ancient mesopotamia and modern iraq in the british press, 1980–2003 by michael seymour

C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 3, June 20042004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2004/4503-0003$3.00

Ancient Mesopotamia and Modern Iraq in the British Press, 198020031

by Michael Seymour

This paper addresses the relationship between the representation in British newspapers of Iraqs present and that of its ancient past. Using a database of articles drawn from 23 years of coverage, it aims to demonstrate a strong and highly politicized tendency to link the ancient past to the present through metaphor and allegory. This connection is discussed in terms of its implications for the popular representation of ancient Mesopotamia and for coverage of contemporary politics in three contexts: the Iran-Iraq War, the 199091 Gulf War and associated sanctions, and the build-up to war in 20013. The paper examines the roles of heritage in building perceptions of modern Iraq through the media and calls for a broader recognition of the dangers and potentials of heritage as a tool in the representation of international conict. m i c h a e l s e y m o u r is an M. Phil./Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (31-34 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY, U.K. [[email protected]]). Born in 1979, he received his B.A. (2000) and M.A. (2002) from the University of Southhampton. His dissertation is tentatively titled Approaches to the Mesopotamian Past in the History of Archaeological Thought: Babylon in Modern Representation, Reception, and Cultural Consumption. He was published (with Stephanie Moser and others) Transforming Archaeology through Practice: Strategies for Collaborative Archaeology and the Community Archaeology Project at Quseir, Egypt (World Archaeology 34: 22048). The present paper was submitted 9 vii 03 and accepted 29 x 03. [Supplementary material appears in the electronic edition of this issue on the journals web page (http://www.journals.uchicago. edu/CA/home.html).]

1. I thank Stephanie Moser and Yannis Hamilakis of the Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, Roger Matthews and Jack Green of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and John Curtis of the British Museum for a wide range of advice, information, and support. I also thank the six anonymous reviewers for their careful attention and useful suggestions. Remaining errors and omissions remain entirely my own. For funding I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Board, U.K., whose support of my postgraduate studies at the University of Southampton and University College London allowed me to conduct this research.

The political value of the past is well recognized, and the politicized use of archaeology in modern contexts now receives serious academic consideration (Gathercole and Lowenthal 1989, Kohl and Fawcett 1995a, Daz Andreu and Champion 1996). In particular, archaeologys roles in nationalist and imperialist culture have received much attention, while the resurgence of sub-state-level nationalist movements in Europe has provoked studies more concerned with the role of the past in the construction of identities in resistance or opposition to the state. Despite Meskells (1998) bold attempt to open up debate in this eld, Iraq, in common with much of the Middle East, has still not received the same level of attention as many European and New World contexts in this respect. This lack does not reect a want of subject matteras demonstrated below, Iraqs past has been employed in a variety of highly politicized forms in recent yearsbut perhaps has more to do with the sensitivity of what have generally been very difcult political contexts. Disciplinary anxiety is understandable: the political questions concerned lie far beyond the reach of traditional archaeological practice and bring the weight of present-day political responsibility to bear on specialists trained primarily to deal with the ancient past. The engagement may also cost a scholar access to material or even a country and in some cases an entire career (Kohl and Fawcett 1995b:16). I agree with Durrans (1989:70), however, that the political uses of the past present challenges that archaeologists cannot detach from their own work. Highly politicized uses of the Mesopotamian past exist and affect us, and therefore we need to acknowledge and address them. The aim of this study is to examine the relationships between cultural heritage and modern identity in British newspaper coverage of Iraq. Following a review of relevant existing research and a discussion of British newspapers as research material, the article is divided into three chronological sections: 198090, 19902001, and 20013, corresponding to the Iran-Iraq War and its aftermath, the rst Gulf War and sanctions, and Iraqs renewed position as a U.S. military focus after September 11, 2001, leading eventually to the war of 2003. These periods will be shown to correspond with three distinct phases in the representation of Iraqi heritage in the British press. The relationships between coverage of the ancient past and of current affairs in each period will be discussed, with a particular focus on the political roles of cultural heritage. At the outset, it is worth briey emphasizing the unique archaeological and historic wealth of Iraq. Ancient Mesopotamia (largely ancient Iraq) is of prime importance in studying the origins of farming, writing, and urban society. The ancient cities of Ur, Uruk, Babylon, Nineveh, and many more lie here. Iraq can boast the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, the Shicite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, and some of the worlds most important historic monasteries. Despite this, only two sites, the Assyrian capital of Ashur and the Nabatean city of Hatra, are currently inscribed on the United Nations World Heritage list. Perhaps most fundamental 351

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from the point of view of Western scholarship, the importance of ancient Mesopotamian culture to the history of modern Western thought, a history once considered to begin only in fourth-century Greece, is increasingly recognized (Parpola 2000:30): In comparison with Greek and Hellenistic cultures, Mesopotamian culture at rst sight, undeniably, seems alien and strange. The better one has learned to understand it, however, the more it has come to resemble our own culture. Its strange and exotic features conceal within themselves an invisible world of ideas more familiar to us, which resurfaces in new garments but largely identical in content in classical antiquity. Britain has a long history of involvement in Iraq, including a leading role in the formation of the state itself. The World War I British occupation of the provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, completed in 1918, set the provisional borders of modern Iraq, rst as a British Mandate and later as an independent state. As with much of the Middle East, borders were dened on the basis of European tactical and economic concerns, with only minimal reference to the ethnic, religious, and tribal associations of the new states inhabitants. The development of European archaeology in Iraq was not independent of these factors, and the continued heavy involvement of European archaeologists in studying the regions past can be seen in part as a legacy of these political and economic ties. Many of the most famous archaeologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made their careers at Mesopotamian sites or through the decipherment of the areas ancient languages. As a result, the British Museum today holds one of the largest and most-studied collections of Iraqi antiquities in the world, ranging from the winged bull colossi of Nimrud to tablets from the library of Ashurbanipal that are fundamental to the study of ancient Mesopotamian languages. A further legacy is the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, developed in close cooperation with the countrys British administration (Lloyd 1982:7; Matthews 1997:59) and still active although without a permanent presence in Iraq since 1990. From the earliest Assyrian excavations of Paul Emile Botta and Austen Henry Layard, who commenced work in Iraq in 1842 and 1845 respectively (Larsen 1996:12, 68), antiquarian and archaeological work in the region has been inuenced by international and imperial competition motivated by the desire for a claim to the great cultural inheritance that the areas ancient history represents in Western thought and culture. The place of ancient Mesopotamia in nineteenth-century European models of the ascent to civilization, however, built on Old Testament and classical sources, is ambiguous (Russell 1997:27). The imperial successes of Assyrian and Babylonian kings are mixed with notions of Eastern despotism inspired by biblical allegories and reinforced by the rise of Orientalist imagery in romanticist art and literature. This contradiction, never satisfactorily re-

solved, remains important for understandings of the representation of ancient Mesopotamia in the present. Although research into the politicized use of Mesopotamian archaeology outside Iraq is a recent development (Bahrani 1998:161), substantial attention is now being paid to the role of European imperialism in the early history of Mesopotamian archaeology and Assyriology (Larsen 1996, Bohrer 1998, McCall 1998), and awareness of the historical context of Mesopotamian archaeology is now widely recognized as important to its practice today (Matthews 2003a:199; Pollock 1999:27). It remains true, however, that little work exists on the contemporary political context of the subject. Bahrani (1998) has addressed the construction of time and space in modern treatments of ancient Mesopotamia, while others have commented on the representation of Saddam Hussein as an Oriental despot (Pollock and Lutz 1994, Meskell 1998). One paper does provide a direct precedent for this study, focusing specically on the relationship between archaeology and modern politics in U.S. newspaper representation of the Gulf War. In Archaeology Deployed for the Gulf War (1994), Pollock and Lutz form their database from a selection of American newspapers (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune) between August 1990 and February 1992 (p. 264). Their database consists of 22 articles in which archaeology was discussed in connection with the war (p. 266), material largely concerned with damage to sites. They note a substantial increase in coverage during the six weeks of the war itself (7 articles, as opposed to 5 in the ve and a half months before and 10 in the year after) and describe a dearth of prewar reporting on archaeology, posing the question Why did the print media suddenly discover the existence of Iraqs archaeological past? (p. 267). Pollock and Lutz identify a number of parallels in the representation of Iraqs archaeology. Noting the exclusive focus on famous rulers and elite objects, they observe a similarity in the reduction of Iraqi identities to the single personality of Saddam Hussein (1994:268). They also highlight a parallel with oil in the treatment of archaeological resources as a global commodity (p. 270): Both oil and archaeological artefacts are portrayed as resources with international owners. . . . Neither can be the exclusive purview of modern Iraqis. The United States has the right to purchase Iraqi oil (the Iraqis may not choose to refuse to sell, or try to do so at very high prices), just as Western archaeologists have the right (even the duty) to explore and interpret Iraqs past. Other common themes include the comparison of American and Iraqi attitudes to archaeological sites, represented as protective and exploitative, respectively (p. 278), and the tendency to endow archaeology with anthropomorphic qualities at the expense of covering actual human loss of life (p. 280). Coverage of Islamic archaeology and heritage is, they nd, conspicuous by its absence.

