Why a Museum?

Wall Street Journal ^ | April 18, 2003 | ERIC GIBSON

[knuthom]

We shouldn't have been surprised that, after the looting of Baghdad's antiquities museum last weekend, negligent Americans, not the looters themselves, got most of the blame. For much of the media, every bad thing since the invasion has been America's fault. So adding another charge to the indictment was an easy call.

[knuthom]

And in October the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported that Saddam had started moving--to a remote town in northwestern Iraq--several truckloads of "gold bars and artworks from museums in Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul."

This is interesting in light of reports yesterday that some of the 55 most wanted may have gone to northwest Iraq.

[ex-Texan]

My first thought was that Saddam was looting Iraq's museums. Very very first thought.

The American media should hang their collective heads in shame. Better yet, they should be lined up and shot. Starting with every vapor-brained idiot at CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS. They are all a bunch of @%$#%%!

Starting with Dan Blather ... he would be first on the list if I had a vote.

[ricpic]

You want to feast on the cultural treasures of Babylon? Go to The Metropolitan Museum or The Art Institute Of Chicago or The British Museum or The Louvre and you'll be stuffed up the wazoo with 'em!
All this crying is transparently obvious crocodile tears from the usual hate America crowd. Gauranteed they wouldn't know a Babylonion cultural artifact from an Assyrian or even an Egyptian if you stuck it up THEIR wazoo. And I'd like to!!

[Servant of the Nine]

This is interesting in light of reports yesterday that some of the 55 most wanted may have gone to northwest Iraq.

Yes, the Syrian Border.

It is shameful what the media has done with this, especially after the article in Archaeology Magazine was already in print about the Museum staff assuring the world that they had the treasures safeguarded in case of war.

If there is any fault, it is that of the staff for engaging in typical middle eastern bragodocio instead of admitting their inadequacies.

So9

[MizSterious]

I wish someone would send this article, and the one it mentioned, to Bill O'Reilly. Last night he was very critical of the troops on this issue.

[just mimi]

I agree. Bill O'Reilly said that it would have taken one armoured tank to stop the looting and that it should have been done. I would love to hear him do a more complete story and a retraction of his criticism.

[Howlin]

There was a thread around here last night about some 'stuff' showing up at London's airport; I just looked and I cannot find it. I'm still looking.

But it sounded kind of bogus, because it clearly stated that the stuff was on a British Airways plane, and they haven't flown in or out of the Middle East since the end of February.

[ckilmer]

umour and Fact at Baghdad Museum
Free Britannia journal ^ | April 18, 2003) | Anat Tcherikover
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/895943/posts

Posted on 04/18/2003 11:46 AM PDT by quidnunc


Media outlets worldwide lament the fate of Iraq's National Museum at Baghdad, said to have been looted on 12 April. All refer to the important archaeological treasures, now nowhere to be seen, and quote museum officials on the horrors of the marauding mob. The Americans are generally blamed for failing to protect the museum. A petition in this matter, organized by Cambridge and Oxford scholars, has already gone to UNESCO (14 April).


Only a few reporters have detected some strange flaws in this story. In the Daily Telegraph (14 April), David Blair observes that the heavy steel doors of the vaults, about one foot thick, show no sign of having been forced open. He also reminds his readers that "Saddam's regime is thought to have removed some artefacts from the museum before the onset of the war". Similarly in the New York Times (12 April), John Burns notes that it remains unclear whether some of the museum's treasures "had been locked away for safekeeping elsewhere before the looting, or seized for private display in one of Mr. Hussein's myriad palaces."


A cursory check of older reports on the Baghdad Museum, published long before the war, in fact upholds these suspicions and more beside. An article by Alistair Lyon, published in www.museum-security.org on 2 December 1998, describes the state of the museum at that time: "Dusty showcases that once glowed with treasures from ancient Mesopotamian cultures now lie empty in the locked rooms of the Iraqi Museum. The Iraqi authorities removed the finest jewellery, statues, pottery and other prized artefacts and stored them in secret caches during the 1990-91 Gulf crisis. Even I don't know where they are, said Donny Youkhanna, assistant director of the museum'. Significantly, Mr. Youkhanna is described in more recent sources as Iraq's chief archaeologist, director general of Iraq’s Antiquities Research Department. If he did not know where the items were in 1998, who did?


