Posted on 05/05/2003 5:52:41 PM PDT by soccermom
Baghdad Museum 'Outrage' Dwarfed by Diplo Looting Spree
Now that many of the irreplaceable treasures supposedly looted from Baghdad's National Museum are turning up in Jordan, it seems that all handwringing over the episode by media types desperate to paint the Iraq war as a failure was vastly overdone.
But while Iraq's art looters weren't all they were cracked up to be, there's still plenty of cause for concern on the looting front - especially when it comes to the media's favorite deliberative body, the United Nations.
"It was chaos, wild, something out of a war scene," said one executive with the food service that Aramark, which runs the U.N.'s cafeterias. "[Rampaging diplomats] took everything, even the silverware," she told Time Magazine.
Other U.N. workers confirmed the devastation wrought by the diplo mini-riot on Friday, saying that at least one of eateries had been "stripped bare." One described the cafeteria raiders as "unbelievable, [there were] crowds of people just taking everything in sight."
Time identified some of the looters as "well-known diplomats" who "finished off the raid with free drinks at the lounge for delegates."
The well-stocked lounge bar was a favorite target of the international peacemakers, with one delegate telling the magazine that bottles of top-shelf U.N. booze were disappearing faster than priceless Iraqi art treasures on a warm spring day.
The U.N. mele was prompted by a decision by cafeteria workers to stage an impromptu walkout in a dispute over vacation pay. After a high-ranking U.N. official gave the order to keep the cafeterias open despite the job action, the diplo-pillagers ran wild.
Meanwhile, as the smoke surrounding the media's favorite looting story began to clear, the New York Post reported that "dozens of priceless Iraqi artworks and archeological items" that were supposedly looted from Baghdad's National Museum have turned up in Jordan.
The find included "a number of valuable, museum-quality antiquities," which were confiscated by customs officials from people heading east across the Iraq border.
Marine reservist Col. Matthew Bogdanos, the Manhattan assistant district attorney who's in charge of investigating the museum looting, indicated Thursday that the media hysteria over the incident was vastly overblown.
Only 25 of the museum's 170,000 artifacts are now believed to be missing, he told reporters in Baghdad.
Rather than the result of spontaneous looting, investigators now suspect that the art treasure heist may have been an inside job by professionals who took advantage of the chaos as Iraq's capital fell.
Not unlike what happened at the U.N.
All I could do was shake my head in disbelief. What a rarified (as in "heads up their a$$e$") environment it must be to work at the UN.
How could President Bush and the Defense Department let such a thing happen? This points out a serious lack of planning. Don't you think that President Gore would certainly have had a plan in place to prevent such a tragedy.
U.S. soldiers soon restored order and lured the animals back into confinement.
Oooops, Sorry! The above quote was from the story about the Baghdad Zoo, not the one about the UN-Zoo.
WHOA! This was supposed to be the end of civilization as we know it!!!!
Shoot the looters
That is the normal way to deal with looters...
The "diplomatic elites" at the U.N. should be treated as common criminals when the behave as such....
These are the bastards that Clinton and his bib wearing followers want us to SEEK CONSENT from, to defend ourselves and attack our enemies?
F'em.....Shoot em and ignore the surivors....
Semper Fi
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