I was walking around the dimly-lit museum. Occasional shafts of light penetrated the thick, hastily erected blast walls, sparkling trails of circulating dust in the air. Every display case was now empty. A lone mannequin stared blankly into space. There was no sense of place or time. The experience was stripped of context, of meaning, of reference – a great cultural void.

This was the upper floor of Mosul museum in northern Iraq, its unique 3500-year-old artefacts now stored away to protect them from the bombs. As the west prepared to attack, this dreamlike experience was suddenly filled with a different kind of meaning – the power of the empty display cases was awesome.

Back in Baghdad, in Rasheed Street, a picture framer worked quietly, dutifully framing pictures of Saddam Hussein.

This man’s country is a place that saw the invention of the wheel, mathematics, the arts and modern urban civilization. He would believe, and it’s hard to dispute, that Iraq has the most significant culture on the planet. In November 2002, as UN weapons inspectors entered the country, I travelled through Iraq, visiting its sites of ancient culture so important to the world, yet now so threatened. I discovered a country ravaged by a decade of brutal economic sanctions, a country of proud yet dishevelled people, a country who’s true culture has been sidelined and all but forgotten in the eyes of the outside world.

The culture of a nation is what sets it apart from the rest of the world. It is what makes it recognisable, what makes it different, what makes it special. In my journey through Iraq, I came to realise that through manipulation of the culture of this country, from without and from within, the world sees Iraq in a very different way.

I sat outside a café, on a chilly evening in the southern town of Najaf drinking strong, sweet Iraqi tea. Next to the café was the local camera shop, its façade adorned with a mural of a smiling Saddam behind an instamatic camera – Big Brother is watching you. This is contemporary visual culture in Iraq. Artists and sculptors earn their living by creating and recreating endless images of Saddam Hussein, and there are many variations – Hunting Saddam, Military Saddam, Telephone Saddam, Leisure Saddam, Revolutionary Saddam… the list goes on. Baghdad even has its own National Museum of Saddam Art. The personality cult that surrounds this man is enormous – behind the moustache lies strength, paternity, and a country of adoring followers, yet this is a distortion of true national sentiment. Saddam becomes the dominant image of Iraq, its people are forgotten and its artists denied the opportunity to express their true feelings, denied the outlet of culture to define themselves as a nation.

In rebuilding ancient Babylon, Saddam is stamping his name on the bricks, just as the great Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar of 600BC had done in his construction of this majestic city.

This country’s historical culture is the richest and longest standing national history in the world. Iraq was ancient Mesopotamia – home to the great biblical civilizations of the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and before them the Sumerians. Civilization began in Mesopotamia, before Egypt, before Greece and Rome.

Six thousand years ago, the great Sumerian city of Uruk was founded in what is now southern Iraq. This was the first city in the world. It was the beginning of urban civilization, the beginning of everything the world now holds as defining of ‘culture’ – architecture, writing, engineering and technical progress, commerce and the arts. The great hero of Uruk was its king – Gilgamesh. The epic of Gilgamesh is the earliest known book, predating Homer and the Bible, and tells of his quest for immortality. In the end, the gods will not grant him immortality, and he seeks to be immortalised by building a great city, the walls of which will last forever holding his memory. The jeep pulled in to Uruk on a bright morning. The wind from the southern desert plains blew coarse sand in my face. Wild dogs prowled the blasted traces of its mighty walls. Uruk survives – barely, but it is there. And in its walls, the memory of Gilgamesh lives on.

So much of the physical fabric of Iraq is rich with the traces of ancient cites yet to be discovered, rich with the essential history of humankind. Yet because Iraq has become a political entity, the west seems to have forgotten about its crucial place in the history of the world. Indeed, those in power in the west no doubt hold this forgetfulness as a great propaganda tool – what is forgotten and not known about is easier to destroy.

And in the middle of all this lie the people of Iraq, with a contemporary culture dominated by the image of Saddam Hussein, and a historical culture conveniently forgotten by the aggressors. Without the use of these aspects of culture, the Iraqis are rendered mute. Without the cultural references, the people of the west simply do not know who these people are – it is like walking round a museum full of empty display cases.