Troops were told to guard treasures

The Washington Times ^ | Paul Martin

[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.

[wideminded]

I excerpted the article because I thought that is what we are supposed to do for copyright reasons, although I am somewhat unclear as to which newspapers this applies to. I probably should have excerpted some other sections such as the part you highlight in red, but I figured that the article is not too long altogether and people could just read the rest of it.

It looks like someone dropped the ball in the Pentagon, which is hard to understand given that Gen. Garner was supposed to be running the show in postwar Iraq.

[Ole Okie]

I am not much into hand-wringing or blame-game just because we missed protecting the museum ... but if it indicates a hole in DoD execution that runs deeper, I'd be very scared.

Hmmmmmmmmm.

Ho hum.

[Theresa]

"This story won't die because there is a political agenda behind it."

The story won't die because that museum was very important. The loss is comparable to the entire Smithsonian being picked clean and all the records being trashed.

[Free ThinkerNY]

The Left will keep it alive, not because they give a damn about ancient artifacts, but because it is the one bad aspect of the war they can exploit. They can use it against the President and the U.S. military they hate so much. If our troops had shot and killed some looters, the Left would be screaming bloody murder. They would be calling them war criminals; racists who don't value the lives of "Third World People of Color." They would be saying, "People, over property!" That we killed people in order to protect the valuable property in the museum.

[Fractal Trader]

Prevented by whom? You seem to be quite sure that all the 'treasures' were stolen in the past few weeks.

As you probably know, these were "stolen" by people in the know. Personally, I think that there is much more in the ground than in the museum.

Want to go digging in Abraham's city of Ur with me sometime? : - )