Comments for BBC NEWS | Middle East | US criticised over Babylon damage »
Posted By dissent 5 months, 3 weeks ago in NewsAmerican troops and contractors caused substantial damage to the archaelogical site at Babylon in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, a new UN report says.
The report says key structures were harmed and the site was subjected to "digging, cutting and levelling".
But UN cultural officials stress the damage did not begin when the Americans arrived, or end when they left.
The US says looting while Babylon was under their control would have been worse had they not been there at all.
The new report was issued on Thursday in Paris by the UN's cultural agency, Unesco.
It comes after five years of investigations by Iraqi and international academics, some of whom have previously been critical of damage caused when US troops were based at Babylon in 2003 and 2004.
The 4,000-year-old city south of Baghdad was once home to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
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jordan115 months, 3 weeks ago
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These type of things....the artifacts, the roads, the structures...are psychologically very important to some people. To walk the same roads as people from 4000 years ago can be very significant to a person's sense of place in the world. Americans are flippant about these things, I believe, because their own sense of place is barely a blip in the time continuum.
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Sad. Very sad that such a significant place was treated with such disrespect.-
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dissent5 months, 3 weeks ago
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the irony is that babylon, just as we are now, was THE empire of its day.
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perhaps some future empire, should humanity last so long, show us the same staggering disrespectful ignorance and thus the same disregard for understanding the human journey on the planet.
perhaps some future empire will also show us the same shallow, hollow arrogance in the belief that they too, like us, are superior to everyone and everything yesterday, today and tomorrow.
the greatest lesson to be learned from history is that all empires are brutal and arrogant but also all empires eventually crumble and are swept away.
the inability to actually see this obvious irony is saddening.
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hyperbola5 months, 3 weeks ago
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Well, another facet of our "victory" in Iraq. Anybody think Obama and Afghanistan will turn out any better?
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So This Is What Victory in Iraq Looks Like?
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/07/08/so-this-...
America will have to deal with the reality that, no matter how we spin facts, President Bush’s ill-advised Iraqi adventure has ended in defeat.
...Many in the West continue to delude themselves into seeing progress—and therefore “victory”—when in fact the situation in Iraq has only regressed. It is in vogue for Western journalists, pundits and government officials to compare and contrast conditions in Baghdad today with those that existed in 2007, when the U.S. began its “surge” of military forces into the urban areas of Iraq in an effort to quell violence that had reached epidemic proportions. There is no debate over the fact that the level of violence in Baghdad and elsewhere throughout Iraq has dropped dramatically since the surge was instituted. But the cost paid by Iraqi society, shredded by ethnic cleansing and segregation, raises the question of whether or not the alleged “cure” is any better than the “disease” it purports to address. One thing is certain: Iraq remains a very sick patient. The U.S., in designing a surge that addressed only the most visible symptoms of the problems which ravage Iraq in the post-Saddam era, has created a false sense of accomplishment when in fact the underlying conditions that caused the violence prior to the surge still exist. It’s like a cancer temporarily stunned into remission by a drug that weakened the body and now is being withdrawn without actually curing anything. The Shiite-Sunni schism has only worsened, and there is increasing risk that the Arab-Kurd disagreement over oil rights will escalate from a war of words into something more violent.
The absolute failure of the surge is even more evident when one considers conditions inside Iraq before the U.S. invasion in 2003. There is simply no serious benchmark by which one can make a viable argument for improvement. Even the Bush administration stopped the pretense that we had brought democracy to the country. Stability is now the term of choice, and when one compares the situation in Iraq circa February 2003 to today, the facts scream out loud and clear that Iraq is far more unstable in its present condition than when governed by Saddam Hussein.....
.... The number of Iraqi refugees has more than quadrupled since the invasion. Some 500,000 Iraqis had fled the abuses of the Saddam regime, while today more than 2 million Iraqis have been compelled to leave the country as a direct result of the U.S.-led invasion and subsequent occupation. Another 2 million have been forced from their homes and are internally displaced.-
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hyperbola5 months, 3 weeks ago
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Unemployment is rampant. Iraq’s health care system is in tatters, as is its education system. But apparently these figures are meaningless in the face of the one major statistic the Twitter-crazed Western media seems to have fallen in love with: There are nearly 18 million cell phones in use in Iraq today, up from a mere 80,000 when Saddam Hussein governed. The fact that most of these phones operate with intermittent or nonexistent service is irrelevant. Iraq has cell phone coverage. God Bless America.
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It is wishful thinking to believe that the Iraqi military and paramilitary forces under the government of Prime Minister al-Maliki will be able to hold the ruins of Iraqi society together without major U.S. intervention. The sad reality is not only that Baghdad is a far more militarized city today than at any time under Saddam Hussein, but the United States has assumed the role of Saddam’s Special Republican Guard. American soldiers are now an iron fist lurking on the edges of the city, waiting to be called in to crush any sign of rebellion or insurrection. That our role has so readily transformed from liberator to occupier should come as a surprise to no one.
.... The biggest challenge in Iraq facing the Obama administration is not to fall victim to the need to be seen as victorious. Victory today can be measured only in terms of mitigating the consequences of failure. There will be no “Battleship Missouri moment,” with the forces of a defeated Iraqi insurgency lined up to formally surrender. Instead, America will have to deal with the reality that, no matter how we spin facts, President Bush’s ill-advised Iraqi adventure has ended in defeat. Whether this defeat is memorialized with imagery reminiscent of the U.S. retreat from Saigon, with helicopters pulling the last occupiers from the roofs of the American Embassy in Baghdad (unlikely), or repeats the pathos of the Russian retreat from Afghanistan, with a convoy of American troops crossing over into Kuwait in orderly fashion (more likely), there is no victory to be had in the classic sense.
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