Here's a police sketch of one:
Next war CNN will hire retired curators to criticize how we fight it.
Posted on 04/12/2003 7:05:07 AM PDT by kalt
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Looters have sacked Baghdad's antiquities museum, plundering treasures dating back thousands of years to the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia, museum staff said on Saturday.
They blamed U.S. troops for not protecting the treasures.
Surveying the littered glass wreckage of display cases and pottery shards at the Iraqi National Museum on Saturday, deputy director Nabhal Amin wept and told Reuters: "They have looted or destroyed 170,000 items of antiquity dating back thousands of years...They were worth billions of dollars."
She blamed U.S. troops, who have controlled Baghdad since the collapse of President Saddam Hussein's rule on Wednesday, for failing to heed appeals from museum staff to protect it from looters who moved in to the building on Friday.
"The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened," she said. "I hold the American troops responsible for what happened to this museum."
The looters broke into rooms that were built like bank vaults with huge steel doors. The museum grounds were full of smashed doors, windows and littered with office paperwork and books.
"We know people are hungry but what are they going to do with these antiquities," said Muhsen Kadhim, a museum guard for the last 30 years but who said he was overwhelmed by the number of looters.
"As soon as I saw the American troops near the museum, I asked them to protect it but the second day looters came and robbed or destroyed all the antiquities," he said.
ARMED GUARDS
Amin told four of the museum guards to carry guns and protect what remained.
Some of the museum's artifacts had been moved into storage to avoid a repeat of damage to other antiquities during the 1991 Gulf War.
It houses items from ancient Babylon and Nineveh, Sumerian statues, Assyrian reliefs and 5,000-year-old tablets bearing some of the earliest known writing. There are also gold and silver helmets and cups from the Ur cemetery.
The museum was only opened to the public six months ago after shutting down at the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War. It survived air strikes on Baghdad in 1991 and again was almost unscathed by attacks on the capital by U.S.-led forces.
Iraq, a cradle of civilization long before the empires of Egypt, Greece or Rome, was home to dynasties that created agriculture and writing and built the cities of Nineveh, Nimrud and Babylon -- site of Nebuchadnezzar's Hanging Gardens.
You have a point there. The clause about an active battle will be invoked. Neither Iraq, nor Saddam's regieme, have surrendered.
Smells of an inside job!
Right, that's the point. The war has all sorts of different groups who beleive that their preferences ought to equate with Rumsfeld's priorities.
You have th environmentalists not wanting us to use DU ammunition.
You have the reporters who want all planning to be done around their safety after they refuse to evacuate war zones.
And now you have the tea and crumpets crowd getting their panties in a twist because their won't be a tresures of Iraq coffee table book out anytime in the near future.
Yeah, it's a bad thing. It might even be as bad as the arm-chair generals here insist. However, the people to blame are Saddam Hussein and the looters.
We were given a list of important sites. We went out of our way not to bomb or damage them, even when Iraqi units were stationed nearby. For whatever reason, we failed to anticpate that this would happen.
Perhpas our generals were busy trying to find the other 7 POW's. Perhaps they were busy trying to find the nuclear and/or chemical weapons. Perhaps they were tracking down war criminals. Perhaps they were planning the attack on Tikrit.
It sucks what happened, and that's all there is to say. People need to get down from their ivory towers and realize that the world does not revolve around their priorities 100% of the time.
Dont twist my words! I never argued when it happened, but I asked WHO DID IT? ... You said."To suggest the place had been pillaged by corrupt Saddam operatives before US troops got there is ludicrous," I then asked: "then who pray tell did it? Where did they come from? who were they?"
If you have honest answers to this, it would be good to know. How do you know these looters were NOT saddam's former fedayeen or henchmen out to loot something? This is a fair question whether it happened before or after the troops being in baghdad center. remember, these operatives are in baghdad, EVEN NOW, shooting at marines, it is not like they just all up and left.
Likely because the curator is a Saddamite appointee who knows how to play to the Al-Jazeera 'blame-USA-first' coverage. Any act of US kindness and concern for Iraq's cultural heritage is to be seen as weakness, or at least thoroughly ignored.
viz. my other comment about the shrine at Kerbala. we treated that shrine far better than practically ever Muslim conqueror to come through that city, even thought it risked Marine lives to not fire back at the saddam fedayeen holed up there. those who have spilled blood on that shrine include Saddam in 1991, and the fanatics last week, who murdered a competing cleric on its hallowed grounds.
Actually, from what I understand, many of the Iraqi oilfields are fairly low pressure affairs - IIRC, there was some concern before the war that if many of the wells had been set afire, there was at least a reasonable possibility that they wouldn't be able to reconstruct them. Perhaps PW or someone else with more understanding of oil geology can comment on this, but I do strongly remember hearing something along these lines. If that's the case, it may have been a bit harder of a choice than it might appear at first blush. Sacrifice priceless historical treasures, or sacrifice the future wealth of the country....
In any case, it's done now, so probably the best thing to do is to make an offer of general amnesty for returned artifacts as soon as it's feasible, or perhaps even seek money to start a reward fund for returned artifacts.
Next war CNN will hire retired curators to criticize how we fight it.
Probably none. Now, how many were injured or killed attempting to overthrow Saddam? None, you say? Well, I guess by your logic we should not have liberated them.
That still wouldn't apply to the museum, however. Their freedom isn't our freedom, but their cultural heritage is most definitely OUR cultural heritage. Just because they were derelict in their duty to defend it, it does NOT mean that we should join them in that dereliction.
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