s e y m o u r Mesopotamia and Iraq in the Press F 353

DataThe database employed here consists of all articles relating to Iraqi heritage, broadly conceived, between January 1980 and March 2003 in U.K. national newspapers. Tabloid coverage of ancient Mesopotamia is virtually nonexistent prior to 2003, and therefore the database cannot reect the full social or political spectrum of the British press. Because of limitations in indexing, only articles from the Times and the Guardian are available for the rst two years of the database. After this, all national newspapers are included.2 The database consists of 605 articles, distributed unevenly from 1980 to 2003. These are supplemented by further collections relating to political context and to coverage of Iranian heritage during the Iran-Iraq War. Several catalogues and databases were used to collect and check the data used in this project. The Times Index, the Guardian Editors Index, the Clover Newspaper Index (later the Newspaper Index), and Lexis Nexis Professional were all essential tools. In all cases, including paper and microlm forms (the Guardian Editors Index consists of a card-le scanned onto microlm and can be consulted at the British Newspaper Library, Colindale, London), searches were term-based, but the results returned were not automatically included in the database. Not all terms searched for were relevant to all three periods covered in the newspaper (e.g., Canford, as expected, returned relevant results only for 1994, while references to the Iraq Museum are extremely scarce prior to 2003). Where possible, searches were repeated using at least two databases (in most cases the Clover Newspaper Index and Lexis Nexis Professional). Articles which had used the terms in contexts unrelated to Iraq (references to Babel and Babylon in particular often occur without any intentional reference to Iraq, ancient or modernthe currency of this ancient name in so many modern contexts is interesting in itself but far beyond the remit of this article), and television listings (excepting relevant substantial reviews) were then excluded to give the totals used here. Although the data are generally treated as qualitative for the purposes of this article, the large number of articles does allow some crude quantitative analysis. [Tables and charts illustrating some broad trends in the data and supporting some general statements in my argument appear in the electronic edition of this issue on the journals web page.]2. U.K. national newspapers included in this study are as follows: the Daily Mail, the Daily Star, the Daily Telegraph, the Express, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the Independent on Sunday, the Mail on Sunday, the Mirror, the Morning Star, the News of the World, the Observer, People, the Sun, the Sunday Express, the Sunday Mirror, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times, and the Times. Not all of these newspapers run throughout the 23 years of the database, and those marked contributed no articles to the database. The vast majority of articles included in the database come from the major broadsheet (quality) newspapers: the Times and Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph and Telegraph on Sunday, the Independent and Independent on Sunday, the Guardian, the Observer (the Sunday newspaper of Guardian Newspapers Limited), and the Financial Times.

The database is intended to include a broader range of material than that of Pollock and Lutz. While the latter concentrated on discussion of archaeology in direct relation to the 199091 war, this study is concerned with the relationships between archaeology, current affairs, and political comment in the press. In addition to articles that directly relate Mesopotamian archaeology to current affairs, therefore, the database also includes uses of historical and biblical references in discussion of current affairs, articles in which heritage and archaeology are included but are not primary themes, and coverage of archaeology and cultural heritage not explicitly related to modern politics. the newspapers British political journalism, according to Turnstall (1996:234) shares many common characteristics with other democratic countries, but also has its full share of national idiosyncrasies. Not least of these are the extreme age and continuity of highly competitive political journalism in London. No other city in the world has such a long and uninterrupted history of such competitive political journalism. The presss long and auspicious history is often cited in support of the quality of todays British media. U.K. media legislation is among the least restrictive in the world, and many cases can be cited in support of a governmental commitment to relative press independence (Lawrenson and Barber 1985:6; Brown 1985). The mechanics of this freedom, however, are often poorly understood. British newspapers are free in a classically liberal sense: they are free to publish, within fairly unobjectionable legal limits, whatever material they see t. They are free to use this right to compete for readers and advertising revenue. In fact, they have to, as their freedom is inspired by the very same political and economic principles that lie behind arguments for free-market economics. For this reason, the substantial constraints of commercial operation have rarely been considered an infringement on the freedom of the press, despite their phenomenal effectiveness in eliminating the left-wing radical press during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Curran 1991: 35). Today it is no longer possible to cover broadsheet production costs from the cover price alone or to start up a new publication without substantial nancial backing. In short, a British broadsheet newspaper needs to be compatible with the interests of large advertisers to survive (Murdock 1982:142). The current political spectrum of Britains broadsheet press ranges from the relatively liberal, centre-left Guardian to the more conservative Daily Telegraph. The London Times, rst published in 1785, is the worlds oldest surviving daily newspaper. Tabloids, with higher circulation and less reliance on advertising revenue, tend strongly toward the political right, with more explicitly nationalist content than the broadsheets. They are far less likely than the broadsheets to cover archaeology or history and as a result are underrepresented in this project.


production and consumption of news Communications research is complicated by the ephemerality not only of media coverage itself but also of the processes of media production and consumption. To analyse the production of news in the present is no simple matter, and much work has been devoted to developing effective participant-observer methodologies for researchers working in newsrooms (e.g., Hallin 1986, Ericson, Baranek, and Chan 1989). To analyse consumption of news is more difcult still. The readers role in negotiating and eventually consenting to the validity of British news is vital, however. Not only does it check some of the more obvious excesses evident in centralized, restricted state media around the world but also it lends the news that is produced a legitimacy that can only come with the belief in a free press and one which can be called to account for misinforming the public. The paradoxical result, however, is that when readers disagree with the content of a British newspaper they nd themselves opposing not only the expertise and research of a very large media organization but also what would appear to be public consensus. This process is not one of irresistible, unconstrained indoctrination, however. Coverage must remain plausible for consumers, as must the impression of consensus they are presented with. If the public substantially and vocally resists, the impression of consensusand by extension the legitimacy of coverageis quickly undermined.

198090: The Iran-Iraq War and Its Aftermathpolitical context: the iran-iraq war and british interests British commitments and concerns during the early stages of the Iran-Iraq War were unique among the major external powers. While less directly affected by the instability with which the conict threatened global oil markets than the United States (because of the U.K.s lower rate of consumption and the ownership of significant North Sea oil reserves) or by the nancial concerns which led France to support Iraq (whose huge debts to the former made its survival essential), the British position was arguably as tightly constrained diplomatically as those of either of these powers or that of the U.S.S.R. On the one hand, close relations with the United States meant that, while British Foreign and Commonwealth Ofce (FCO) statements were careful to emphasize the autonomy of British policy on the war, this policy could in reality deviate signicantly from that of the United States only with difculty. On the other, a legacy of colonial rule in the Middle East meant that intervention from the far less powerful British government of the 1980s would be at best embarrassing and at worst counterproductive (Chipman 1989:219). The FCOs initial priority, therefore, became the maintenance of diplomatic relations, insofar as was possible, with both belligerents. Britain declared neutrality and prohibited the

sale of arms to either country. In the face of Iranian hostility to the West, however, and particularly the United States, Britains channels of communication with Tehran broke down. The failure of diplomacy was uncomfortably public, accompanied by the expulsion of many British diplomats from Iran and Iranian students and activists from the U.K. The 1980 embassy siege was particularly signicant as a media event, bringing home as it did the extent to which a conict in the Middle East could resonate in London (Guardian, May 1, 1980). Ultimately, a lack of condence in predicting the behaviours of the combatants, and particularly of Iran (Abrahamian 1993), hindered the development of a coherent foreign policy. In practice British approaches, like those of other European states, developed on an ad hoc basis and in general can be better understood as a series of pragmatic responses to events than as adherence to a single British position on the war (Chipman 1989:216). As the war progressed and the possibility of an Iranian victory became increasingly real, the attitudes of outside powers began to focus on the prevention, primarily through provision of resources to Iraq, of an outright victory for either side (Rubin 1983, Wright 1983). This goal was rooted in fears of regional instability, whether brought about through the spread of revolutionary fundamentalist Islam beyond Iran or by the action of an aggressively hegemonic secular Iraqi state employing the powerful rhetoric of pan-Arabism. Moreover, the oil price incentive for ending the conict had, by 1983, all but vanished (Long 1984:39): Almost immediately after the war broke out, the spot market began to rise. Oil traders prepared for the worst. Yet the worst never happened. Almost three years passed and, far from having an adverse effect on the oil market, the war was actually seen by some as a godsend, easing what has become one of the greatest international oil gluts in recent years. Although this assessment is cruel, giving no consideration to the massive human cost of continued violence or to the economic ruin of both Iran and Iraq and even going so far as to refer to these disasters as a godsend, it does reect the position oil traders during the early 1980s were employed to hold and to base their decisions on. A Western government position, while not as exclusively based on economics, could not afford to treat the oil markets as less than a major factor in policy making. Oil was of particular importance to the United States, its biggest consumer. The Reagan government could ill afford to repeat the Johnson and Carter administrations disastrous relations with the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) during the 1970s. iranian and iraqi perspectives on ancient mesopotamian and persian heritage Since achieving formal independence with the signing of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty in June 1930, Iraq has struggled to gain a sense of national identity. The alien political form of the nation-state was imposed, largely by foreign powers,


