Posted on 04/12/2003 7:05:07 AM PDT by kalt
That's what I'm wondering. These are the same people who booby-trapped their oil wells. If you are right, perhaps it is all hidden in one place. I hope and pray it can be recovered.
Anyway, I still think we should have had secured the museum right away.
You are setting up a false dichotomy. One can be concerned about both the future and the past equally and also be concerned about the troops AND the museum. It is NOT either or. That museum was a valuable asset to the people of Iraq and the people of the world, If it could have been preserved with our help we should have done it. It's not the end of the world but if we could have spared ourselves getting blamed for this we should have.
It is important to save BOTH. It's not either we save the oil or we save the "stuff". We save both. We should have sent a half a dozen soldiers over there. They would not have been in any more danger than in battle. They would have been in less danger. So we screwed up.
NO BLOOD FOR ARCHEOLOGY
It dusgusts me further that they would blame US troops for not protecting that heritage. There are still firfights and attempted homocide bombings going on. The Marines can't be everywhere at once.
What happened to all that great rhetoric about how citizens of Iraq are IRAQIS before anything else?? If that crap were true, there would have been no need to protect the heritage of the Iraqi people.
The blame lies with the looters, not with the Marines, who are still sheeding blood to free the Iraqi people.
Such a silly question! It's ALWAYS the Americans fault!
Since I have visited many of the great museums of the world (but not this one) I am certainly sympathetic to that feeling. OTOH, I am so grateful the undiscovered archeological finds have presumeably been left intact I can let it pass.
Our troops are not museum guards, hospital guards, school guards, business guards, traffic cops or infrastructure developers. I wish they could all come safely home ASAP while we are ahead. It's going to get nastier over there before it gets better IMHO.
It's unfair to expect our soldiers to turn their backs on the guns and homocide bombers in front of them in order to go and protect artifacts that the much touted Iraqi pride should have made taboo.
"Come to think of it I am getting impatient for the US to get going on stopping the looting. It's starting to make us look bad that we are not doing anything."
It was one thing when Iraqis were looting the offices of their tortures of desk chairs and air conditioners and the homes of their torturers of gold dining room chairs as they did at Uday's house. It's quite another for them to destroy their own heritage.
I would like to know more about the 'looters', their motives and the artifacts themselves. Either way, our soldiers are having enough problems in Baghdad, without having to stop in the middle of multiple firefights to answer the UN call for them to be policemen as well.
That call from the UN, combined with continued fighting and attacks by Pali terrorists angry at their benefactor's political demise smells like a concious attempt to trap our forces in a 'quagmire.'
If our soldiers HAD turned aside from their goal in order to immediately try to restore order in the middle of a WAR ZONE, and some had been killed or injured as a result of protecting Iraq's heritage from the Iraqi people....would you still be angry that our forces didn't do 'enough' and 'look sloppy'?
All the same, I hope there's a determined effort to retrieve as much of the looted material as possible and return it to the museum.
BUMP!!
Perhaps something like this happened to the library at Alexandria.
That is a darned good question. I've been studying what make our cultures tick for 30 years. Naturally, such study is useless without an avid interest in history, so as to learn about the older cultures which were in some cases subsumed by the newer ones (the culture of ancient Egypt, subsumed by Islamic culture 1,400 years ago for instance)
Because of this avid interest in ancient history, I'm appalled by the looting of ancient artifacts....but dammit, I'm a heckuva lot MORE appalled by the armchair generalship I see here on this thread!
You posters blaming OUR military first are really a sad example of troop support. I mean..what good does it do for adults to support our sons and daughters shedding their own blood to attain freedom for some population far away if we haven't got the least idea how our military goes about freeing people in the FIRST PLACE???
Somebody said "well, we've got troops guarding hospitals, so there's no reason we can't spare a few to go and guard a museum" that opened just before military action began - as if Saddam never expected military action to start!? CUT ME A BREAK!!
We have a finite number of troops on hostile territory with nasties just WAITING to ambush them the moment they let their guard down...AND THERE ARE ALLEGED 'PATRIOTS' HERE ON THIS THREAD WHINING THAT IF WE CAN GUARD HOSPITALS...IF WE CAN GUARD HOSPITALS....THEN WE OUGHT TO HAVE SPARED A DOZEN OR SO MEN TO DIE GUARDING A D@MNED MUSEUM!!! AS IF A MUSEUM IS AS IMPORTANT AS A HOSPITAL!
You posters insisting that our troops be placed into further life threatening situations in the midst of such bloody chaos in order to protect a museum sound like you thought it was a GREAT idea to send our special forces into Mogadishu to die as part of a 'humanitarian' mission, where they were lured into a trap.
As an historian, I HATE what happened to these antiquities. But have a hard time believeing there were as me=any treasures there as claimed in this article.
HOWEVER, I refuse to allow ANYONE to order our troops....my nephews and cousins among them, to die in order to defend a museum. Dying defending the wounded in a hospital is one thing, but if I EVER hear ANY of our troops lifes are wasted in such a BLOODY CLINTONIAN WAY....this rant will be extremely mild and cool headed by comparison to the action which I will take. </rant mode off>
Then it was really stupid of the Iraqis to loot it then, wasn't it?
"We must send in troops to that location ,and PROTECT what left.! Please...protect that site"
If we may judge by this quiveringly hystrionic article, the museum is empty. I agree with another poster who suggested an amnesty program for those people who return the treasures. There's not much sense in guarding the barn after the horses have gone.
We'll protect it when we can. Our troops have more humanitarian concerns to deal with.
Here's an idea: HOW'S ABOUT IRAQIS START POLICING THEIR OWN AND STOP DESTROYING THEIR CITIES LIKE SPOILED CHILDREN RUNNING AMOK? AREN'T THERE ANY ADULTS IN IRAQ??
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