On 11 May 2000, CNN's correspondent Jane Arraf reported on the reopening of Baghdad Museum on the occasion of Saddam's birthday. This is how the article concludes: "The museum had been infested with termites, and years of storage have damaged the artwork. … Some of the more spectacular pieces, treasures from the royal tombs in Ur and recent excavations from Nimrod, won't be on exhibit until summer." Ms Arraf was no doubt quoting the Iraqi authorities on the intention to exhibit these treasures, indirectly informing us that they were nowhere to be seen at the time.


With this information at hand, it is instructive to examine the precise sources on the supposedly total looting of 12 April 2003. Both the Telegraph and the New York Times articles say that the story came from a museum official, who may or may not be telling all. There is no corroboration from any other direct witness. It is equally instructive to examine the bulk of photographs taken in the museum between 12 April and 15 April. All show disarrayed storage spaces, which easily fit with CNN's description of the desolation incurred by May 2000. One photograph, reproduced here, shows empty glass showcases. The caption given to this photo by Agence France Presse claims "empty shelves after a mob of looters ransacked and looted Iraq's largest archeological museum in Baghdad". However, this cannot be true because the glass of the showcases is intact. Clearly, these showcases were emptied in an orderly fashion without being broken, which fits best the evidence of 1998, given above.


Surely, the misfortunes of the Baghdad museum are a matter for concern, but likewise the misfortunes of the press on this issue during the chaotic days of 12-15 April 2003.


Sources:


1. Alistair Lyon's article of 1998: http://www.museum-security.org/reports/07798.html#11


2. Sources mentioning Mr. Youkhanna's poistion as chief archaeologist: http://www.cairotimes.com/content/archiv06/iraq.html http://www.geocities.com/iraqinfo/index.html?page=/iraqinfo/sum/articles/graves.html


3. CNN's article of 2000: http://www.cnn.com/2000/STYLE/arts/05/11/iraq.museum/


4. Photographs of Baghdad museum 12-15 April 2003: http://search.news.yahoo.com/search/news/?adv=1&p=baghdad+museum&ei=UTF-8&c=news_photos&o=a&s=&n=20&2=3&3=


5. Academic petition to UNESCO, 14 April 2003, http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wolf0126/petition.html and its background website: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wolf0126/index.html


6. NYT article of 12 April 2003: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/international/worldspecial/12CND-BAGH.html


7. Telegraph article of 14 April 2003: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2003%2F04%2F14%2Fwmus14.xml

[optik_b]

OReilly was not critical of the troops at all. He was critical of someone up top who obvioulsy placed no priority on protecting these priceless artifacts. It amazes me how some of you guys cannot see how obvious a blunder this is. This is a crime against all of us not just the iraqi people. I guess some of you do not care if massive looting occurs when it could have been prevented.

[MizSterious]

I wish people would at least investigate further before jumping on the network's propaganda bandwagon. Few in the media are reporting what the WSJ did, as reported by Phil Dragoo in post #26 on this thread yesterday:

Iraqis Say Museum Looting Wasn't as Bad as Feared
The Wall Street Journal | Thursday, April 17, 2003 | YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

But, thanks to Iraqi preparations before the war, it seems the worst has been avoided. Donny George, the director-general of restoration at the Iraqi Antiquities Department, Wednesday said his staff had preserved the museum's most important treasures, including the kings' graves of Ur and the Assyrian bulls. These objects were hidden in vaults that haven't been violated by looters.

"Most of the things were removed. We knew a war was coming, so it was our duty to protect everything," Mr. George said. "We thought there would be some sort of bombing at the museum. We never thought it could be looted."

The Wall Street Journal article concludes with the paragraph containing the U.S. colonel's account that his force was taking fire from the museum and thus could not protect it from looters. It is quite ignored by the NYT and the alphabetnetwork that U.S. forces did not return fire on the museum although they would have been within their international rights to have done so.

And in post 9, Grampa Dave quoted PD again:

To: TroutStalker; Grampa Dave; PhiKapMom

Lt. Col. Schwartz, whose functions also include feeding the lions in the abandoned Baghdad Zoo next door, said he couldn't move into the museum compound and protect it from looters last week because his soldiers were taking fire from the building -- and were determined not to respond. There is an Iraqi army trench in the museum's front lawn, and Lt. Col. Schwartz said his troops found many Iraqi army uniforms inside. "If there is any dirty trick in the book," he said, "they sure used it."

