Posted on 04/15/2003 10:34:17 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
The always amusing Robert Scheer, "columnist-fanatic" for the Los Angeles Times, never fails to grasp any straw that gives him a chance to rant about the Bush administration. Yesterday he was feverish over the weekend news from Iraq: "Destruction of one of the world's most significant collections of antiquities." Scheer arches his eyebrow and notes that the oil fields were protected, but not the museum. Get it?
Scheer is simply echoing a complaint about the antiquities that has ricocheted around the elite media. This is a convenient excuse for disgraced gloom-mongers to switch the subject from the liberation of Iraq to the familiar rhythm of anti-Bush chants. My guess is that not one of the regular talking heads on cable had ever heard of the Iraqi museum until it became an opportunity to turn great news into an occasion for disaster.
Proponents of the liberation of Iraq ought not to shy away from this story. Rather, they ought to use it to frame the question of the whether or not this war was just: Forced to choose between leaving the museum unharmed and freeing the children from the now infamous children's jail, which would you choose? On a broader scale, would you prefer the order of Saddam's regime, including the horrific practices of its jails, or a week of looting and chaos?
If you missed it, go back and read Jack Kelly's riveting but revolting USA Today story from April 14:
BAGHDAD – Pictures of dead Iraqis, with their necks slashed, their eyes gouged out and their genitals blackened, fill a bookshelf. Jails cells, with dried blood on the floor and rusted shackles bolted to the walls, line the corridors. And the screams of what could be imprisoned men in an underground detention center echo through air shafts and swear pipes.
Read the whole story. Scheer and his colleagues in the anti-war crowd haven't, and probably won't. They don't care. But the looting of the antiquities museum fills them with rage.
The absurdity of this line of complaint about the looting goes unremarked upon because an entire slice of big media has completely abandoned any idea about what differentiates good and evil. CNN's stunning admission that it covered-up for Saddam for a decade is just the most obvious evidence that modern "journalism" has not just lost, but positively rejected, any idea of a moral compass.
When the gates of the Nazi death camps swung open in 1945, Scheer would no doubt have been writing about the destruction done to Berlin. A moral blindness so complete can not be credited with any capacity to see good and evil.
Scheer's not alone of course. His lack of talent combined with the Los Angeles Times' contempt for its readership just operates to give him so much rope that he inevitably hangs himself in public. The more unconscious among the morally bankrupt simply parrot the storyline as it emerges.
Tim Russert on Sunday made the mistake of asking the secretary of defense how America could have "allowed" the looting of the museum to happen. Rumsfeld immediately seized on the word "allowed" – which, of course, carries with it culpability – and he would not let go, even in the face of Russert's attempt to recast the question in order to avoid being Rummified.
The defense secretary then gave a tutorial on war: Bad things happen in war. But greater good comes out of it. Rumsfeld didn't specify the children running free to their parents or the destruction of a system of such cruel repression that it makes ordinary people turn away, but that's the wellspring of his disgust with dilettantes prattering about museums.
Of course, it is a loss that the museum was ransacked. But the freeing of the people of Iraq was well worth that cost. And had the diversion of troops to protect government buildings, including museums, cost an additional soldier's or Marine's life, that would have been too high a price to pay.
Human life matters more than bones, clay tablets and ancient jewels. That's the bottom line. It is also a dividing line.
The left is reeling, confused by the triumph of the American military in a noble cause and the revelation of a clearly, undeniably evil regime. This sequence of events upends the left because it destroys so many of its pillars.
The American military is never supposed to triumph in a just cause.
The use of force is never supposed to be unambiguously revealed as just.
There is not supposed to be such things as "good" and "evil."
But there, in every paper and on every television screen, are evidences of all these things – powerful and persuasive evidences that ordinary Americans understand and absorb, and which will shape politics for decades to come.
The left is defeated and its American members know it. And they are bitter. And increasingly alone.
That is a very interesting question. We know from the reports of the troops who have seen the palaces that Saddam and sons had worse taste than Sanford and Son so it is doubtful that the Husseins would have had any sentimental regard for anything truly historic. Therefore, the money trail (if any) is what should be followed.
Robert Scheer didn't have a problem with mayhem and looting in Los Angeles in 1992.LOL! What happened in L.A. was an "uprising" - remember? < /sarcasm >
The key was when it was reported that (1) the vaults were opened (not broken into) and (2) the museum's records were missing.
The antiquities world (even the collectors, but especially the museums) lives and dies on provenance.
It looks to me like this was not just an inside job - it was the proverbial fire to cover up the burglary. The corrupt regime had probably been selling these items ever since Gulf War I and replacing them with fakes or not replacing them at all. Sold with fake provenances certified by an employee of the museum. When they realized the chickens were about to come home to roost, they destroyed the records so that there won't be two provenances on the same object and the artifacts already in collectors' and museums' hands won't be exposed as stolen.
This theory makes much more sense when you consider that the initial report claimed that 170,000 artifacts disappeared within two days. That defies common sense.
Take a professional football field, 300 feet by 160 feet. Divide it up into 1-foot squares, and place an artifact in each one.
You would fill up THREE entire football fields (144,000 square feet) and almost fill half of a fourth one, to get to 170,000.
And that was carried off in a day or two. Yeah right.
This story is like Topsy - "Somebody ain't tellin' all they knows."
But it isn't really germane. What is germane is the strange belief that we were somehow obligated to shift our efforts in the middle of a shooting war to turning combat troops into museum guards. I'm sorry, I love ancient history, but that simply strikes me as a very unrealistic demand.
I did not know that. That is rather strange--opening "just in time" for war...that plus the looting in GWI (when we weren't even in Baghdad) makes that museum smell worse than five-day-old menudo....
I'm guessing it is easier to "burn" books and mss. than to "loot" them. I have a feeling the valuable items are already safely on their way to their new owners.
I couldn't agree more.
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