His Way

Near the end of 2019, two former Iraqi archaeologists were killed by mortar shelling in the suburb of Babylon, having joined ISIS in the wake of the most recent civil war that erupted between Shia sects in a turbulent area south of the capital, some fifteen years after the American invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein. Their journey to martyrdom had begun that first year, in fact, on a certain afternoon when a forty-foot statue of Saddam was toppled and yanked from its base in Firdos Square, Baghdad.

On April 9, 2003, the Americans had reached the capital city at last. Iraqis were discovering that the fearsome dictator had fled, Baathists were being rounded up and jailed, and the streets were rejoicing.

George W. Bush, the American president himself, magically appeared on television screens within that same hour—his smiling face broadcast in cafés, car garages, shopping malls—with a message meant to reassure Iraqis of his personal respect and admiration for them, and how he knew in his heart that Iraqis were a good and gifted and peaceful people, for theirs was a country with a long dignified history. The nightmare of Saddam, he said, will soon be over.

During the roughly four minutes it took to broadcast Bush’s recorded message, the National Museum in Baghdad was looted by a mob. Papyrus leaves featuring the first-ever recorded writing, jewelry from Cyrus the Great, Sasanian arabesques, and over 11,000 cylinder seals of long-gone empires all vanished into the gray and black markets, never to be seen again. Dozens of Iraqi archaeologists fearful of such an eventuality had, just prior to invasion, provided coordinates of the National Museum to coalition forces, along with several dozen other Iraqi cultural landmarks for protection, though only the Central Bank in Baghdad wound up securely safeguarded.

Relic-looting continued throughout museums, civic buildings, and residences across the country for several months. Archeologists could see, in real time, actual theft of priceless antiquities through the very same cameras filming American Marines bringing freedom to Iraqis, and then standing by while dazed citizens were interviewed about what freedom meant to them. Yet another irreplaceable relic would be captured, on camera, hoisted on a looter’s back and hauled over the remains of a house in rubble, a smashed window, a blasted door. One archaeologist wept while telling the BBC that what they were witnessing could only be comparable to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258.

Back on April 9, an American corporal serving with the 4th Marines named Edward Chin found himself at the base of a statue of Saddam Hussein. It was an accident of timing: he happened to be picking his nose at the statue’s base waiting for orders when his higher-ups excitedly said that Fox News cameras had made it to the square, and certain Iraqi men in the crowd, along with Chin’s fellow Marines, had struck up a conversation about the historical import of the scene they knew would soon unfold. The statue was coming down. Simply due to Chin’s location, the crowd began egging him on. Using a rope, he climbed the statue. “Giving insult” man to man, as a cultural tradition, held an almost otherworldly power for Iraqis, or so Chin had discovered during his time in country. After scaling up to Saddam’s enormous face he did not know exactly what to do, but he pulled from his gear an American flag. Gleefully, Chin unfurled it, flapping across Hussein’s face.

All cheering stopped.

Chin later told an interviewer on Good Morning America that he’d been “sort of surprised” by the silence. He walked among stunned locals in his battle gear, gamely trying to smile, giving thumbs-up to scared and confused passers-by, assuring those who frowned at him that he only meant to insult Saddam, only Saddam and not regular Iraqis, and he apologized if that was the case. Anyway it wasn’t up there very long. For hours he continued to explain himself. He meant no harm.  He was a passionate patriotic guy like President Bush, remember Bush, on the TV? Saying he personally admired Iraqis? That was just his way, Chin’s way, of taking part in history.

Saddam Hussein’s way had been to study and copy Joseph Stalin’s grip on the imagination and iconography of an entire people. Ever since capturing the presidency in 1979, Saddam had issued thousands of orders for the construction of his own likeness wherever he could, swapping ancient faces with his own face, replacing famous scenes of Saladin, Nebuchadnezzar, and even Mohammed with scenes featuring Saddam. At the start of the invasion, when Saddam’s Republican Palace had been overrun by American troops, the commander waited several hours for news cameras to show up so that an enormous Saddam statue, the one that gazed upon the murderous comings and goings of his Baathist regime, might be destroyed for good by a rocket-propelled grenade. A wrought-iron Saddam in Basra was pulled down by British troops, and then one in Karbala, twice as large. None were captured as vividly for posterity as the forty-foot Saddam in Firdos Square that, prior to toppling, had momentarily been “defaced” by the American stars and stripes. Indeed, jihadists of the first insurgency against occupation forces took to trading photographs between themselves of the Firdos Square desecration, pictures showing a hapless grinning Marine on top of Saddam and spreading that odious flag, another testament to American arrogance.

A pair of archaeologists from the University of Baghdad (Daoud al-Maliki and Taha Maruf) observed the desecration of Saddam firsthand. Cameras found them in the crowd weeping, but not from happiness; they explained themselves. Each man had felt profoundly distressed in his soul by something only archaeologists would understand, for while these men loathed and hated Saddam, they loathed the poison of propaganda more. Propaganda obliterated truth and history like a bomb. What they were witnessing was the erasure and substitution of lived history, of Iraqi memories ceding to some nonsensical official story, and time itself becoming meaningless.

In the end, among the over-170,000 pieces looted from the museum in Baghdad was a pristinely preserved marble head depicting the Roman god Apollo, an unusual relic, to be sure, a copy of an original made in Greece and brought to Babylon in 323 by the conqueror Alexander the Great, who kept Apollo’s head in his one of his golden tents to watch over him as he slept. Allegedly, the pilfered head was at Alexander’s bedside when he took ill and died—not more than twenty feet from the actual spot where Saddam Hussein would build his last residence, a winter palace, a few millennia later, and where the head of Apollo ended up stashed for a time. Saddam rarely visited that residence; something about the particular location made him uneasy. It had been cursed by a primeval spirit, he believed, haunted by puckish jinni that clung to the grounds with an animal rage, as if something had upset them in the past and Saddam could not find out what it was. One weekend, in a fit of pique, the dictator ordered all historical artworks out of the house and donated to the National Museum. A single work of art remained, a ceiling mural in the great room.

It was that same room where the bodies of the two Iraqi archaeologists were found, the men having long ago grown out their beards and taken up Russian AK rifles to fight for a caliphate dream. They died in a gunfire exchange with al-Sadr rebels who briefly controlled the region from 2018 to 2019. Maruf and al-Maliki were good fighters, but known for taking off for days at a time to seek out worthless objects in the rubble—an official seal of the old Baathist regime, a Swiss fountain pen once owned by Saddam’s eldest child Uday—anything of the lost, frantic, disjointed past they felt had to be kept in mind and saved for posterity once the fighting stopped, once a caliphate was triumphant, and true Muslims again ruled the Levant. Each man carried a bulging knapsack at all times, stuffed with whatever pieces had been scavenged after gun battles. Both sacks, like everything else in the area, had vanished.

To this day, Saddam’s winter palace remains abandoned. The outer walls dotted by mortar and rifle-fire, the inner walls festooned with graffiti in both English and Arabic saying FUCK YOU SADDAM and INFIDELS ROT IN HELL, the structure is a monument to entropy, every door pried off, every shard of window-glass stolen, all the French chandeliers stripped for parts and the Persian rugs shredded to tatters. High enough to discourage any other desecration but gunfire, the ceiling-mural of Saddam’s great hall has been left intact, some thirty feet by forty feet depicting a panoramic history of Mesopotamia, date palms and dunes, crescents and towers, Sunni and Shia, and the former three-starred flag of Iraq, flying mutely and innocently at the center.