Trump threats to Iran culture sites were illegal, bad strategy and a break with tradition

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In breaking with President Donald Trump’s threats to attack cultural sites in Iran and vowing to “follow the laws of armed conflict,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper was continuing the distinguished tradition of U.S. military protection of cultural heritage, best known through the “Monuments Men” of World War II. Belatedly, so is his commander in chief.

Esper might also have kept himself and Trump out of jail if the president had not walked back his tweets ("I like to obey the law," Trump said Tuesday).

While international protocols, notably the Geneva Conventions (signed in 1949 and amended in 1977) outlawed attacks on “historic monuments, works of art or places of worship,” this had not been put into practice until 2017, when Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi was convicted of destroying cultural heritage as a war crime for his desecration of historic sites in Timbuktu. Al-Mahdi still has seven years left of his jail sentence imposed by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.

Unlike Trump, then-Gen. Dwight Eisenhower recognized the universality of cultural heritage and urged his commanders to protect it in 1944: “Shortly, we will be fighting our way across the Continent of Europe in battles designed to preserve our civilization. Inevitably, in the path of our advance will be found historical monuments and cultural centers which symbolize to the world all we are fighting to preserve. It is the responsibility of every commander to protect and respect these symbols whenever possible.”

Trump should be more like Ike

Eisenhower made it clear that protecting lives took precedence over monuments, but he also understood the importance of the cultural heritage of Italy and Germany to their people and to the world. 

By contrast, in the Iraq invasion in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signaled a disrespect that may have sown the seeds of today’s resentment toward the American presence: First, in planning the invasion, Rumsfeld dismissed information on the locations of cultural sites offered by delegations of archaeologists and other experts that had been passed up the chain of command to his office. In the aftermath, former Iraqi National Museum Director Donny George was unable to persuade American troops to protect the museum because they had no orders to do so. Yet, while the unguarded National Museum and Archives were looted of priceless treasures and irreplaceable documents, the oil ministry was protected by dozens of tanks — sending an unmistakable message about U.S. priorities. 

Any notion that America would express regret for neglecting to secure the sites of Iraqi (and global) heritage disappeared with Rumsfeld's infamous comment about the widespread looting. “Stuff happens!” he said at a news conference on April 11, 2003. As if that weren't enough, he went on to deride Iraq’s cultural heritage, including the Uruk vase from 3,000 B.C., one of the seminal objects of human civilization (looted but later recovered).

“The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?' ” Rumsfeld said to laughter from the press corps.

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Later, the U.S. military recognized the importance of respecting and preserving Iraq’s cultural heritage, and established comprehensive training programs to prevent blunders such as establishing the military installation Camp Alpha atop the ruins of Babylon.

"They destroyed the whole country," commented the head of the Babylon museum about U.S. forces in Iraq. "So what are a few old bricks and mud walls in comparison?"

Military and civilian personnel now serving in conflict zones from Iraq and Afghanistan to West Africa have been instructed in the “hows” and “whys” of respecting and preserving cultural heritage by organizations such as the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield and the Smithsonian Institution.

Pioneering military archaeologist Laurie Rush developed the ingenious program of distributing decks of cards with information about cultural heritage in Iraq and Afghanistan to enlisted men and women serving there.

Archaeologist Laura Tedesco has served for a decade in the State Department as a cultural heritage specialist. She began her tenure at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, where she was hired in  response to a State Department inspector general report. Imagine that. The analysis concluded that cultural preservation was so important, the embassy needed an archaeologist. 

Use heritage to undermine regime 

When in 2011 he announced U.S. support for a new National Museum in Kabul, then- Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, previous commander of U.S. forces in the country, spoke of cultural heritage as critical to rebuilding Afghan national identity and a peaceful civil society, and as foundational to the social reconciliation process.

My Afghan translator brought his words to life when he accompanied me on a tour of the museum. The visit, his first, transformed his image of his country.

“I never knew Afghanistan was such an important historic and cultural center in Asia, and I didn’t realize Afghanistan was once a Buddhist country, ” he said after we left the museum.

Of course, he knew the Taliban had destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas, but it is not the same as recognizing that his country once was Buddhist and had an illustrious, pluralistic history far different from the Taliban’s fundamentalist Islamic straitjacket.

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Because of its capacity to shape identity and inspire pride and unity, cultural heritage — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Mali and elsewhere — is a powerful weapon against violent extremism. Eisenhower recognized this, and today, so do jihadists. That is why they destroy cultural heritage sites from Mosul to Palmyra to Timbuktu.

From Persepolis to the Cyrus Cylinder, Iran's cultural heritage could play a moderating and unifying role if regime change, for which thousands of protesters have risked their lives, ever comes about.

Extremists get why culture matters. Why did it take a prompt from his Defense secretary for Trump to get it? Instead of aping extremists in wanting to destroy culture, why doesn’t the president undermine the fundamentalist Iranian regime by praising Persian cultural heritage?

Cynthia P. Schneider, a professor in the practice of diplomacy at Georgetown University, served as U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands from 1998-2001. She co-directs Georgetown's Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics as well as the Mali-based Timbuktu Renaissance and the Los-Angeles-based MOST Resource. Follow her on Twitter: @schneidercp