In addition to the fact that some of the big pieces were reproductions and that the regime had been involved in illegal antiquities trafficking for years anyway, I also read this morning in the Wall Street Journal that some of the most important pieces were believed to have been taken away by Saddam for display in his palaces. Their fate is unclear, and the convenient destruction of the catalogs makes tracking some of these things problematic.
The real reason for all the international "concern" appears in these sentences, and it's as true now as it was in 1996:
Sympathy for these Iraqis seems widespread among collectors and archaeologists in the United States, who are critical of continued sanctions against President Saddam Hussein's government.
In other words, the leftist pro-Saddam intellectual and academic world is simply staying true to form, even after we have moved from sanctions to war. For some reason, odious left-wing dictatorships attract "intellectuals" the way horse manure draws flies.
"I also read this morning in the Wall Street Journal that some of the most important pieces were believed to have been taken away by Saddam for display in his palaces. "
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Thanks for mentioning this. I went and looked it up, here are some excerpts ( full article requires subscription, so I won't repoduce in its entirety). Note the museum has been closed to the public for years, so how do we even know what was or wasn't there, and most pieces could have left the country in Saddam's pockets. In fact, how do we know, that it wasn't the fedayeen, who "Looted" and broke the cases, to cover up the fact that the museum has really been looted way back who knows when by Saddam.
EXCERPT:
Iraq's Plundered Treasures from Wall Street Journal, April 16,2003
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB10504503813207600,00.html?mod=special%5Fpage%5Firaq%5F3 "Following the 1991 Gulf War, thousands of artifacts from museums across Iraq vanished, only to resurface on the international Middle Eastern art market, where prices have been climbing in recent years. "An enormous amount has been illegally exported since 1991," says Christopher Walker, a deputy keeper at the British Museum in London. Over the past decade, he says, British customs officials have brought to the museum "maybe hundreds" of objects that they suspected were smuggled out of Iraq.
Complicating the cataloging task is the neglected state of the Baghdad museum, which had been closed to the public during much of the 1990s. Most of the museum's records were kept in a card catalog, most of which looters destroyed. Until recently, only high-ranking Iraqi officials and some international curators had access to the collection. Many curators believe Saddam Hussein displayed some of the most valuable items in his palaces. It isn't clear whether these pieces were destroyed by bombs or stashed far away from Baghdad.
In fact, many of the museum's most valuable pieces were small enough to fit in a pocket. Among them: A seven-inch-tall limestone statuette of a praying prince, circa 3300 B.C., and a series of ivories about five inches tall, including a Nubian figure carrying a lion, dating to the eighth century B.C.