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Invaders Destroy Iraqi Archaeological Sites
Iraqi officials are investigating reports that Islamic State militants destroyed Hatra, an archaeological site that dates to the First Century B.C., two days after the group bulldozed another nearby site, the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud.Destruction of such important historical sites is indefensible. Like an extinct species, once they are gone, they are gone forever. The casual destruction of the world’s heritage is too often a byproduct of war, as well as a symbol of its senselessness.
The IS act reminded me of another example, however, one from my own time in Iraq with the American Army, in 2009.
On the edge of Forward Operating Base (FOB) Hammer where I lived were several small hills, lumps of raised dirt on the otherwise frying-pan-flat desert. These were “tells,” ancient garbage dumps and fallen buildings. For thousands of years, people in Iraq, as throughout the Middle East, used sun-dried bricks to build homes and walls. The bricks lasted about twenty years before crumbling under the strain of erosion, at which point the people rebuilt on top of the old foundation. After a couple of rounds, the buildings sat on a small hill. There had been so much erosion over the years, along with the digging the Army had done, that an entire area two football fields in size was covered with pottery shards.
In a few minutes of wandering around, you could find pieces commingled that were handworked (old), spun on a wheel with grooves (less old), and glazed with blue color (newest). They were just laying on the ground. Where hold has been dug, you could see larger pieces, even most of a large pot or two. The problem for history was that the large, mostly flat area attracted soldiers, who would sometimes drive the SUVs used to get around on the base around, doing “donuts” and enjoying kicking up dust plumes. No one officially seemed to mind much — kids blowing off steam — until one reservist Lieutenant Colonel took it upon himself to personally try and preserve what was left of the site. He set up posts with red streamers on them, both as a warning and as a way to make driving impossible, and the donuts stopped. At least during his one year deployment.
People said that when the American Army first built the FOB and dug up truckloads of dirt, they found ancient skulls and long bones. You could sometimes spot very old bones in the dirt inside the earthen Hesco barriers that protected the base. The Army used one nearby ancient hill for artillery practice, blowing off most of the top. As one soldier said, “If it’s old and already broken, why does it matter if we shoot at it?” That same area was turned over to the Iraqis, who use it still today as a live fire exercise zone.
The American Army digging also exposed an old village perimeter wall, short-lasting sun-dried bricks on the bottom with a row or two of longer-lasting kiln-dried bricks on top for sturdiness. There was little wood in the desert for kilns, so the inhabitants could not build the whole wall out of the sturdier fired brick. There was still a large brick factory in the area, a few miles from the FOB, that made bricks with local mud. With only a little water added, the mud turned thick and sticky, bad for walking when it rained in winter, great for bricks.
Some ten thousand tells are scattered all over the Middle East. You could see them in the desert from the helicopter, especially in the late afternoon when the sun was low, as they were the only things that cast a significant shadow. An ancient river once flowed through this area, with the village adjacent. A band of greenery marked where the river had been, suggesting there was still water deep underneath. Some of the pottery and bricks were likely Sumerian. It was possible the dust we dug out of our ears at night might have been part of an ancient wall around a Sumerian city.
At night the tell area was very dark so as to avoid giving the insurgents an easy aiming point, and you could imagine how the earliest inhabitants of what was now FOB Hammer must have seen the night sky. It was beautiful, deserving of he over-used expression “awe-inspiring,” with stars down to nearly the horizon. It was all a reminder that we were not the first to move into Iraq from afar, and a promise across time that someone might sit atop our own ruins and wonder what ever happened to the Americans.
(Partially excerpted from my book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Diplomat Loses Top Secret Clearance for Link to WikiLeaks
Wired.com has the story about State taking away my security clearance as a tit-for-tat for my book documenting their silly failures in Iraq.The reporter really captured the 1984 meets Brazil world this is all taking place in:
In December 2010 the White House issued a directive warning federal employees not to access the government documents WikiLeaks published online.
“Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority,” the directive said.
Ironically, Van Buren had worked across the hallway from Manning for about six months in Iraq in 2009 and 2010 at Forward Operating Base Hammer, he told Wired in a phone interview Wednesday.
That’s where Manning allegedly downloaded the cables to a CD-Rom while pretending to lip-sync to Lady Gaga music that was supposedly on the disc. Now Van Buren is being punished for linking to something that Manning allegedly downloaded from the Army’s classified network and leaked to WikiLeaks.
“I literally had my office across the hall from where he worked,” Van Buren said. “I don’t think I actually ever met the guy. The last time I had access to U.S. government secrets was on the Army system that Bradley Manning used.”
Van Buren said State Department security staff who informed him of his suspension this week didn’t even know who Manning was when he mentioned the name. The security guys, Van Buren said, thought he was trying to brag about his Department connections.
“Don’t try to impress me with the people you know,” he says one of the staffers told him. “You could work for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; the rules are the same.”
Read the whole story at Wired.com.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Dinner with Bradley Manning
I probably had dinner with Bradley Manning. Manning, the soldier who allegedly handed over massive amounts of classified material to Wikileaks, was stationed at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Hammer at the same time I was. The office where he worked was right down the hall from mine and though I never knowingly met him, it is hard to believe that we never walked past each other in the corridor, or ended up in the single cafeteria at the same time. The food wasn’t that good, and it could have been Manning one of those days when an anonymous soldier muttered that the salt was not enough to overpower the grease on pot roast Wednesdays.One of the most striking things Manning alledgedly leaked was gun camera video from an Apache attack. The aircraft gunned down two journalists and may have also killed civilians. A new film, Incident in New Baghdad, revisits the leaked video and includes interviews with one of the soldiers involved. Take a look at a clip from the film.
You can see the original gun camera video as well, though YouTube requires you to sign in to prove you are mature enough to see what war is really about.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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