on an ethnically, religiously, and culturally very diverse population in the wake of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Since that time the government of Iraq has been subject to many episodes of violent upheaval, not least in the rise of the Bacth party, coming to power through a military coup in 1968. For Saddam Hussein, whose own rise to power was marked by terror, coercion, and purges of Bacth party members, ancient history provided a cultural resource emphasizing unity, continuity, and stability (Tripp 2000:225). In a state whose ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse population was united by British mandate rather than any cultural afnity, the assertion of ancient Mesopotamia as a common Iraqi heritage is an obvious and essential tool in the construction of Iraqi national identity. Mesopotamian-inspired festivals, art, theatre, and poetry all received encouragement under the Bacth partys rule, and cultural and religious differences were to a large extent transcended by placing an emphasis on ancient Assyria and Babylon (Baram 1991:55). Ancient Mesopotamia also provides a rich visual resource, the importance of which cannot be overemphasized (Wallis 1994:266): Visual representations are a key element in symbolising and sustaining national communal bonds. Such representations are not just reactive (that is, depicting an existing state of being), they are also purposefully creative and they can generate new social and political formations. In Iran the iconography of ancient Persia had long been part of the shahs political repertoire. Emphasizing a break not so much from the ancient past (although, as a preIslamic past, this was also signicant) as from the recently ousted regime, Khomeinis Iran focused only on Islamic history, itself rich with material for a Shicite theocratic state opposed to a Sunni Muslim aggressor (this being the case in effect, despite Iraqs large Shicite population). In particular, the very beginning of Shicite history saw the murder of cAli at Kufa and the martyrdom of Husayn ibn c Ali and his followers at Karbala, both in what is now Iraq. Here, the conscious effort to eschew the ancient past in favour of Muslim history is signicant. From the point of view of Islamic history, Iran certainly aimed to garner international attention, infamously through causing disturbances at Mecca (Taheri 1982). All of this affected Iraq, heightening the need for its national identity, in opposition, to appear relatively secular. Clearly there was an incentive to avoid emphasizing the conict of interests between faith and state produced by the war for Iraqi Shic ites. During the Iran-Iraq War, therefore, Iraqi propaganda emphasized continuity with the ancient past and not least the reputed military prowess of Assyrian kings. Despite the economic pressures of a decade of war, efforts to rebuild Babylon continued. Only in later years did Saddam Hussein publicly embrace religion in government, a shift well illustrated by the redirection of resources into construction of the worlds largest mosque (Cockburn 1995).33. Although by 1989 Saddam Hussein was already claiming descent from the Hashemite dynasty and by extension the Prophet, this assertion had as much to do with the Iraqi leaders rehabilitation of the once-disgraced Hashemite monarchy as with nationalist heroes in Iraqi culture (Thurgood 1989, Walker 1989).

iraq and the antiquation of iran One striking characteristic of Western coverage of the Middle East generally has been a tendency for war to draw attention to religious extremism in the hostile areas/groups (Said 1997 [1981]:65). In the case of early 1980s Iran, whose cultural shift away from Westernization was sudden, extreme, and very recent and whose own government had set out to eliminate what it saw as an unacceptable secularization of Iranian life (Wright 1990), this phenomenon was inevitably acute and became a dominant force in coverage of the Iran-Iraq War. Just as Saddam Hussein aimed to promote a secular national identity distinct from that of Iran, so in order to render the conict intelligible the Western media needed something more familiar against which to depict an Iranian Other whose difference was epitomized in the image of Ayatollah Khomeini. Coverage of alien or extreme behaviour in the name of Islam took Iran or Iranians as their examples in the vast majority of stories throughout the 1980s. In emphasizing cultural difference such coverage serves to alienate and reduce empathyhow can the readers sympathize with people whose behaviour they simply do not understand? Occasional articles even reected on this alienation: To much of the Western public . . . it is all simply another senseless episode between strange and no doubt irrational peoples from whom the Wests civilising hand was lifted prematurely (Bushkoff 1984). Coverage regularly came close to explicit ridicule. Juxtaposition, for example, with banal, familiar London settings, most obviously in the case of a goat sacriced in a London street (Guardian, September 25, 1984; Clough 1984), was one important method through which this was achieved. The meaning of such representations had much to do with historical illegitimacy. Shown to appear strange and awkward in a Western (i.e., de facto modern) setting, it was not only Iran but Islam as a (much reduced, monolithic, caricatured) whole that was presented as an aberration and, through its difference in light of the legacy of Orientalist literature, art, and thought (Said 1978, 1993; Rodinson 1988), as antiquated. All this left a contradiction, however. On the one hand, readers were asked to see the Iranian theocracy as stuck in the past (articles frequently cite Islamic tradition as a cover-all explanation when describing alien customs or laws in Iran; after 1988, a similar treatment is applied to Iraq). On the other, they were asked to believe that it was a historically illegitimate aberration of the present. To reconcile the conict of antiquation and illegitimacy, the reader must employ the logic of Victorian progress narratives and, more specically, of the idea that history (in the rise of civilization sense) in the Middle East progressed to a certain point before stopping dead, at which point the West took up the torch of civilization (Childe 1925) and progressed far more (Trigger 1996:625). The implication was that Khomeinis Iran represented a way of life that not only was backward but had failed in history and was simply unable to grasp the advances of modernity. A striking example can be seen in a story


showing a new Iranian machine for performing a traditional punishment (New Machine Used for Cutting Off Thieves Fingers, Times, February 8, 1985). We are shown that backward Eastern despots, even when presented with all the advantages of our technology, cannot rise above their cruel, brutal naturein the simplest terms, the colonialist notion that it may be impossible to reform the savages. Social evolution being the unstated mainstay of such thinking, we should not be surprised when some political commentators, even after the 1979 revolution, predicted that religious fundamentalism of all kinds (at a time when the Shicite Islamic fundamentalism of Iran was the only kind highlighted in the media) would eventually be completely displaced by more modern valuesspecically, freemarket capitalism and democracy. For an observer following the line of thinking described above, the Iran-Iraq War comes to have everything to do with the past. If Iran is the antiquated Other, Bacthist Iraqs explicitly territorial concerns are far more familiar to us, even on occasion embodying our resistance to Khomeinis revolution and the attack on our historical narratives that it comes to represent. Even without the knowledge that the Shatt al-Arab border was originally set up (in Iraqs favour) by the British, it is easy to see how Iraqs state territorialism, consistent, at least in appearance, with the classical European forms of nation-state nationalism described by Kedourie (1961), Gellner (1983), or Smith (1986),4 lends itself well to readings opposed to the new and alien theocratic model of revolutionary Iran. As a battle of competing ideologies the story is made all the more compelling by the idea that the reader has something, however slight, in common with the Iraqi attitude to the war, as well as something to fear from the Iranians and their implied ability to plunge us back into the dark ages (home, in English popular history, to the Iranian torture devices highlighted by the newspapers).

