I was intrigued and disappointed to read John Gravois’s article on the agreement signed by the Hoover Institution at Stanford with the Iraq Memory Foundation for the deposit at Hoover of “two shipping containers” of records created by Iraq’s Baath Party. These are apparently nearly seven million pages of government records of the party, which ruled Iraq from 1968 until our 2003 invasion of the country. The Iraq Memory Foundation, which was founded by Kanan Makiya, a prominent Iraqi refugee and currently a professor at Brandeis University, claims that it was given custody of the archive by persons in the current Iraq prime minister’s office. Makiya is quoted as saying that these records need to be kept in safekeeping, “but Baghdad is just not ready for it.” Hoover says it is acting at the request of the Iraqi government, and it will preserve this archive just as it has the records of the Soviet Communist Party and “the Chiang Kai-shek diaries. . . . This is right down our alley.” On the other hand, Saad Eskander, the director general of the Iraq National Library and Archives, contends that these records belong in his country and in his institutional care.

My friend Trudy Peterson, the former deputy and acting archivist of the United States, while acknowledging that the materials ultimately must be returned to Iraq, agrees that it may not be safe to return them now. Trudy is one of the most accomplished archivists I know, and she is without peer on questions of international archives in the United States. She argues that Hoover and the Iraq Memory Foundation must negotiate an understanding for the future return of the material.

That seems a safe and sensible principle, but I wonder whether we ought not to allow the Iraqis to determine whether or not it is safe to house nationally significant archives domestically? Questions of security are not the only relevant questions, it seems to me. After all, the United States has just pushed the Iraqi government to begin reintegrating the Baathists into the public life of Iraq. Does it not seem likely that the process of de-Baathification will require access to public records of the Baathist era? Should the Iraqis have to go to Stanford to consult these materials? Shouldn’t we permit those responsible for archives in Iraq to make the determination? Is it becoming for the country that was so inattentive to protecting Iraq’s archeological heritage to alienate its archival heritage?

I think there are some big issues here, academic as well as political, and I would hope that historians and archivists in this country would pay attention to this consequential announcement.