Mr. Mulliner, you have been removed. Just let me know when you want back on.
In any case, it appears the Western jurisdiction in which the first Iraqi artifacts have turned up is not Florida but Paris. Quelle surprise! The National Museum fell victim not to general looting but to a heist, if not an inside job, for which the general lawlessness provided cover. Am I sorry it happened? Yes, because it has given the naysayers, who were wrong about the millions of dead, humanitarian catastrophe, environmental devastation, regional conflagration, etc, one solitary surviving itsybitsy teeny-weeny twig from their petrified forest with which to whack Rumsfeld and Co.
Marvelous writing!
Mesopotamia may be "the cradle of civilization," but civilization learned to walk and talk and graduated to long pants in Greece and Rome and London and North America and Australia and India and Japan and St Lucia and Papua New Guinea, and what was once the cradle became, in the last four decades, the toilet of civilization a place incapable of inventing the industrial shredder but anxious to import them for the purpose of feeding human beings into.
Absolutely right on target!