19902001: The Gulf War and Sanctionspolitical context: build-up to the 199091 gulf war By late August 1988, with both belligerents exhausted, the Iran-Iraq War had effectively come to a close. UN monitors began observing what was to be a lasting ceasere on August 20, with peace talks in Geneva beginning ve days later. Iran gained the important border agreements it had originally sought, but Ayatollah Khomeinis public regret at his inability to depose Saddam Husseins regime, combined with the string of Iraqi military victories which preceded the peace settlement, al4. The similarity would not bear close scrutiny, however. The Ba thists had from the start employed pan-Arabism as a unifying concept, more reliant on familial and kinship bonds than on the investment of identity in territory (i.e., the creation of a motherland) and certainly not wholly secular in its driving forces or cultural potency (Makiya 1998:198).c

lowed Iraq to declare victory. In reality neither regime was victorious beyond its own survival, itself more than was expected of Khomeinis regime in 1980 or of Saddam Husseins in 1986 (Hirst 1986). The human costs were staggering, including large numbers of civilians from both sides (Herzog 1989:255), and exacerbated by economic disaster. Lost oil revenues and the costs of actually waging the long war left both countries nancially drained and economically isolated. On top of this, the ideological zeal of the Iranian government had been seen to be blunted by pragmatism (Wright 1990:186), while Iraq had lost its leverage with Western governments that no longer feared the spread of Khomeinis revolution (Karsh 1989:5). The real victors were those outside the war, Gulf states whose economic and military stability had been maintained to a remarkable degree throughout and countries outside the Middle East, simply relieved that the feared escalation of the conict into superpower confrontation which apparently threatened during the early years of the war (Sabin 1989:293) had not materialized. With Iraq no longer as important to Western security, the relatively scant coverage Iraqi human rights abuses had received prior to 1988 (usually limited to coverage of annual pleas from Amnesty International, often not included in the database of this study because they rarely contained the antiquating references more commonly included in coverage of torture in Iran) began to swell. Given the scale and extreme severity of Saddam Husseins repression of Shicite and Kurdish uprisings within Iraq at this time, including the 1988 gassing of thousands of Kurdish civilians at Halabja, there was no shortage of atrocities to report as coverage turned against him. As a weakened Iran faded from view in the U.K. newspapers, Iraqs prominence began to increase. In March 1990 the execution in Baghdad of the Iranian-born Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft on charges of spying prompted outrage in the U.K. media (Mallet 1990; Sunday Times, March 18, 1990). The real turning point, however, did not come until July 1990, as Iraq began to threaten neighbouring Kuwait, accusing the latter of oil theft to the value of US$2.4 billion from the Rumayla oil elds early in the Iran-Iraq War and demanding reparations. By effectively threatening force to inuence Arab oil production quotas, Saddam Hussein put external and particularly U.S. economic interests in the Middle East at risk. With the invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, Iraq contravened international law in the abrogation of existing borders and in the denial of Kuwaits sovereign statusa status that the UN exists to defend (Matthews 1993:132). The invasion rapidly led to war, and Iraq subsequently dominated the British press for several months. from orientalism to new militarism Coverage of the 199091 war bore little obvious relation to that of its predecessor. Keeble (1997:8) argues that the presentation of a short, clean war allows states to engage the public in a form of glamorised, substitute warfare . . . [in which] . . . people are mobilised through their


consumption of heavily censored media (much of the censorship being self-imposed by journalists) whose job is to manufacture the spectacle of warfare. Gone was Saddam Hussein, necessary evil and sometime ally against the dangers of Iran. In his place had arisen a global threat of demonic proportions. Gone, too, were the bloodbaths and chemical-weapons horrors of Iran-Iraq. Instead, on-board cameras tracked smart bombs through the doors of carefully selected military targets. The terminology, too, had been suitably adjusted. Deterrence, surgical strikes, and the notion of a clean war arose to describe this very different conict. To many, the war appeared to exist primarily as a media event detached from (a) the series of massacres of which the conict consisted (Keeble 1997:5), (b) civilian casualties, reduced in coverage to the status of rare accidents, and (c) the specic tactical reasons for the war, political and economic (Wilcken 1994:33). So apparent was the inuence of media coverage on our understanding of the conict that Baudrillard (1991) questioned the very reality of the war, provoking, unsurprisingly, passionate responses (Adair 1991, Jarrett 1991). In the years since the Gulf War, many writers responsible for this coverage have substantially changed their attitudes. Military leaders have been accused of supplying misinformation to the media and of taking pains to withhold information that did not t with the wars positive public image (Henderson 1992, Lubow 1992), most signicantly the Iraqi death toll (Norris 1991). These critiques, however, appeared in academic books after the wars disappearance from the public eye (coverage of the large continued and active military presence in Iraq during the 1990s was, by comparison with coverage of operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, extremely lowkey), and the image of a just, clean, and mercifully short conict has stuck until recently, with the less popular 2003 war provoking a major public reassessment of 199091. The image of this war was of extreme importance to its Western belligerents. For the U.S. Bush administration, keen to redress the loss of face the American military still felt over Vietnam, the objective was to be seen as ready and able to put down foreign opposition swiftly and effectively. Britain, Americas closest ally in the handling of a UN response to the invasion of Kuwait, could also benet from appearing efcient and able, as well as from nurturing the much-lauded special relationship with the United States and a commitment to security with more friendly powers in the Gulf. arab despots and heritage Many trends in coverage are conspicuously reversed in 198990 as attention shifts from Irans Ayatollah Khomeini to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. In the buildup to the Gulf War opposition to Saddam Hussein from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states received a great deal of coverage and was unsurprisingly portrayed positively. The military regalia of Saddam Hussein was now placed on the side of wrong, the less Westernized fashions of

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia on that of right. The shift would appear to contradict the traditions of representation of the past decade, and, insofar as Saddam Hussein is rapidly transformed from the lesser to the greater of two evils, it does. Such a contradiction is not as unusual as might be assumed, however, and once again precedent can be found in Victorian attitudes to race and social evolution. Specically, representations of the noble and barbaric savage in ethnography and prehistory show a similar contradiction. With little more dignity or respect, Arab Muslim leaders criticizing Saddam Hussein are cast in the noble savage role. Their judgment is seen as impeccable through their agreement with Western powers, yet the logic behind it is represented as simple fear, in contrast with the measured strategies and noble aims of the United States and Britain (Keeble 1997, Hassan 1999). Moreover, their diplomatic and military roles are played down; Middle Eastern leaders are represented as unable to bring about change in the same way as their Western allies. Saddam Hussein, meanwhile, becomes a barbaric savage (or, in a parallel schema, a cruel, selsh Eastern despot)a savage, moreover, who has found a white mans rie. He can be presented as a threat to the West but with the caveat that his weapons are not of his own making. They, along with his costume, are presented in a manner not dissimilar to the Iranian nger-cutting machine, as gifts of Western modernity that he knew no better than to abuse.5 This in turn helps support claims that he does not understand his own destructive power and that his military decisions are therefore inherently irrational. The changing attitude of the British press is easily discernible in the database. Prior to 1988, all references to Islamic tradition (a term almost exclusively invoked in negative or alienating contexts) and to barbarism, savagery, and despotism refer to Iran. Between 1988 and 2001 all such references refer to Iraq. Acceptance of the revised identity of Saddam Hussein was not universal, and a positive identity for the Iraqi leader, primarily representing Muslim resistance to a bullying West, found support in a variety of communities worldwide and even in Britain, where British Pakistanis, a small, socially vulnerable and relatively new ethnic minority, chose to cast Saddam Hussein in a heros role against the overwhelming British interpretive consensus (Werbner 1994:214). This resistance, however, did not translate into any national debate, was not recognized in press or television coverage, and in short was given no opportunity to undermine the dominant construction of Saddam Husseins identity as a despot. Although a pro-Saddam view could not have been expected to win5. This is not to deny or to play down the role of Western powers in arming Saddam Hussein covered in depth by Timmerman (1992). The Iraqi leaders decision to build up this military capability and his success in doing so, however, were obviously his own. While guilt certainly does lie with those who supplied arms to Iraq, to remove culpability from Saddam Hussein himself on this basis, regarding him simply as the helpless tool of larger powers, would clearly be absurd.


