Dean of Woodrow Wilson School said in Iraq: "we knew how to destroy but not how to build."

The war in Iraq: Five years later
New York, March 17, IRNA
US-Iraq-War-Outlook
In April 2003, just after American troops secured Baghdad, the Iraqi national museum was looted.

American soldiers nearby made no effort to stop the looters, much less provide a guard. We either did not have enough soldiers to protect the museum, or we did not care enough to try, an American academic said.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld thought it was a "stretch" to attribute the theft and destruction of priceless Mesopotamian artifacts to "any defect in the war plan".

"Our government knew how to destroy but not how to build. We had toppled a regime, and in coming months we would dismantle Saddam Hussein's bureaucracy and disband his army. But we did so with absolutely no understanding of how to build a liberal democracy, or even a stable, rights-regarding government with broad popular support, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton said.

Such a government requires a prosperous economy, a secure society and sufficient cultural unity to allow everyday interaction among different ethnic groups in workplaces, schools, hospitals, the army and the police.

Protecting the symbols of a common and proud heritage is Democracy Building 101 - at least for anyone who understood anything about Iraqi history and culture, the academic said citing the war plan.

Americans are still living with the aftermath of this ignorance, and we will be for decades to come.

In 2003 and 2004, experts debated whether it would take one year or three to rebuild Iraq. Now we debate whether it will take 10 to 15 years or whether it can be done at all, said the academic.

Those broken and stolen statues from the museum are the enduring symbols of what has gone so wrong. They were easy to smash, so hard to repair.

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