VOICES
Lifting the Fog of the Bias War
Something happened at the Iraqi museum, but not what you read
The scenes caught by television and still photographers were heartrending. A woman wailed as she pointed at smashed statues and empty glass cases in the Iraqi National Museum. Looters still scurried through the halls. Radio and newspaper reports grimly told the world that 170,000 objects in that repository of Mesopotamian history had vanished in a looting frenzy, including some of the world's best-known ancient treasures.
The April incident in Baghdad, which took place under the noses of American troops and tanks, quickly became an international symbol of an invasion gone terribly awry. Within weeks, following a Pentagon-led investigation, a second round of stories reversed course and said the losses were, in fact, minimal. Conservative pundits then jumped on the episode as a lie perpetrated by anti-U.S. Baathists and amplified by duped reporters and excitable American academics.
The problem, though, is that neither the initial very high estimates nor the later very low ones were accurate. The reasons for this inexactitude are not so simple as the critics would have us believe, and have more to do with the difficult and imperfect nature of reporting than with conscious bias.
The first media mention of the museum mess came from Agence France-Presse on April 11, two days after the fall of Baghdad. Sammy Ketz and Ezzedine Said described a dozen looters rifling through the museum, but made no attempt to quantify the loss. Learning of the disaster, other reporters converged the next day at the museum, which backs up to a poor neighborhood on the west side of the Tigris River. "It was complete chaos," Bill Glauber of the Chicago Tribune recalls. "There were still looters in the place, and I thought I'd get hit in the head with a metal bar."
That night, the BBC and the Voice of America quoted Nabhal Amin, identified as deputy director of the Iraqi museum, as saying that all 170,000 items in the museum were stolen or destroyed. Many U.S. dailies published the next day, such as the Tribune and The Washington Post, were more cautious, and avoided specific numbers. "I felt leery being definitive," says Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Post, who arrived at the museum early on April 12. "It was a very fluid situation." Glauber wrote that looters made off with "tens of thousands of artifacts."
The early edition of The New York Times estimated that 50,000 objects were missing, a number gleaned from a midlevel Iraqi museum official. But the final Sunday paper took a far more dramatic stance, trumpeting in the first paragraph that "at least 170,000 artifacts were carried away by looters." What was beyond question, the story stated, was that the entire complex had been "completely ransacked."
The Times reporter, John Burns, says that he changed the more conservative figure after talking that evening to reporters in the hotel who had spent the day witnessing terrible scenes of chaos. "We were disposed to believe the worst," he recalls. "We were tremendously distraught, and passion got the better of us." Other reporters on the scene have sympathy with his decision. "A lot of us got swept up," says Glauber. "There was an emotional punch to it all because the looting [in Baghdad] was indiscriminate and indescribable." To Burns's credit, both versions of the story warned lower down that "a full accounting of what has been lost may take weeks or months."
Many of these first reports were full of basic factual holes. Amin, the source of the 170,000 figure, was not a museum employee, though she had served years before as one of several assistant curators. Senior museum officials left when the battle in the museum neighborhood began to rage on April 8, and were unable to return for several days, while Amin lived within walking distance. She was correct that there are roughly 170,000 numbers cataloged in the museum's collection, but each listing can include many objects — such as several beads from the same broken necklace. The actual number of objects is probably closer to a half-million. Amin also had no current knowledge of efforts to secure gallery items before the war began. But reporters on the scene had little time or resources to sort out the facts. "In retrospect, there were dogs that didn't bark," says Burns. For example, he noted that one door to a storeroom seemed undamaged — important evidence that at least some looting might have been an inside job.
The impact of the early stories was heightened by dramatic quotes from outraged academics in the United States, comparing the disaster to the burning of the Library of Alexandria or the Mongol sack of Baghdad. Reporters — including myself, in an article for Science Magazine — were quick to highlight their statements. The museum situation quickly became a major political embarrassment for the Bush administration. Archeologists had long warned that the museum was vulnerable, and the speedy occupation of the Oil Ministry by U.S. troops provided a stark contrast to the lack of attention to the museum. The incident was front-page news for days.
The Pentagon, initially recalcitrant, took a week to send tanks to secure the museum complex. But the Defense Department soon dispatched a team to find out what was missing, retrieve what it could, and get control of the story.
That investigation led to a second raft of stories in May and
June that focused on returned objects and the discovery of hidden
artifacts from the collection. The situation, it was clear, was
not as dire as first reported. The issue of U.S. culpability in
the looting was ignored.
Yet some Pentagon claims for credit were disingenuous, such as
the announcement that gold from the ancient Sumerian city of Ur
and the Assyrian capital of Nimrud was found in a Central Bank
vault. In fact, museum officials had told U.S. military officers
that it was there, and archeologists had begged the Pentagon before
the war to protect the bank precisely for that reason. Though
the bank was looted, the vault miraculously remained secure.
Conservative writers like Charles Krauthammer and John Podhoretz soon went on the attack against museum officials and the media. On June 13, Krauthammer mockingly wrote in The Washington Post that only thirty-three artifacts were lost, and "you'd have to go back centuries, say, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find mendacity on this scale." In the July 11 New York Post, Podhoretz dismissed the effort to hunt for the lost antiquities as "a result of the hysterical and entirely politically motivated campaign to blame us." After all, he noted, the "total number lost can be counted on two hands and two feet."
But these lowball estimates, too, are wrong. Krauthammer and
Podhoretz refer only to gallery objects — more than 10,000 stored
artifacts remain missing even now.
By mid-summer, no doubt to the relief of the Pentagon, the media
had moved on. "It's been on my to-do list," says Chandrasekaran,
still stationed in Baghdad, of a follow-up. "But with guerrilla
insurgencies and car bombings, it is hard to find the time."
Were reporters dupes? Amin's emotion clearly was real, her anger
at the United States comprehensible. No senior museum officials,
however, ever stated that the museum's entire collection was stolen;
they consistently said that until a time-consuming inventory was
complete, there was no way to know. If reporters were quick to
accept Amin's dire numbers, they were also quick to buy the Pentagon's
rosy claims later. The more important question was why the military
was so unprepared for the terrible urban chaos that engulfed Baghdad.
Amid such conditions, no one expects the proverbial first draft
of history to be unassailably accurate. Perhaps the best advice
is to use eyes more than ears. "I basically just tried to
write what I saw," says the Tribune's Glauber. Where eyes
fail, acknowledge the chaos, say what you don't know. And in the
aftermath, reporters — with prompting and support from editors
— need to use their analytical talent and investigative drive
to bang out a more accurate and nuanced second draft.
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
