Looters Ransack Baghdad's Antiquities Museum

Reuters ^ | April 12, 2003 | Hassan Hafidh

[Physicist]

THe museaum staff had the ability to do something. They didnt. They failed. Why arent you blaming them?

I absolutely am. This is OUR heritage the looters sacked (so much for the relevance of "they didn't help themselves, so why should we": it's for OURSELVES we should have saved these treasures). When my warehouse burns down, it's entirely the fault of the arsonists, but I'd still want to wring the neck of the inattentive night watchman.

And I'd still want the volunteer firemen to show up to do their best to put it out, as hazardous as saving mere property may be.

[Tony Niar Brain]

Rumsfeld and Franks knew there would be looting after Saddam was taken out. They knew that the museum would be a target for looters, and they knew the treasure that it held. Regardless of the actions of the looters, the inaction of the upper echelons to have soldiers guard the absolutely irreplaceable artifacts of the museum is inexcuseable. These were not just fancy rocks, vases, and scribblings; these things embodied the history of civilization as we know it. Their importance transcended things political and military, and insults aside, I don't believe you have grasped that point.

[WOSG]

THe museaum staff had the ability to do something. They didnt. They failed. Why arent you blaming them?

I absolutely am.

Fair enough. I am opposed to the proposition that this is somehow the US military's 'fault', even while I too feel it a shame this (and other looting) happened ... An Iraqi museum in an Iraqi city with Iraqi citizens looting, IMHO at least some, if not most culpability falls with those who happen to live and work (and apparently loot) there.

[WOSG]

Rumsfeld and Franks knew there would be looting after Saddam was taken out.

They knew that marines and soldiers and airmen would DIE in this war. Wow, and 120 men and women died. Why didnt they stop that? Does that make them negligent for not preventing it? On the day of this looting, marines were still fighting and dying in baghdad firefights. they are being blamed for not controlling what they hadnt had control over. You might as well be blaming them for not winning the war with so many casualties!

Insults aside, you are arguing past my point, which is that 20/20 hindsight and "woulda coulda shoulda" are different from making life-and-death decisions real-time in the fog of war. Criticism is much easier than constructive solutions. Just say "mistakes were made" and leave it at that. I JUST WANT YOU GUYS TO CUT THE US MILITARY SOME SLACK!

[Kay Soze]

After just one hour of research here's what I have found on the "looting" :

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The main entrance to Baghdad's antiquities museum is firmly shut, sandbags are stacked up near the gates, and priceless treasures have been spirited away for safe keeping.
Every moveable piece was packed up in crates a week ago and removed from the museum, he added.
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:d9AfWlwiYW4C:asia.news.yahoo.com/030312/3/tjtf.html+%22donny+george%22+baghdad&hl=en&ie=UTF-8


“The experts, which included Iraqi art officials, said some of the most valuable pieces had been placed in the vault of the national bank after the 1991 Gulf War, but they had no information on whether the items were still there.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2575224,00.html


"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." http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105053292455773900,00.html

“Officials at the UNESCO meeting at its headquarters in Paris said the information was still too sketchy to determine exactly what was missing and how many items were unaccounted for.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2575224,00.html

Some believe that individuals, including government employees, are taking the best pieces out overland through Jordan
Hamdoon said that many pieces had disappeared from provincial Iraqi museums after the war.
http://www.usfca.edu/~trembath/www-class/iraq-antiquities.html

Some of the objects on display here are reproductions, with their originals removed by conquering nations to be displayed in foreign museums. The Louvre in Paris, London's British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum in the US all contain antiquities from ancient Mesopotamia. Some pieces have been returned, but the effective closure of the country seems to preclude any further returns for the foreseeable future. http://www.arab.net/iraq/iq_baghdadsights.htm
Sensing the treasures could be in peril, museum curators secretly removed antiquities from their display cases before the war and placed them in storage vaults - but to no avail. The doors of the vaults were opened or smashed, and everything inside was taken, museum workers said.