substantial support in a hypothetical open public forum, the important point is that this stage was never reachedthe pro-Saddam position was effectively stied by total media consensus. saddam hussein and nebuchadnezzar The use in British newspapers of an analogy between Saddam Hussein and the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar6 is complicated by the Iraqi presidents own constant use of the ancient past and, specically, the militant kings of the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires in legitimating his rule.7 Nonetheless, in the Western context it is now Nebuchadnezzars position as a classically styled Eastern despot that is used repeatedly against Saddam Hussein, and it is this element of representation that has received comment from Meskell (1998:3) and Bahrani (1998). Early articles use the analogy in producing arguments for Western intervention in the Gulf (Guardian, August 7, 1990; Adams and Ellis 1990), while material from the late 1990s focuses on the arrogance of Hussein in playing up to the analogy (Guardian, January 4, 1999). Nebuchadnezzar the despot is still Nebuchadnezzar the ruler of an empire; more important, that empire does have a place, if an early one, in the classical metanarrative of Western civilizations development. Conversely, Bahrani (1998) has argued that the concept of despotism has been a vital element in the Western construction of an Oriental Otherthat setting presentday rulers up as throwbacks to a past Western politics has long since succeeded. Indeed, this may be a causal element in Hassans (1999) frustration about American assumptions of irrational decision-making processes in Middle Eastern politics. rebuilding babylon Babylon is by far the most commonly mentioned site/ ancient city in the database. A story covered regularly is Saddam Husseins attempt to rebuild Babylon as a centre for culture and, at least initially, for tourism. Earlier articles, few as they are, show admiration for the attempt (Guardian, October 6, 1986), as well as an awareness of the symbolic value of rebuilding a famous city once sacked by Persian invaders, albeit in 539 b.c. (Guardian, August 3, 1987). The project is described as aiming to bolster national pride in the war effort against Iran but also as an attempt to create a major city for tourism (and particularly Western tourism) once the Iran-Iraq War was over. In the event the end of the war was accompanied6. The Anglicized version of the real name, used by Mesopotamian archaeologists and Assyriologists, is Nebuchadrezzar (itself shorthand for the more accurate Nabu-Kudurri-usur). Popular writing and all articles in the database use the Anglicized biblical form Nebuchadnezzar, however, and the latter is therefore used in this article. 7. The key role of heritage for the Iraqi Bacthists in consolidating political authority and legitimacy is well demonstrated by Baram (1991). The 1990s saw a further escalation of Saddam Husseins attempts to associate himself with the ancient past.

by a rapid deterioration in Iraqs relations with the West, and attitudes toward Babylon quickly altered. At a technical level, the rebuilding project was accused of being archaeologically unsound, damaging the original site (Vallely 1989). These claims proved greatly exaggerated (John Curtis, personal communication, 2003) but meshed well with the main criticism levelled in articles: the idea of the project as a reection of Saddam Husseins selfishness, showing disregard for the ancient site and for the economic plight of his people. By 1988 the treatment is already sceptical (Boseley 1998). The cultural aims of the project are still noted but are overshadowed by comments on Saddam Husseins self-aggrandisement and criticisms of the half-built Babylon (Vallely 1988). With the build-up to the Gulf War Babylon became a symbol for vanity and the decadence of a despotic leader. The biblical morality lessons of the ancient city were resurrected, leading eventually to references to modern Baghdad as a city of sin (Daily Telegraph, November 28, 1990). Articles mention the bricks bearing Saddam Husseins name included in the structure, continuing the tradition of earlier builders at Babylon of including dedications, naming themselves and honouring gods, on bricks at regular intervals (Miller and Mylroie 1991). The wider context of this coverage affected its message signicantly. At this time Iraq was synonymous in the Western media with the identity of Saddam Husseina consequence of legitimating the bombing of Iraq through the demonization of the Iraqi president. As a result, stories such as these appeared to question not only the legitimacy and worth of their intended target Saddam Hussein, who was literally represented as a pretender to the throne of Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi, but of modern Iraq as a state and Iraqis as its inhabitants. In the context of war coverage that rendered ordinary Iraqis virtually invisible, articles undermining their cultural worth in history now appear disturbingly complicit. Following the 199091 war, Babylon continues to be represented primarily as a monument to Saddam Husseins vanity and to his neglect of the basic needs of his population under sanctions (Barkho 1994; Times, March 13, 1995). Finally, the unnished site serves as testimony to the poverty of Iraq after a decade of sanctions (OKane 1998). The message conveyedarrogance and decadence leading to self-destructionis reminiscent of the biblical destruction of Babylon or Nineveh or of nineteenth-century romanticist treatments of the same subject matter. The implication of the message is that, as did the ancient cities, Iraq has brought suffering upon itself through arrogance and decadence. In the place of God in the analogy, this suffering is administered by more powerful nations. The sensitive politics of economic sanctions make an explicit statement along these lines unacceptable, yet through the analogy of Babylon it is almost possible to assert that Iraqs poverty-stricken population are being punished for the war in a way which is somehow just and preordained. Such an uncritical use of the analogy on issues as politically sensitive as the economic sanctions against Iraq is dangerous. While making for


engaging copy, its reductionism, as well as the inappropriate and insensitive use of a moralizing biblical analogy, represent an irresponsible treatment of the sanctions question. destruction of archaeology in iraq under sanctions One of the great tragedies for world heritage in the 1990s was the rapid destruction of Iraqs ancient sites and museums through robbery, theft, and looting (Russell 1998). This loss, however, was greatly overshadowed by the human tragedy that precipitated the destruction. Iraqs heritage was being lost through poverty and desperation, as ordinary Iraqis risked hand amputation and, from 1994, forehead branding for theft (Makiya 1998:ix) in their attempts to make relatively small amounts of money through the vast sums that Assyrian, Sumerian, and Babylonian artefacts could eventually command on illegal Western art markets. The representation of this problem was relatively sensitive to the situation of the Iraqis involved in the thefts themselves, acknowledging the hardship that led to the destruction of sites and looting of artefacts. Beyond this the apportioning of blame varied considerably. Although Western art collectors received partial or full blame in almost all coverage, partly as a result of the campaigning of Renfrew (2000) and the McDonald Institute, Cambridge, responsibility is also at times attributed to Western governments and the UN (Daily Telegraph, October 17, 1995) or to Saddam Hussein in his disregard for the welfare of his population (Kiley 1998). Inevitably, each of these positions also contributed to a far larger argument on the value of the sanctions themselves. Respected positions in Western academia and often sensational subject matter afforded archaeologists a surprisingly signicant voice in media coverage, despite the very low priority of archaeology as a factor in political discussions of sanctions, and it is for this reason that archaeologists entering the debate over the problem of looted antiquities had also to consider the wider implications of sanctions legislation. the canford relief Apparently a far cry from the personalized identity politics of the Gulf War, the story of the Canford relief is a romantic one of lost treasure recovered in the most unlikely placea school dining room. Articles (Daily Telegraph, July 7, 1994; Shaw and Kennedy 1994) fail to mention that the tuck shop in question is in fact the Nineveh porch at Canford Manor, built and stocked for Sir Austen Henry Layards patrons Sir John and Lady Charlotte Guest (Russell 1997:5372). What is invariably covered is the auction sale price of the relief. The tuck-shop discovery is an obvious hook on which to hang the story. Nonetheless, it substantially affects the meaning of articles, as it establishes the point of origin of the relief in England (specically upper-class Englandwhat point of origin could be more appropriate than a public school tuck shop?). One Times article (July

8, 1994) does cover the Iraqi governments attempt to block the sale. This is countered, however, by a far more upbeat article one day later celebrating the discovery of a document establishing Layard and England as the reliefs rightful owners (Kennedy 1994). It would be hard to imagine such a positive take on a failed repatriation claim in a less mutually aggressive political context. Moreover, the negligible legality of Layards work in Iraq, which eventually led Sir Stratford Canning, then British ambassador to Constantinople, to beg the Ottoman Sultan for a retroactive permission for Layards excavation (Bohrer 1998:342) (the legal proof cited in the article), is not mentioned.

20013The past two years have seen many changes. The World Trade Centre disaster of September 11, 2001, heralded a seismic shift not only in U.S. foreign policy but also in Western media approaches to the Middle East. In practice the two are difcult to disentangle, the consequences of the rst phenomenon being the prime subject matter of the second. Beyond the unique nature of coverage of September 11 itself, coverage of U.S. international conict (in Afghanistan and Iraq) since this event has set many precedents. One surprising feature of this great upheaval is the speed with which international sympathy for the U.S. position, global and unequivocal in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, dried up. This loss of support was so great that, by the eve of war in Iraq in March 2003, the global popularity of the U.S. government was at a demonstrable low. The failure of the United States and Britain to build consensus on Iraq in the UN left the two countries alienated from long-standing European allies and severely damaged the credibility of the UN itself. Enormous antiwar protests around the world received substantial media coverage and, more remarkably, support.8 When compared with the Gulf War of 199091, where patriotic support for a war whose causes were assumed to be just ran through almost all of the national media in Britain, the situation as of 2003 seems shocking in its difference. What was the impact of these developments on coverage of Iraqi heritage? The most obvious change has been in sheer quantity; 252 articles mentioning or focused on ancient Mesopotamia and/or the archaeology of Iraq appeared in the rst six months of 2003, compared with 209 articles during the entire 1990s. This increase does not appear to be purely an artefact of the necessarily extensive coverage of the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad (although this does account for 108 of the 252 articles). Moreover, many of these articles are extended, multipage reports (throughout most of the database small columns represent the bulk of included articles).8. Particularly striking was the almost unprecedented strong antiwar stance of a tabloid, the Daily Mirror. Such a position would almost certainly have been condemned as unpatriotic in 1990.


