[from occupied ga]

In the stalls of Portobello Road and the shops of Bond Street, dealers offered him antiquities probably smuggled from Iraq, a modern nation in distress that sits astride the remains of several ancient civilizations.

And this is bad because? It's OK for official government looters to plunder the stuff for their own use, but it's not OK for ordinary citizens to sell it. I guess I just don't understand why a "government archeologist" is substantively different than a tomb robber other thatn the government archaeologists gets paid with money already looted from taxpayers to loot tombs.

[FairOpinion]

Actually I think most of the pieces that have been sold internationally were probably done by Saddam, I doubt that ordinary Iraqis had the means to do it, and were probably too terrify to even try.

I bet that Saddam took most of the artifacts, sold them and put the money into Swiss bank accounts.

But the other side is, that the artifacts from the museum are not lost, they are just somewhere else, and most of it was done before we even set foot in Iraq.