Baghdad, the shimmering legendary city of King Gilgamesh, of Scheherazade and the Thousand and One Nights, of Harun Ar-Rashid, of flying carpets, of bazaars, of Aladdin and his lamp, of Sinbad and his seven voyages, and of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves, has now been ransacked, raped, trashed and pillaged. But who is responsible for all the thieving, lawlessness and chaos in Baghdad? Who is the real Ali Baba in this modern tale of theft, deception and wanton destruction?

On the day US Marines captured Baghdad, the only people celebrating their victory were the thousands of liberated looters, drifters, criminals and arsonists armed with AK-47s that the Americans deliberately let loose on the streets, frantically waving the V-sign and cynically shouting “Bush Good — Saddam Bad.” Only a few weeks back, these same criminal crowds were kissing the feet of the Iraqi dictator, chanting “Our soul, our blood, we sacrifice to Saddam.” Decent Iraqis stayed at home, and when they did venture out into the lawlessness and chaos outside, they were not celebrating; they were demonstrating. To them, the real culprits were the American invaders themselves, not their rampaging Iraqi goons and cronies.

There are now credible and independent eyewitness accounts that US Marines were actually encouraging mobs to ransack and destroy the administrative and cultural institutions of the country. They even helped transport busloads of looters from the slum areas of Baghdad for that very purpose. According to an April 11 report by Ole Rothenborg, published in the Swedish Newspaper Dagens Nyheter, US Marines killed two Sudanese guards standing at their posts in front of an administrative building on the other side of Haifa Avenue in Baghdad and then crushed the entrance and gestured to the people to start looting; loudspeakers encouraged them in Arabic to take back “what belongs to them.” US tanks then moved on to the next government building, the Justice Department, and then the next and the next and the next. All in all, 158 government buildings were gutted and most of them set on fire. Only the Ministry of Oil and the Ministry of the Interior were left intact and guarded by US Marines.

Why would Iraqi thieves and riffraff, no matter how dirt-poor and downtrodden, want to burn the Qur’anic Library of the Ministry of Religious Endowment? Why would they want to burn ancient leather manuscripts of the Qur’an dating back to the 8th century? Why would they set fire to the public health records, cultural archives and municipal records of Iraq? Why would they torch the National Library and the Library of Archives, or burn academic records at the universities of Baghdad, Mosul and Basra? Why would they want to deface with a hammer two seated marble deities from the temple at Harta? Why would they burn archaeological card catalogues and photographs, or destroy priceless artifacts or smash Grecian and Roman statues, or decapitate the stone statues of Nebuchadrezzar and Sennacherib, the two ancient kings of Babylon and Nineveh responsible for besieging the holy city of Jerusalem and enslaving the ten northern tribes of ancient Israel? Why? Could this possibly be payback time? Revenge is definitely in the air.

Who are these arsonists who sadistically set Iraq on fire with such vengeance? Robert Fisk describes them as a “trained and organized” army of men armed with maps and moving confidently from one building to another in utter indifference to US troops, knowing exactly where to go and what to burn next. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who these men are. In any crime, the most important clue to solving the mystery is the motive. Let’s just ask ourselves, who stands most to gain from wiping out the Islamic, cultural and artistic identity of the Iraqi people. In who’s best interest is it to extract the ancient roots of Iraqi culture and civilization and destroy the symbols of Iraqi nationalism and pride? Just think about it. All roads lead inevitably to one destination, perhaps two.

The Iraqis have accused the US of the most organized cultural “crime of the century.” And rightly so. US archaeologists have even suggested that the failure to protect Iraqi antiquities could amount to a war crime under the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property. According to initial estimates, a total of 170,000 statues, clay tablets, pieces of pottery and jewelry dating back more than 5,000 years to the first dawn of civilization simply vanished. Is this possible? Is it conceivable that a 5,000-year-old Sumerian alabaster vase — known as the warka vase, which weighs 300 kilograms and would need several people to remove it — could have been so easily carried away by looters without the connivance of US forces? The same applies to the 5,000-year-old alabaster Uruk Vase, the famous stone sculpture known as the “White Lady,” and the world-renowned clay tablets of King Gilgamesh written 2,500 years before Christ. Is it conceivable that the 9,000-year-old Neolithic collection of sculptures or the collection of 80,000 cuneiform tablets comprising the world’s earliest writing, or the spectacular cache of gold artifacts from the burial tombs of Assyrian queens in Nimrod could have been spirited away by petty thieves who simply hated Saddam Hussein? And what about the Babylonians tablets depicting Jews paying homage to the Babylonian king? Could that have been stolen by anyone other than Israeli-organized gangs?

We now also know that members of the US news media (Fox News Channel and Boston Herald) and US soldiers are being investigated for attempting to smuggle artworks, artifacts and Monetary Bonds from Iraqi palaces and banks through Dulles International Airport and London’s Heathrow Airport. American customs officials have begun intercepting stolen items in an operation dubbed “Operation Iraqi Heritage.” But what good does that do the Iraqis? Can they ever hope to retrieve their lost cultural and artistic heritage? FBI Director Robert Mueller, who has sent agents to investigate the looting, had these comforting words: “We are firmly committed to doing whatever we can to secure these treasures for the people of Iraq.”

