“The money or your lives” — this infamous Wild West slogan best describes, in a nutshell, the armed-robbery situation in Iraq. The tragedy is that at the end of this Western-style holdup, Bush and his neoconservative highwaymen got away with both — the money and the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children.

Baghdad, the shimmering legendary city of King Gilgamesh, of Scheherazade and the Thousand and One Nights, of Harun Ar-Rashid, of flying carpets, of bazaars, of Aladdin and his lamp, of Sinbad and his seven voyages, and of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves, has now been ransacked, raped, trashed and pillaged. But who is responsible for all the thieving, lawlessness and chaos in Baghdad? Who is the real Ali Baba in this modern tale of theft, deception and wanton destruction?

On the day US Marines captured Baghdad, the only people celebrating their victory were the thousands of liberated looters, drifters, criminals and arsonists armed with AK-47s that the Americans deliberately let loose on the streets, frantically waving the V-sign and cynically shouting “Bush Good — Saddam Bad.” Only a few weeks back, these same criminal crowds were kissing the feet of the Iraqi dictator, chanting “Our soul, our blood, we sacrifice to Saddam.” Decent Iraqis stayed at home, and when they did venture out into the lawlessness and chaos outside, they were not celebrating; they were demonstrating. To them, the real culprits were the American invaders themselves, not their rampaging Iraqi goons and cronies.

There are now credible and independent eyewitness accounts that US Marines were actually encouraging mobs to ransack and destroy the administrative and cultural institutions of the country. They even helped transport busloads of looters from the slum areas of Baghdad for that very purpose. According to an April 11 report by Ole Rothenborg, published in the Swedish Newspaper Dagens Nyheter, US Marines killed two Sudanese guards standing at their posts in front of an administrative building on the other side of Haifa Avenue in Baghdad and then crushed the entrance and gestured to the people to start looting; loudspeakers encouraged them in Arabic to take back “what belongs to them.” US tanks then moved on to the next government building, the Justice Department, and then the next and the next and the next. All in all, 158 government buildings were gutted and most of them set on fire. Only the Ministry of Oil and the Ministry of the Interior were left intact and guarded by US Marines.

Why would Iraqi thieves and riffraff, no matter how dirt-poor and downtrodden, want to burn the Qur’anic Library of the Ministry of Religious Endowment? Why would they want to burn ancient leather manuscripts of the Qur’an dating back to the 8th century? Why would they set fire to the public health records, cultural archives and municipal records of Iraq? Why would they torch the National Library and the Library of Archives, or burn academic records at the universities of Baghdad, Mosul and Basra? Why would they want to deface with a hammer two seated marble deities from the temple at Harta? Why would they burn archaeological card catalogues and photographs, or destroy priceless artifacts or smash Grecian and Roman statues, or decapitate the stone statues of Nebuchadrezzar and Sennacherib, the two ancient kings of Babylon and Nineveh responsible for besieging the holy city of Jerusalem and enslaving the ten northern tribes of ancient Israel? Why? Could this possibly be payback time? Revenge is definitely in the air.

Who are these arsonists who sadistically set Iraq on fire with such vengeance? Robert Fisk describes them as a “trained and organized” army of men armed with maps and moving confidently from one building to another in utter indifference to US troops, knowing exactly where to go and what to burn next. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who these men are. In any crime, the most important clue to solving the my