There is a lot about war in this issue. The front page is about the experts and archaeologists who are advising the US government to be really careful if it goes to war in Iraq not to smash up the monuments and too many of the archaeological sites. Then we give you an eyewitness account of what the ancient town of Nablus looks like after the Israeli incursions in April (more of this later). And, finally, there are three interviews with war reporters about that difficult threshold where art encounters the battlefield.
Memoirs by people who lived through World War I and II often describe a prelude when all conversation was of war and life seemed to be a conveyor belt, ineluctably carrying everyone into conflict. As we read this, it always seems a tragic madness as we have the advantage of hindsight and know what horrors are to come.
The madness is on us again, for whatever terrible reason that prevents men from learning from experience. As we await the President of United States’s decision, let’s draw attention to a few facts and paradoxes.
Iraq is, of course, Mesopotamia: cradle of our civilisation according to old fashioned history books; ignored by fashionable modern text books, so most people know nothing about the country beyond the iniquities of Saddam Hussein.
How many of the American Christian fundamentalists, I wonder, know that we are likely to bomb vital evidence of the bible story into talcum powder? Would a greater knowledge of the people or of the monuments make us less keen to go to war? (I hope the former.) What is certain is that our present ignorance of both makes it easier to feel comfortably detached as we propose to unleash hell.
And then there are the lawyers. How many people know that the US army now goes into battle with attorneys who advise them on what they can and cannot bomb while still remaining on the right side of the Hague Convention? I suppose it is better than nothing, but it so massively misses the point of life itself that one can only laugh at the folly of it. Such ritualisation blurs and normalises the reality of violence, which should never be normal.
Worse still is the simple denial that violence has taken place. This occurred with Nablus, the ancient town on the West Bank. In June, we reported that venerable monuments had been damaged or destroyed. No less a figure than the former director of the Israel Museum told us that we had been dupes of Palestinian propaganda and that nothing of any moment had happened. So when a brave English journalist offered to go there on our behalf, we dipped deep into our pockets (art publications are never rich) to pay for it because the truth was too important to be left hanging. Not only was nearly everything we had reported correct, but the overall devastation, the human reality, was much, much worse.
Which brings me back to monuments in times of war. We fret about Samarra and Babylon, Baghdad and Basra, Mosul and Ur in the knowledge that we are incapable of affecting the main stream of events in the very slightest.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as ‘What a tragic farce'