A makeover: Baghdad, the 2013 Arab capital of culture

Baghdad has had several makeovers to reflect the varied images and identities of its invaders over the centuries. For its inhabitants, however, a cultural and intellectual continuity seems to persist, suggesting either schizophrenia or a mode of survival that necessarily disregards political realities. A favorite pastime after the 2003 invasion was to deface these portraits or tear them down. Aside from the subsequent destruction of other Saddam-era monuments by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Committee to Remove the Remains of the Baath Party, however, the city of Baghdad was mostly ignored, leaving decades of neglect, deterioration and poor maintenance of architectural heritage unaddressed. The systematic destruction of identity and erasure of national memory by successive states in modern Iraq has resulted in various voids. Since the invasion of 2003, Iraq's modern heritage has been neglected as part of what seems to be a larger policy of de-nationalizing Iraqi history.