NYT and the alphabetnet continue to try to foist the Big Lie of looting--when it's more the Mogadishu template: U.S. removes tyrant starving citizens, so tyrant hides behind citizens to shoot at U.S.

For NYT and the alphabetnet America, Bush and the troops are ALWAYS wrong, their question at press conferences and in their "news" is ALWAYS "Why hasn't Bush quit beating his wife!"

Kudos to WSJ and Fox for the balanced report.

The Leftist propaganda machine is in effect criticizing the dead firemen and police in the WTC for failing to rescue "millions of irreplaceable files".

It's a war of liberation and we and the Iraqis are victorious.

The Left is losing--and it turns their red faces purple.

It's just plain annoying that so many report this story wrong, leaving out important little details like these, just to get their anti-war, anti-Bush point across. It's even more so that Freepers are helping in this endeavor.

[PhilDragoo]

Upon closer examination, the "looting of Iraq's museum" resembles the Republicans' draconian cuts of Medicare.

A leftist canard.

In this instance, masking embezzlement by the Nebuchadnezzar Nazis.

[swheats]

"Saddam and his family are basically cultural vandals. When he left Kuwait he trashed the place. So it makes sense that when he leaves Iraq he took the most valuable items."

This reminds me of another family who left with great historical treasures, and trashed a certain White House.

[nopardons]

It's the Oriental Museum in Chicago; but how correct you are and that includes some yahoos on this very forum too !

[nopardons]

Try this one on for size ! More facts and truth to read, instead of whinging lies and over blown propaganda. :-)

[Fifth Business]

Thanks for the ping. I'm going to ping a couple others also.

[nopardons]

You're welcome.

It's imperative for us to know ALL of the facts. Did you also read the links ? If not, do so.

[Fifth Business]

OReilly was not critical of the troops at all. He was critical of someone up top who obvioulsy placed no priority on protecting these priceless artifacts. It amazes me how some of you guys cannot see how obvious a blunder this is. This is a crime against all of us not just the iraqi people. I guess some of you do not care if massive looting occurs when it could have been prevented.

I agree with you. While I agree with the goals of the war and the way it has been conducted, I think this was a blunder. Here's a few points I'd like to make.

There is a lot we still don't know, but it appears that there was much destruction and possibly some pilfering that took place after our troops arrived in Baghdad. Had we secured the museum, we could have prevented it.

We may never know what was taken before we arrived and what was taken after we arrived. Had we secured the museum, we would know.

Apparently, one of the commanding officers in Baghdad said we were taking fire from the museum grounds and that's why it couldn't be secured. But Central Command and DOD are not saying that we even tried to. Rumsfeld was very dismissive of the issue. Did we try or didn't we? The statement also contradicts a report that we did in fact secure the building for a half hour with a tank and then left. The statement about "taking fire" doesn't really tell us much. If we avoided every place we were "taking fire" from, we wouldn't be in Iraq right now. Does he mean that the Iraqi's chased us off because we had insufficient force? Then had we allocated sufficient force to secure the museum, we could have stopped the looting that transpired and killed some bad guys too.

The looting of this museum following the fall of the regime was entirely predictable. After the Shi'a uprising following the Gulf War, nine museums in Southern Iraq were looted and over 4,000 items stolen. There was much discussion of this fact in the months leading up to this war.

[Fifth Business]

You want to feast on the cultural treasures of Babylon? Go to The Metropolitan Museum or The Art Institute Of Chicago or The British Museum or The Louvre and you'll be stuffed up the wazoo with 'em!

You are correct that those museums have much of Iraq's riches, but are you aware that everything dug up in Iraq since the 1920s has gone into Iraqi museums, principly this one? Their collection of cuneiform tablets numbered more than 100,000. While we don't know how much was taken beforehand, how much remains, and how much destroyed or pilfered following our troops arrival, we could have secured the museum and prevented the looting that followed our arrival. It would also have allowed us to quantify some of the answers to those questions.

All this crying is transparently obvious crocodile tears from the usual hate America crowd.

Not all of it. There are many people on this board who agree with the objectives of the war but think this was a major blunder.

Gauranteed they wouldn't know a Babylonion cultural artifact from an Assyrian or even an Egyptian if you stuck it up THEIR wazoo.

I would know the difference.

[Fifth Business]

ping

[wideminded]

Thanks for the ping. I read the editorial. It was good and told me some new facts. BTW maybe you pinged me two other times but I only noticed one and could one find one when I searched through all my comments.