Leading archaeologists were interviewed, and the potential threats to sites were discussed at length. Given what we have already seen, an increase in coverage around a war is unsurprising. But why was there so much more material in 2003 than in 1990? There appear to have been three factors operating in this case: a new onus on news media to appear culturally sensitive and aware, the fact that Iraq was no longer reducible for a Western public to the image of Saddam Hussein, and the usefulness of Iraqi heritage in lending weight to antiwar arguments. cultural specicity in coverage of international affairs One major effect of September 11, 2001, was a sudden rise in the perceived importance of knowing about the rest of the world. Even in the wake of the disaster, U.S. media joined in the suggestion that America had been bombed into the world, the implication being that ignorance of the Rest was no longer acceptable. When news media sought to educate on Afghanistan, the Taliban, and Al-Qacida as specic entities, the unspoken aim was to present a West defying accusations of ignorance and stereotyping: knowledge of the specic politics of Afghanistan had gained political salience. Specic politics in this case does not mean an in-depth political history of Afghanistan. The knowledge offered mainly consisted of Afghanistans place on the map, the name of Osama bin Laden (leading to some public confusion, bin Laden being neither an Afghani nor a member of the Taliban), and the information that the Taliban regime was oppressive, fundamentalist, and anti-Western, friendly to the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks and without a legitimate claim to power. Although this may not seem particularly ambitious, the information was communicated effectively and now constitutes the (much increased) bulk of Western common knowledge of Central Asia. In the case of Iraq, public awareness raised during the 199091 Gulf War provided a much stronger starting point. Saddam Hussein and Baghdad were both familiar, as was Iraqs oil wealth. As we have seen, the name of Babylon was also familiar to some extent. In the months leading up to the 2003 war, the information that Iraq contains ancient sites became a key part of an information package more ambitious than that constructed for Afghanistan and extending to the representation of ethnic diversity. The existence of Iraqs Kurdish and Shic ite populations, if dened only in terms of their opposition to Saddam Hussein, was much more clearly and prominently represented than in 199091, for example. The role of archaeology in this context was to verify that Iraq was not the empty desert represented in 199091 and that destruction of its ancient sites would represent an assault on world heritage and culture (Bright 2003). This paralleled the sentiment of much antiwar writing, depicting the war as a U.S. assault on world government and international law.

separating iraq and saddam hussein The rst Gulf War saw Saddam Hussein as the personication not only of tyranny but also of Iraq. Thanks in large part to the trend toward showing cultural awareness described above and following the precedents set in coverage of Afghanistan, this is no longer considered acceptable. Public sympathy for the Iraqi people has been substantial and their difference from the person of Saddam Hussein recognized. As a result, where previously the ancient past had been invoked to demonstrate aspects of Saddam Husseins character, the attempt to move away from the now unsustainable habit of identifying the country and its inhabitants with its dictator has allowed a different reading. That Saddam has usurped the Iraqi heritage remains a strong message in coverage, but the very existence and importance of the heritage for Iraq and for the world has attracted substantial attention in its own right. ancient mesopotamia as antiwar device The third and arguably most important factor in the increased coverage of Iraqi heritage in the British press is the fact that it lent itself well to the questioning of the merits of war in Iraq (Jenkins 2003). The threat posed to sites (usually, and inaccurately, presented prior to the war as a threat posed primarily by bombing) was in itself used as an argument against war. Now the barbarians of the piece became those who would bomb the ziggurat at Ur (the most popular example chosen, situated next to an Iraqi airbase and supercially damaged by bombing during the rst Gulf War). While it is certainly true that Iraqs cultural heritage is of unique value, it is disheartening to see archaeology prove at times the most evocative tool in antiwar arguments. The priorities implied are reminiscent of Pollock and Lutzs (1994:280) observation of archaeologys being valued over human life in some 199091 U.S. coverage but are much more surprising in this context, where the danger to Iraqi civilians was a major part of the antiwar case. The role of heritage in undermining the legitimacy of the war reached its zenith in the culmination and immediate wake of the conict. The looting of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad represented an enormous cultural loss for Iraq and the world. The invading forces had ignored warnings from several sources, notably the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the U.S. interim civil administration-in-waiting, the Ofce for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), and individual archaeologists invited to provide information on the potential threat the war posed to cultural heritage. Not surprisingly, their failure to act when looting began came to symbolize for critics a broader ignorance of Iraqs cultural worth. The failure to heed the warnings given was covered (Martin, Vulliamy, and Hinsliff 2003) and blame for the cultural tragedy placed squarely with the United States. No greater archetype of brute ignorance could be imagined than an unashamed


apathy with regard to the loss of the most important resource for studying the birthplace of civilization.9 Successive ill-judged comments from high-ranking coalition ofcials, most famously the U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfelds offhand dismissal of the looting (Stuff happens, quoted in Fiddler 2003; Think of all the looting that took place after the earthquake in Turkey. Remember what happened after the riots in Los Angeles. . . . We know what happens at a football game, a soccer game, in England, quoted in Bone 2003) allowed an already hostile British press to demonstrate the coalitions failure to understand the scale of the loss and, by extension, its failure to understand Iraq and its needs. In a war so explicitly concerned with hearts and mindsthose of American, European, and Middle Eastern governments and publics as well as of Iraqisthis disaster became perhaps the most damaging public relations failure in the U.S.-led coalitions campaign.

To unify power, economic or cultural, at the top, in the hands of the few, it is necessary to fragment power at the bottom. Divide and rule is the old adage. To break down resistance, a monopoly on culture is necessary. A peoples culture, which would cross over borders between people, which is human and universal despite differences, . . . signies the possibility of resisting global economic and cultural hegemony. To maintain the global economy and the global culture, unication must exist at the top among the few, the very few. It must not take place at the bottom among the many, the very many. Hetata discusses the power of states in the North over those in the South and, more specically, those of the G7 (now G8) over the rest of the world. Perhaps, however, the very few are fewer still. Just as the producers of culture can exacerbate and maintain divisions in the non-Western world, so too (with the caveats of resistance outlined above) they can exercise this control over consumers of culture in the West, preventing empathy (in the case of the Iran-Iraq War) and even inciting hostility (in the Gulf War). It is difcult to avoid the use of the past as moral allegory in such casesmuch of the material in my database was made relevant to the readers of British newspapers by the tendency of writers to draw parallels between the past and the present or to contrast the two. The relation of coverage of heritage to that of current affairs is not necessarily harmful, but in the case of British coverage of the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars much negative potential has been realized. If coverage of heritage is intended to be understood by consumers as related to the present, the angles taken by writers on the past are to some extent dictated by the stories of the present. Once established, however, divisive and alienating stereotypes can be difcult to displace, and the problems created by using such links must be recognized. All this, however, does not negate the scope that exists for a more sensitive and even constructive use of heritage in the media. As a cultural resource, heritage is variously used to build, support, or oppress cultural identities through difference. By the same token, however, our pasts, for all their diversity, have the power to unite and to perform a very basic and very positive function of mass cultureto remind us of our common humanity. I agree with Hassan (1998:202) that it is erroneous to discontinue the search for universals and transcultural commonalities because it allegedly spreads within an intellectual scheme that subverted it for the glorication of a hegemonic West. Recent generations of scholars have worked to show the value of difference of all kinds and to establish that the world cannot be reduced to a bland homogeny, far less one whose agenda is determined by the worlds tiny socioeconomic elite. They have been right to do so: our world histories have been guilty of prejudice on the basis of sex, gender, ethnicity, nationality, class, religion, and language. But life is not only difference. It is one thing to be forced into a totalitarian homogenizing schema and quite another to celebrate

