"I also read this morning in the Wall Street Journal that some of the most important pieces were believed to have been taken away by Saddam for display in his palaces. "
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Thanks for mentioning this. I went and looked it up, here are some excerpts ( full article requires subscription, so I won't repoduce in its entirety). Note the museum has been closed to the public for years, so how do we even know what was or wasn't there, and most pieces could have left the country in Saddam's pockets. In fact, how do we know, that it wasn't the fedayeen, who "Looted" and broke the cases, to cover up the fact that the museum has really been looted way back who knows when by Saddam.
EXCERPT:
Iraq's Plundered Treasures from Wall Street Journal, April 16,2003
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB10504503813207600,00.html?mod=special%5Fpage%5Firaq%5F3 "Following the 1991 Gulf War, thousands of artifacts from museums across Iraq vanished, only to resurface on the international Middle Eastern art market, where prices have been climbing in recent years. "An enormous amount has been illegally exported since 1991," says Christopher Walker, a deputy keeper at the British Museum in London. Over the past decade, he says, British customs officials have brought to the museum "maybe hundreds" of objects that they suspected were smuggled out of Iraq.
Complicating the cataloging task is the neglected state of the Baghdad museum, which had been closed to the public during much of the 1990s. Most of the museum's records were kept in a card catalog, most of which looters destroyed. Until recently, only high-ranking Iraqi officials and some international curators had access to the collection. Many curators believe Saddam Hussein displayed some of the most valuable items in his palaces. It isn't clear whether these pieces were destroyed by bombs or stashed far away from Baghdad.
In fact, many of the museum's most valuable pieces were small enough to fit in a pocket. Among them: A seven-inch-tall limestone statuette of a praying prince, circa 3300 B.C., and a series of ivories about five inches tall, including a Nubian figure carrying a lion, dating to the eighth century B.C.
Another point that should be brought up, not only in terms of the museums and libaries, but also in terms of hospitals, is that all the head honchos of these government institutions were, naturally, Baathists. Their howls of indignation at us strike me as a little suspect. In some cases, I'm sure they hope to cover up regime misdeeds and even perhaps their own mismanagement by blaming a chaotic state of affairs on "looters" or "pillaging" or some such thing. In other cases, they probably are simply so used to defending the Party that it is unthinkable for them not to continue to do so.
Very little has been said about the complicity of "intellectuals" with Saddam's regime. Nobody gets a high-level job (such as curator or director) under a dictatorship unless they've paid their dues to the dictator and are loyal to him. This includes the people in charge of the museums.
De-Baathizing the country is going to be as difficult as getting the old Communist Party connections out of Russia. Judging by the behavior of ex-KGB honcho Putin, that still hasn't been completed. Saddam and his party were in charge for a long time in Iraq, and there are probably many people, particularly among the intellectuals and privileged classes, who are not going to be happy to see the old regime go.