Lawrence Rothfield and "The Rape of Mesopotamia"

In April 2003, like many of us, Lawrence Rothfield watched with great concern as news accounts detailed the pillage of Iraq's National Museum. Since then, the looting of sites around Iraq has not ceased, and Rothfield, as co-founder and former director of the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago, has been working on an extensive inquiry into how such wholesale thievery and destruction was allowed to occur.



In his resulting work, The Rape of Mesopotamia (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Rothfield reconstructs the planning failures - originating at the highest levels of the U.S. government - that led to the invading forces' utter indifference to the protection of Iraq's cultural heritage from looters. Widespread incompetence and miscommunication enabled a tragedy that continues even today, despite widespread public outrage. Bringing his story into the present, Rothfield argues that the international community has yet to learn the lessons of Iraq - and that what happened there is liable to be repeated in future conflicts. The Rape of Mesopotamia is a powerful, infuriating chronicle of the disastrous conjunction of military adventure and cultural destruction.

Rothfield was recently featured in the article "Iraq War's cultural costs as seen through a Chicago prism" by Julia Keller in The Chicago Tribune, where Rothfield reveals that one of the reasons that spurred him to write this authoritative account was its many connections to the city of Chicago.



The Rape of Mesopotamia is essential reading for all concerned with the future of our past, and is now available from the SAFE Store. 


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