Loot

by Mark Stephen Meadows

In Basra, a few days ago, I watched as a Baath party member was shot in the street. He was shot three times, then again, as he tried to crawl away.

One night I was talking with several old men while automatic rifles -- probably AK47s -- were being fired across the street. None of my hosts flinched. I don't think they even broke the beat of the sentence. They were used to it by now. Iraq had, after all, been like this for decades. It was the culture.

In Baghdad, things were hot. Never mind the 135¡F heat. The sun would go down and the guns would come out. The looters were carting off goods from any building that had an administrative ring to it. All of the ministries in Baghdad, I was told, were looted, save the temple of petrol: the Ministry of Energy. The looting, not the war, has interrupted people's lives, kept people inside, afraid. The fear of looters has made people carry weapons with them whenever they leave the house. And it has been the looting that has cost the country so much of its heritage and history.

Where did the looting start?

I spoke to a man in Basra and a woman in Baghdad last week. They are both Iraqi, they were both in these two towns during the war and they both told me the same thing: that coalition troops opened up ministries and banks and then stepped back, allowing local residents to help themselves to the booty inside.

But culture can be changed faster than you might think. The easy way to do it is to cauterize a country's brain. Burn the administration and institutions that preserve the memory, and you have an infantile nation, ready for your new education.

I went to Baghdad to see what was happening, and that was what I saw…