstick]

^One would think they would be briefed about it.

One would think... but such things do not always happen.