Replies

If guarding the treasures of Baghdad were topic A, I think we'd have heard about it before now (with all the talking ex-military heads, embedded reporters, etc).
Someone reported a lot of the looting was by insiders. The large scale removal of antiquities most likely happened before the US and UK got there.

The other part about this is that everyone in Iraq knew that military action was coming. This "rush to war" took 14 months. It's not like they couldn't have taken precautions during that 14 months for these items. Couple that with the fact that the SH regime in Baghdad was less of a governmental organization than a crime syndicate. I think it's entirely possible and maybe even likely that there was a conspiracy to leave these items unprotected so that insiders could pilfer them and funnel the proceeds back to the the top governmental criminals in exile. I really don't think that's a farfetched scenario at all given the way they sequestered all of Iraq's wealth away for themselves anyway.