Let’s get serious. If the Bush administration wanted to retrieve these treasures for the people of Iraq, it wouldn’t have ignored warnings from its own cultural advisors to protect Baghdad’s priceless collection of ancient artifacts in the first place; US senior generals wouldn’t have refused to deploy a few soldiers or just one tank at Baghdad’s world-renown National Archaeological Museum or the 13 other regional museums at risk. They wouldn’t have carefully guarded the Oil Ministry ranking No. 16 on the list of institutions meriting protection, and left for looters the Museum of Antiquities, the single most important site in the country, ranking second after the Central Bank of Iraq.

When the looting and wanton destruction first started, the Bush administration quickly scrambled to downplay the significance of the crime and to deny any US involvement. One US general had this complacent statement: “I don’t think anyone anticipated that the riches of Iraq would be looted by the Iraqi people.”

“It just happened,” US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld hooted angrily at a press conference. It’s a matter of “redistribution of wealth,” he later added in a relaxed and nonchalant manner. I wonder if Rumsfeld ever stopped to think about the four percent corrupt elite who now owns 80 percent of America’s wealth. Any chance of the Pentagon redistributing that? After their initial complacency, US forces have now resorted to a heinous and racist form of punishment for Iraqi looters. They have been forcing them at gun point to strip naked and walk in public parks and highways. On their chests are written the Arabic words, “Ali Baba — thief.” These disturbing Nazi images first published by a Norwegian newspaper have been distributed worldwide, except in America of course, and US officials are insisting that this medieval tactic is a good deterrent which they will continue to use. Maybe it is. We just hope Benjamin James Johnson, the satellite engineer for Fox News, and Jules Crittenden, Boston Herald reporter, who have both been caught smuggling stolen paintings, Monetary Bonds, and other artifacts into the US, will also be forced to strip naked in public. We hope a similar humiliating fate awaits the five as yet unidentified US soldiers who have stolen valuable items from Iraqi government facilities. What excuse do these well-off Americans have for stealing? At least Iraqi looters were impoverished and desperate individuals suffering decades of deprivation. They didn’t travel thousands of miles across oceans just to steal other people’s cultural antiquities and valuables. In all probability, many of the more valuable antiquities will show up in Israel where officials will claim that these artifacts are rightfully theirs, just as they did after the 1967 invasion of Jordan when they seized the Jordanian National Museum housing the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, and claimed it for Zionism.

As the extent of this cultural catastrophe became known, commentators the world over began to openly denounce the US invasion and to express their indignation and suspicion toward the US government. On April 26, The Guardian carried this headline, “Barbarians at the Gates of Baghdad.” The Bush administration was now beginning to feel the stigma of being compared to the Mongol Hulegu, the grandson of Genghis Khan who in 40 days looted the city, ransacked its libraries, burned its mosques and palaces, killed its civilians and hurled its books into the Tigris until its waters turned red with human blood and black with the ink of volumes of history and civilization. Many Americans themselves were genuinely outraged at the fact that these cultural treasures of the ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sassanids, and Muslims had withstood the sacking of the Mongols only to be destroyed at the hands of George Bush, a man whose knowledge of world culture obviously does not go beyond that of the Old Wild West. Three members of Bush’s advisory committee on cultural property felt compelled to tender their resignation citing the “wanton and preventable destruction”?

It was no longer a question of the Pentagon not caring enough about Iraq’s cultural and artistic heritage to make any effort to protect it; there was now growing suspicion that the US government was somehow in league with art smugglers. Indeed, many stolen artifacts have already started showing up in the art markets of the US where, as many specialists have pointed out, more than 50 percent of stolen artwork worldwide eventually winds up. The fact is that since American forces have not documented any theft and since all records and catalogues were very conveniently destroyed, US officials can do very little to recover these priceless objects of art.

In a drive to dispel the stigma of barbarism and to deny blame for the destruction of Iraq’s cultural wealth, Bush met 500 Arab-Americans at the Ford Community and Performing Arts Center in Dearborn, Michigan, one of the nation’s largest concentrations of Arab-Americans, where he was greeted with chants of “We Love Bush.” Apparently spin doctors at the White House thought that by having Arab-Americans proclaim their love for Bush against the backdrop of a cultural setting, they could simultaneously portray him as a cultured and civilized leader, quell Iraqi anger and indignation at the wanton destruction of their heritage as well as erase images of the barbaric destruction of Iraq’s priceless collection of artifacts, ancient books, rare maps and handwritten archives dating from the founding of ancient Sumer in 3,500 BC to the end of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258 AD.

But history will remember April 9 as a dark and barbaric day for civilization and certainly for the US government. No doubt, the choreographed picture of George Bush as co-pilot stepping off a military jet onto the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, all dressed up in war gear replete with flying suit and helmet, will one day rival images of Hulegu Khan and his Mongol hordes marveling at their military prowess, their double-headed axes, their long range bows of horn and sinew, their catapults and their infamous siege equipment.

As many commentators have pointed out, the most powerful symbol of barbarism is the burning of books and the destruction of works of art. What is ironic is that a brutal and barbaric tyrant like Saddam Hussein who kept his country destitute for decades still managed to preserve Iraq’s ancient treasures of learning and artistry intact for the Iraqi people and at the same time succeeded in building one of the finest educational systems in the region. In contrast a so-called civilized America managed in just a few hours to destroy the very symbols of wisdom and learning; to sack libraries, plunder museums, burn volumes of ancient history and civilization and destroy the cultural and historical wealth of an entire nation.