That led one museum employee to suspect that people familiar with the museum may have participated in the theft.

``The fact that the vaults were opened suggests employees of the museum may have been involved,'' said the staffer, who declined to be identified. ``To ordinary people, these are just stones. Only the educated know the value of these pieces.''
http://www.thesundaymail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,6281650%255E25777,00.html

The museum's most famous holding may have been tablets with Hammurabi's Code - one of mankind's earliest codes of law.
It could not be determined whether the tablets were at the museum when the war broke out.
http://www.thesundaymail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,6281650%255E25777,00.html

In one possibly encouraging sign, several people in the Al Awi neighborhood that surrounds the museum said they did not see looters leave with any antiquities, even amid gun battles and looting that lasted two days.
But he said the only items from the collection he saw stolen were several old rifles. Mostly, he said, he saw looters take chairs, typewriters, ceiling lamp fixtures and other items from the museum's offices, as happened at nearly every other government office in the capital.

Abed El Rahman, a museum security guard who lives on the premises, also said that rifles were the only items he saw stolen from the collections. "But many people were carrying boxes," he said. "I don't know what was in the boxes."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/17/international/worldspecial/17MUSE.html

[AgThorn]

Unfortunate? It's a damned tragedy. Securing that site should have been one of our very top priorities. Mesopotamian antiquities will be the top moneymaker for Iraq, after oil. Many of the oil fields we risked lives to protect were far less important and valuable than this.

Of course it's tragic, but it is not America's tragidy. And Iraq does not "export" antiquities for income, they do export oil. The destruction of the oil wells were predictable, precedent was set, costs of NOT protecting was experienced in '91, etc. There is no comparison of protecting of a museum and protecting of the nations primary export from a known despot, except by people that want to "blame America first" for everything.

[AgThorn]

Saddam Fedayeen killed a marine guarding a hospital yesterday ... we cant win.

Excellent point. Especially for those that think that this was an "American screw-up". Tell that to the parents of the young man standing guard at this hospital. There is a timetable that occurs before one can change from soldier to policeman. The "screw-up" is NOT the soldier's, especially when there was plenty of warning to protect this place prior to the Marines coming in, there apparently was plenty of "cash" around to buy protection, there was plenty of effort made by the Iraqi authorities to protect weapons, 50+ Mig fighters, etc.

The blame for the "screw-up" is clearly that of the Iraqi authorities, who possibly may have even paid for the thievery to give the media another thing to "blame America first" with, just as they did with the "missle in the market" coverup they orchestrated, killing their own citizens for negative PR for America. Shame on any that buy into this way of thinking.

[AgThorn]

We screwed up. Face it. We don't have to protect every part of Iraqi culture but there is NO excuse for not protecting that one museum. It's like letting people steal the original copy of the Declaration of Independence. How would you like that?

To make your analogy work, you have to be talking to the audience of the invading country of the USA that allowed the stealing of the Declaration of Independence. You are not. You are talking to (for the most part) Americans, paralleling a precious treasure of our own, to make us understand what a "precious treasure" is apparently, no need.

The right analogy would see the logic that if we were about to be invaded, that we would have done everything in our power to protect the Declaration of Independence and other precious artifacts that WE consider important to our heritage. Hence the question remains, why didn't Iraq do this? The answer is pretty obvious, that this was most likely done by the Iraqi's to feed the "blame America" mindset.

[aristeides]

The most famous copy of the Law Code of Hammurabi is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris. You can find a description of it at the site of that museum, http://www.louvre.fr/.

[AgThorn]

There may well be higher priorities in a city of 5,000,000, like protecting the living instead of guarding the dead. Maybe that is the sort of real choice our troops are facing.

Amen, nuff said.

Agthorn
father of two military son's in this "engagement"

[AgThorn]

Well written reply (sorry I'm 6 days late in reading it! ;-)