Posted on 04/20/2003 6:20:12 AM PDT by wideminded
KUWAIT CITY In a memo sent two weeks before the fall of Baghdad, the Pentagon office charged with rebuilding Iraq urged top commanders of U.S. ground forces to protect the Iraqi National Museum and other cultural sites from looters.
"Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures," says the March 26 memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.
The Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), led by retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, sent the five-page memo to senior commanders at the Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC).
Two weeks later, American forces pulled down the giant statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad to cheering crowds, and in the days that followed, looters pillaged Baghdad.
The museum was No. 2 on a list of 16 sites that ORHA deemed crucial to protect. Financial institutions topped the list, including the Iraqi Central Bank, which is now a burned-out shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all nine floors under it.
"We asked for just a few soldiers at each building, or if they feared snipers, then just one or two tanks," said an angry ORHA official, one of several who spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity.
A spokesman for CFLCC, the Kuwait-based branch of Central Command that is in charge of coalition ground forces, was not familiar with the memo. He agreed to pass a request for comment up the chain of command.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
I'm with you. All this "priceless" artifact nonsense is is the leftist's latest attempt to muddy a great victory.
Priceless? BS! A coalition life lost trying to save a Golden Fleece that only elitist, rich guys with all kinds of indecipherable initials after their names will ever look at . . . NOW THAT, FRiend, IS PRICELESS!!!!!!!!!
If you think it was so important why weren't you there putting you life on the line to defend it?
You must have some inside information I am not aware of. As some other posters suggested, this was probably an inside job. The main treasures could have been stolen before we even got to Baghdad. As far as stopping the looting, we would probably have had to shoot some of them. How would that have gone down public relations wise during the early days of our entry into Baghdad? All of this Monday morning quarterbacking is just an attempt to detract from an amazing victory, which was accomplished with minimal loss of life for us and the civilian population.
Consider the history of this region. Here's a quote from a recent John Derbyshire column:
Iraqs ancient heritage? In what sense do these ancient artifacts belong to Iraqs heritage? The nation of Iraq has only existed since 1932. Prior to that, the land of the two rivers was a British colony. Before that, it belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Heading backwards through time beyond that, it belonged to the White Sheep Turks, the Black Sheep Turks, the Timurids (another variety of Turk), the Mongols, the Abassids (Arabs), the Seljuks (more Turks), the Buwayhids (Persians), the Abbasids again, the Umayyads (more Arabs), the Sassanids (Persian), the Arsacids (Parthian), the Seleucids (Macedonian-Greek), the Persians again, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Aramaeans, the Elamites, the Kassites, the Amorites, the Akkadians, and the Sumerians.
The point is all these priceless artifacts have simply been looted and pillaged from previous civilizations to begin with.
Marine killed: Despite the cries for a return to normalcy, an Army unit reported a sharp clash with Iraqi irregulars in the western part of Baghdad, in which officers said about 20 Iraqi militiamen were killed and no U.S. soldiers were lost. But a Marine guarding a hospital on the eastern side of the Tigris River was shot and killed when two Syrian men posing as gardeners sneaked up, pulled a concealed gun and opened fire at point-blank range.
From the "Wall Street Journal Sunday" 4/13/03. I can't post the URL because it is no longer working, but you can find the article at Google with "marine killed hospital looting."
I had heard it first reported on Fox News and went to Google for verification.
My heart is breaking for the Marine who was killed while guarding the hospital and for his family.
People just think they are because Clinton and his croniies misapplied and misused the military for 8 years.
Bagdad is a city the size of LA we simply can not be everywhere to safeguard everything.
Prevented by whom? You seem to be quite sure that all the 'treasures' were stolen in the past few weeks.
Guess human life doen't count...
"The military have done a wonderful military job, but they have refused to listen to the civilians who were brought in to specifically tell them what they needed to do in order to make the civilian side of this work," the official said. "The excuse that we've got back time and time again was that their first priority was to war fight, the second priority was to look after their safety, and the third priority was to do the work that we had asked them to do. My question is: Why ask us to come here?" the official asked. He said this sense of frustration was shared by all ORHA officials. "They haven't listened to any of us. We are all equally upset."
We can take from this that our CentCom folks have not executed the post-saddam phase as brilliatnly as the kill-saddam phase, as witnessed by the more massive damage to baghdad buildings from looting than in the precision bombings themselves, by the fact that we *didnt* have the troops in there to protect vital sites, and by the fact that US military let lawlessness run in baghdad for a week or more. ideally, we would have had a tighter clampdown on the city with more troops and a curfew from day 1 (not after 5th day of lawlessness).
Moreover, the memo shows that contrary to the Leftists whining we *did* plan for this and consider it, but we just didnt execute flawlessly. the oil ministry line is just anti-american BS. The shocker to me is how close we were to getting this exactly right, even if this is fingerpointing from one set of officers about where in the chain it didnt get implemented. Hindsight is 20/20.
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