ConclusionI have discussed the use of heritage and archaeology in relation to three different conicts covered in very different ways and representing three distinct approaches to Iraq and its cultural heritage. During the 1980s we see an Iraq that is modern, secular, and, if not accepted as a signier of Self in coverage, then certainly an effective tool in creating and antiquating an Iranian Other. From 1990 we see Iraq re-created and reduced to the single identity of Saddam Hussein. With this change Iraqs past becomes damning biblical allegory, its surviving remains testimony to the greed and vanity of an Eastern despot. Most recently we have seen ancient Mesopotamia mobilized as part of a move to separate the identity of Iraq from that of Saddam Hussein and to reduce the Otherness of the former and its people. What does this uidity in identity and meaning imply for the politicized representation of the past more generally? I have focused my criticism on conventions, stereotypes, and relationships between heritage and current affairs in coverage not only to address popular misconceptions regarding Iraqi history and archaeology for their own sake but also to attack some of the prejudices which stand in the way of our understanding people, events, and views in more recent history and even in the present. The power of the media to divide has alarming implications at a time of rapid globalization (Hetata 1998:283):9. Birthplace and cradle of civilization are phrases now avoided by most scholars, as they deceptively suggest a single point of origin for and imply a simple linear development of what is, in any case, a very problematic term, privileging sedentism, urbanism, the state, and writing as markers of civilization in human society. The phrase is often used by journalists during 2003, however, as a memorable way of emphasizing the importance of Mesopotamian history and archaeology for the public. There was certainly a need to highlight the importance of this heritage. Whether the benets of using such slogans to raise awareness in popular discourse outweigh the cost of continuing to propagate such loaded terminology, however, is a difcult question.


common ground; the latter act holds the same liberating potential as the afrmation of self that is the core of theories of difference. The search for such similarities is as dangerous as any potentially divisive objective, yet both are well worth pursuing and need not leave us defenceless. To return to Hassan (1998:202): Although the theoretical and methodological foundations of science may not answer ethical questions, and they may even serve criminal and evil causes, scholarly knowledge (science in the broad sense of the word), as a mode of enquiry that in principle rejects dogmatism and endorses critical thinking, eschews pre-judicial claims in favour of collective, reective judgement, subjects individual observations and statements to cross-examination and scrutiny, and offers a guarantee against fascist regimes, religious fanatics, intellectual tyranny and solipsistic nihilism. Our ability to sympathize, to understand, to reason, and to negotiate rely on feelings of identication and empathy which are all too easily lost. Heritage is often complicit in the loss of empathy, but it also holds the potential to rebuild it. The potential is obvious in the case of Iran-Iraq, where the two states populations shared an enormous amount culturally and historically, however opposed the outlooks of their respective governments in the 1980s. In 2003, appeals for protection of Iraqs sites, museums, and artefacts have necessarily centred on international legislation such as the World Heritage Convention (Hassall 2003), but the language of shared pasts is of real importance beyond this. In terms of inheritance and of responsibility, the balance between local and global involvement in heritage is a difcult one. World heritage should not mean dispossessed heritage, robbed of its value for cultural identity and resistance at a local level. This is by no means a necessary consequence of the concept of a shared global inheritance, however, and in the representation of Iraq we have already seen more than enough of that which is divisive and alienating.

PostscriptAt the time of writing (July 9, 2003), media coverage of the Iraq National Museums looting has become a highly contentious issue in its own right. The architectural historian Dan Cruikshanks Raiders of the Lost Art, a BBC documentary reporting on the aftermath of the looting, questioned the extent of the looting and the honesty of senior museum staff and supported early coalition military claims that the museum had been prepared in advance as an Iraqi military stronghold and not simply taken over by Fedayeen when museum staff ed. Although an accompanying report by Cruikshank later appeared in the Times (Cruikshank 2003), the questions raised by the documentary were rst taken up in the press by Aaranovitch in the Guardian (2003). The reports

substantially inuenced media coverage and public perception and were taken by some commentators as a brilliant expose of collusion and media deception by leading gures at the Iraq National Museum (Steyn 2003). Several assertions, however, quickly proved ill-informed. Archaeologists immediately made public responses casting doubt on the claims (Crawford and Robson 2003, Robson 2003) and to some extent succeeded in reopening the debate. This effort was reinforced at a July 7 session of the 49e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, held in London, at which the staff of the Iraq National Museum received support from colleagues at the British Museum and elsewhere in refuting suggestions that it should have been possible to produce an instant list of missing artefacts from the museums enormous and only partially catalogued collection and that a military planning position existed at the museum (the misidentied building was a police station) and in emphasizing that the removal of all portable objects to secure locations prior to the war had always been well known and that the presence of empty, undamaged cases in the museum galleries therefore did not suggest deception as the Cruikshank and Aaranovitch reports implied. The impact of Cruikshanks documentary and Aaranovitchs article seems more likely to be remembered than the results of further investigations,10 however, as these latter will inevitably be published less prominently and long after the events in question. They will also be remembered, at least in the short term, more clearly than the current unprecedented level of destruction of Iraqs ancient cities through looting, which continues unreported and unchecked. Ultimately, the success of these sceptical reports could be seen as part of a more general frustration at an apparent lack of progress in the early stages of Iraqi reconstruction and a lessening of Western media and public sympathy for Iraqs problems as a result of the increasing hostility of Iraqis to the coalition presence and particularly the now-frequent attacks on coalition soldiers. They need to be understood as both part-cause and effect of this growing antipathy. Given the symbolic role coverage of looting attached to the museum as representing coalition handling of the conict and its aftermath in microcosm, the revelations of minimal loss and damage, the representation of the museums empty cases and staffs inability to produce statistics on demand as evidence of an inside job, and the suggestion of senior museum staffs implication in Bacath party tyranny have had a strong impact on more general perceptions of Iraqs postwar state. The allegations have dried up public concern over the looting of museums and set an agenda effectively precluding coverage of the looting of sites. Beyond this, however, they have also contributed to an10. Speaking at the 49e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Col. Matthew Bogdanos, leading the investigation into the looting, gave a report on his teams early ndings. This report represented the extent of knowledge on the looting as of July 2003 and contradicted many of the media claims that preceded it. Details of this report can be viewed through British Museum and the Iraq Crisis, http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/iraqcrisis/.


erosion of sympathy for the economic, political, and humanitarian problems confronting postwar Iraq. As we wait for further investigation of these claims, therefore, it may already be too late to undo damage far beyond the traditional sphere of cultural heritage.

Commentsdan potts Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia ([email protected]. edu.au). 3 ii 04 In May 2003, I travelled to Baghdad on behalf of the Australian government in order to present the Iraq Museum with a gift of computer equipment (laptop, scanner, digital camera, software) and to help the staff there set it up and begin the laborious task of resurrecting the registration system of the museum so that they would be in a position to know what had been looted, what remained, what was damaged, etc. This experience was preceded and followed by a large number of media interviews in Australia, Jordan, and Iraq, affording me insight into the role of the media and its reporting on the Iraq Museum crisis and the looting of archaeological sites in the countryside. The present study, therefore, interests me greatly and prompts me to comment on several points which I think may be worth considering. When I was asked by a young Jordanian journalist in Amman whether I believed, as she clearly did, that the American forces in Baghdad had allowed the looting of the Iraq Museum to occur in order to obliterate the physical evidence of Iraqs ancient past, I confess that my mind was less on American realpolitik than it was on the parallel with ancient Mesopotamian rulers who routinely looted the statues of deities from defeated enemies as a means of driving home their victory over them. When the deities (i.e., their cult statues), in these cases, abandoned their devotees (with the help of the invading enemy), it was a sure sign that the people in question had committed a sin and fallen out of favour with their god. In many respects, I thought, the looting of the Iraq Museum and the removal of so many of its signicant treasures would strike a Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, or Assyrian as a similar sign of divine disfavour visited upon the luckless Iraqi population of our own day. What matters, of course, is not whether the Jordan journalist was correct in her assessment of the situationI for one believe that she was notany more than whether ancient victims of similar acts of despoliation were correct in their assessment of the reasons behind the loss of their cult statues. What matters is perception, for clearly the ancients considered divine disfavour a rational explanation of the looting of their temples, just as Arabs living in the region today, like the journalist with whom I spoke, believed that American vengeance

and anti-Arab sentiment lay behind the American armys refusal to prevent the looting of the Iraq Museum. How beliefs of this sort are transmitted by Western journalists to their readers, however, is an entirely different matter, and it is irrelevant, in one sense, how Western media attitudes develop. It is clearly not irrelevant, as Seymour shows, when those attitudes begin to shape public opinion on matters of universal cultural importance. I found it fascinating, therefore, to see how the media slant on Iraqi heritage in the British press changed through time, and this I take to be Seymours main aim in engaging this topic in the rst place. Where I would have been more cautious, or perhaps more diligent in research, is in the earlier part of the paper, for I nd the discussion of Iran and Iranian attitudes apropos the Iran-Iraq War lacking in depth. Anyone who has spent much time in Iran will, I feel sure, agree that the national concern with the martyrdom of cAli and Husayn is not simply a Khomeini-inspired device to justify a Shicite theocratic state opposed to a Sunni Muslim aggressor as Seymour implies. Rather, the entire episode (which long predates the period in which Shicism became a state religion, as this did not occur until the Safavid period) reects the deep-seated hatred of the Arab conquest by an essentially different (linguistically, culturally) people proud of its Achaemenid and Sasanian Persian history. Indeed, the roots of this Arab-Iranian enmity are even more ancient. The Elamite predecessors of the Persians bitterly opposed the Babylonians, Assyrians, and Sumerians. But it is perhaps the memory of the defeat and destruction of the Sasanian Empireitself bound up mythologically with the pre-modern glory of Iran in Ferdowsis national epic, the Shahnamehat the hands of the Arabs (still referred to colloquially in Iran today as lizard-eaters) which, as much as the martyrdom of cAli and Husayn, evinces this difference. Little wonder, then, that Saddam Hussein, when not reviving memories of Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar, cast the struggle with and vainly anticipated victory over Iran during the Imposed War (as it is referred to ofcially in Iran) in terms of the Arab victory over the Sasanian army at Qadisiyya, a battle which was to herald the beginning of the end for the Sasanian Empire. In recent years I have been told on more than one occasion by both young and older Iranians that they do not regard holidays such as the celebration of the end of Ramadan as real, since these are Arab (i.e., Islamic) holidays imposed on them, not native Persian ones like Now-Ruz, the Iranian New Year (March 21). I cannot share Seymours view, therefore, that Iran and Iraq shared an enormous amount culturally and historically, however opposed the outlooks of their respective governments in the 1980s. A visit to Iran would, I think, dispel any such idea. Beneath the thin veneer of a common religion, there is far more that divides these two peoples than that unites them, and differences in Shicite and Sunni doctrine are only the latest manifestation of an antagonism that can be followed for the course of at least four and a half millennia.


e l e a n o r ro b s o n Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RH, U.K. ([email protected]). 20 i 04 I welcome Seymours timely observations on the imagery of ancient Iraq in British newspaper accounts of modern conict in the country. My comments here are those of a participant-observer (albeit trained as neither) in the international media furore that erupted after the looting of the Iraq Museum in mid-April 2003. They should be considered an addendum to the article rather than a critique. British archaeologists and historians of ancient Iraq are not, on the whole, trained to deal with the media, for until this past year we had almost no expectations of our scholarly works being reported in the mainstream press, where Britain and ancient Egypt have traditionally dominated such archaeological headlines as there were. Consequently, in the days following April 18, when the story broke that the Iraq Museum in Baghdad had been looted, much of its complexity was lost through miscommunication. The journalists and their academic informants were operating on two different Kuhnian paradigms: Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of [specialists] see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction (Kuhn 1962:149). In the rst ten days both sides were further hampered by the fact that each assumed that the other had better access to information in Iraq, but as the phone lines had been bombed out some time before we were all dependent on what reporters in Baghdad chose to cover and how accurately they managed to report it. On the one hand I (and the close colleagues with whom I discussed the process as it happened) wished to present the impossibility of knowing for the moment exactly what had happened, the complexity of Iraqs history and its importance to world culture, and why the large-scale theft of large numbers of small undocumented nds (whether from the museums or, worse, straight from archaeological sites) was in some ways just as great a loss as the removal of several dozen well-documented major works from the public galleries of the Iraq Museum. The majority of the journalists, in contrast, focused on art, gold, and treasures from the Iraq Museum (to the exclusion of the looted Mosul Museum, standing monuments, and archaeological sites) and privileged Sumerian and other ancient artefacts over classical and Islamic objects. Many of the reporters were in fact the newspapers art correspondents, more used to covering the Venice Biennale than discussing the archaeology of brown things. The worst of the journalists typically wanted Oriental glamour, decadence, and opulence: ideally, fabulously valuable golden treasures stolen to order for a shadowy art collector or drugs baron with the aid of corrupt Bacathist museum curators. Around half a dozen proposals for television documentaries along such lines came my way in the second quarter of 2003, none of which, I am happy to report, ever got off the ground. The Doonesbury cartoon strip (admittedly not a British

product but syndicated in the Guardian newspaper) ran a long story about the adventures of a stolen artefact from the Iraq Museum, but, bemusingly, it featured a scroll, that most atypical of ancient Mesopotamian objects. (Papyrus, leather, and other organic materials survive only exceptionally in the archaeological record of Iraq.) But the reportage was not all dismally Orientalist, and the overall outcome was mostly positive. The best of the journalists listened and discussed and gave us space to write our own pieces. Donny George Youkhanna, research director of the Iraq Museum, was interviewed at length and rightly portrayed as hero rather than villain (Gibbons 2003) (though one suspects that his name, Christianity, and impressive uency in English all helped to domesticate him for the British market). The British government was embarrassed into tightening up antiquities legislation, rst for artefacts of Iraqi provenance and now for tainted cultural objects worldwide (http://www.hmso.gov.uk/si/si2003/20031519.htm, http://www.uk-legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/ acts2003/ 20030027.htm). No government has yet, however, managed to fund any cultural renewal projects in Iraq, though the British heritage sector and associated NGOs have been very generous with offers of in-kind support. Most heartening, perhaps, there is heightened public awareness of Iraqs extraordinary archaeology, history, and cultural legacy to the world. Visitor numbers to the Mesopotamia galleries of the British Museum rose substantially last April and appear to have remained high. A recent British School of Archaeology in Iraq study day on the Sumerians was a sellout. Responsible journalists in print and broadcast media are now setting out to produce more thoughtful, deliberative pieces on Iraq, its people, and its history that set out to understand rather than gawp or condemn. Maybe there will come a time when it is as taboo to allow the destruction the cultural heritage of any country in the name of war as it would be to sanction the modern pillage of the Pyramids or the Parthenon. neil asher silberman Ename Center for Public Archaeology, 13-15 Abdijstraat, B-9700 Oudenaarde, Belgium (neil. [email protected]). 5 ii 04 There is a long and enlightening paper to be written about the complex relationship between perceptions of the past and modern geopolitics in Iraq. Yet one might question if 605 newspaper stories over 23 years, the vast majority of which, according to the author, come from just ve sources (the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, the Guardian, and the Financial Times), offer a broad enough sample to be revelatory about the complex relationship between Iraqs perceived past and its uid present. Indeed, we do not require a statistical analysis of British press clippings to know that images of the past in Iraqas well as in Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syriahave been deeply entwined with Western imperialism and local nationalisms since


the nineteenth century. Nor is it a great revelation, at least since the publication of Saids Orientalism in 1978, that more pervasive Western antiquarian ideologies of domination, demonization, and dispossession underlie and are used to rationalize the ebb and ow of modern political events. The 605 examples on which this paper bases its conclusions might well be multiplied by the millions in television news reports, magazine features, web sites, cartoons, museum exhibits, and Hollywood lms. In tracing the shifting subtexts of negative historical representations of Iraq and Iran through the events of the past two decades, Seymour has recognized a need for greater inclusiveness and understanding about the Middle East (and its past) in the British press and, by extension, all Western mass media. That would certainly be welcome. But the link between politics and the past is not a simple matter of removing journalistic bias, as if it were a diagnosable (and curable!) intellectual disease. Journalistic reports are the symptoms of a chronic condition. The modern archaeological and historical interpretations on which they are based are themselves narrative genres that draw power from motifs, analogies, and familiar story elements that resonate in the contemporary cultural and political milieu. In the case of Iraq, new post-Saddam stories about the past are now being written, emphasizing, as Seymour does, the unique archaeological and historic wealth of Iraq and the importance of ancient Mesopotamian culture to the history of modern Western thought. These, too, are reied ideological concepts, harking back to the nineteenth-century image of the Fertile Crescent and the direct connection of the ancient Mesopotamians not to the modern Mesopotamians but primarily to the modern West. The story may change, but the relationship between past and present remains constant. Indeed, Western archaeologists and preservation groupseven some who bitterly protested U.S. and U.K. actionsare now queuing up in airport check-in lines to Baghdad as consultants and cultural heritage experts, alongside the other specialist teams of hydrologists, agronomists, economists, and city planners, summoned by the Coalition Provisional Authority to construct a new Iraq. The new, more inclusive images advocated by Seymour, along with new historical images produced by Iraqis, will, in time, undoubtedly nd their way into the popular press. But merely counting or deconstructing them will bring us no closer to understanding the mechanics of the manipulation of the past. In the coming years, whether Iraqs ancient civilizations are metaphorically demonized, universalized, or Disneyed by Fleet Street, they will remain politically potent for mobilizing resources and swaying public opinion about Britains modern role in the Middle East. And it is that deeper relationship between past an

ancient mesopotamia and modern iraq in the british press, 1980–2003 by michael seymour

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