***Dave Does the Blog

And a bit more on the subject.

Andrea links to this site, which seems to be a clearing house of stories on the museum looting.

There’s both tragedy and overwrought comedy here. We should beef up border guards to make sure that artifacts aren’t going out of the country (well, yeah — I assme the border guarding is as tight as we can make it, since we want to make sure that weapons and regime members don’t get out, either). Some artifacts may already be showing up for sale in Paris (has the French government seized the stuff?).

Or this:

Just consider how far the United States has sunk since the end of World War II. America launched the Safehaven Program to recover European art looted by the Nazis. Today, the United States aids and abets the looting of art and treasures thousands of years older than the European art it helped salvage some 60 years ago. In days past, U.S. military and intelligence, including the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, helped recover and restitute historical treasures looted by the likes of Hermann Goering and Alfred Rosenberg. American generals like Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George Patton, Jr., personally oversaw the recovery and return of artwork seized by the Nazis.”

Right. And it was all back in the hands of the rightful owners within days of V-E Day, right? Indeed, that was the first priority of all those people — returning art to its rightful owners. Military operations, security, all that stuff, took second place. Uh-huh.

But there are a couple of odd things, too. Consider this picture, from the CS Monitor: EMPTY DISPLAY: A man in the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad peers into a smashed case that once held a 4,500-year-old marble plaque. The guy is actually peering into what looks like an intact case. Another case in the foreground does have a hole smashed in the middle of it, but just one, just enough to reach a single item inside. The rest of the case is intact, and empty. The floor is clean. There are intact, but empty, cases all around, neatly arranged.

Huh?

Or this picture: An armed guard looks at empty shelves after a mob of looters ransacked and looted Iraq ( news -web sites )’s largest archeological museum in Baghdad. Again, the display cases are neatly against the wall, the glass is intact, there is one display card visible in one case, the floor is clean.

What?

Granted, there are plenty of other pictures of destruction, but I find these two odd, because they show a lack of destruction. What they do show is the orderly removal of a whole lot of artifacts by someone who had the keys to the cases, removed them (and their cards), then closed the cases back up again, neatly, in no sort of hurry.

Not a looting mob, by any means.

So either folks are just being sloppy with their photo captioning (always a possibility), or there’s a lot more to this story than meets the eye. Or, of course, both.

A couple more thoughts on the looting in Baghdad (and elsewhere) in general, and in the museums in particular.

First, I was listening to an NPR article on the Baghdad museum yesterday. I found most interesting a new twist at the end: “some Iraqis” found the idea that Iraqis could have done this inconceivable; “it must have been outsiders.” When asked what outsiders it could have been, the answer was that they didn’t know.

My prediction: before the end of the week, we will hear accusations that the looting was done by the US, by US soldiers in civilian clothes, by Kuwaitis acting on behalf of the US, or by Israeli Mossad agents. The goal, aside from greed, will be the robbing of Iraqis of their cultural treasures (never mind that a couple of bombs could have done so just as neatly, without any sort of conspiracy being needed).

Second, Seki notes some truly horrifying commentary from some folks that puts it into a bit of perspective. One person named Vera commented, This may sound horrible, but given a choice between saving a museum and saving a baby, I would probably run and save the museum.

You’re right — it sounds horrible. In fact, it is horrible. I would burn an entire museum down to save a human life — weeping and cursing the whole time, but if that were the choice, that would be the choice. That some folks would choose differently is extremely disturbing, and just the sort of thing that allows regimes to justify all sorts of atrocities.

On the other hand, I might be willing to sacrifice my own life, if given a choice between that and someplace like the Brit being destroyed. But that’s my choice, not Vera’s.

Of course, in this case, that’s a false dichotomy. It wasn’t a difference between a baby and a museum. But I’ll split the difference, and suggest that (unlike some commentators on the other side of the debate from Vera) I would be willing to put US troops in harm’s way to stop the looting of the museum — if that was the most important mission at the time.

But a baby? Yeesh.

Finally, Seki also notes this NY Post op-ed on the looting in general.

Capt. Greg Robertson of the 4th Battalion, 64th Armored Regiment, explains the true situation in detail: “To say there that there is anarchy is not true, to say that there is looting is true. But if we shot looters, we’d be shooting women and children left and right.”

That would go over well on TV.

“Finding the headquarters of Republican Guard, Special Republican Guard and secret police is a first order of business for us. It’s difficult because they were hidden in civilian dual-use structures. One of the places we were attacked was labeled a ‘cotton factory.’ It was full of weapons, bags of food. And one reason you see looting in places like that is that all the locals know about this dual use and they think these places are fair game.
The hysterical tone of some press reports may reflect the fact that some of the reporters who have been sitting in Baghdad for months have lost sight of the nature of the Saddam regime: They are mystified by the exhilaration felt by so many liberated Iraqis.
But the failure of so many reports to mention the fact that many of the looted stores, institutions and even hospitals were linked to the regime is more troubling. These institutions were dedicated to the exclusive use of Ba’ath Party members – the ordinary public could not make use of them – or were owned and operated by known supporters of the regime.

In that context, looting a museum — one that was kept closed most of the time to common Iraqis, and one which, to be honest, may already have been “looted” by the government (which might give the current curators all the incentive they need to point their fingers in a different direction) — makes a bit more tragic sense.

No wonder Russia is having so much trouble in Chechnya.

Last week it was disclosed that two retired three-star generals — Vladislav Achalov (a former paratrooper and specialist in urban warfare) and Igor Maltsev (a specialist in air defense) — visited Baghdad recently and were awarded medals by Hussein. The awards were handed out by Iraqi Defense Minister Sultan Khashim Akhmed.
It was reported that the retired generals helped Hussein prepare a war plan to defeat the Americans. Achalov confirmed he was in Baghdad just before the war and received medals from Hussein for services rendered. He also told journalists that the defense of Baghdad was well organized, U.S. tanks would be burned if they enter the city and U.S. infantry would be slaughtered. According to Achalov, the only way the allies could ever take Baghdad and other Iraqi cities was to raze them to the ground by carpet bombing.

(via InstaPundit)

I was a history major in college. I love the past. I find ancient cultures fascinating. I find artifacts of past civilizations treasures beyond value.

I mean, just walk around with me at the British Museum. It’s a combination of a kid in a candy store and a pilgrim reaching Rome. Giddy reverence is the best way I can describe it.

Which is why the looting at the National Museum in Iraq is like a gut punch. To read the papers, at least, it ranks right up there with the burning of the Library of Alexandria. How could that happen? What went wrong? Where were the Marines?

As you might guess, I’m not going to downplay the destruction, the cultural loss, not just to Iraq but to the world. But …

… I’m not going to turn around and blame the US military either.

I mean, yeah, it would have been nice to have been able to guard every museum, every hospital, every UN office building in Baghdad. But, um, there’s a war on. People still shooting. Pockets of resistance and snipers and guys strapping on vests full of explosives and ball bearings and driving to checkpoints. To my mind, that rightly took priority over even something like this.

(Cynical side note. I suspect that if the US had flooded Iraq with enough troops to guard every street corner, we would be hearing louder howls of protest over a Military Police State is Being Imposed. I suspect if the US had protected the museum, it would have faced accusations of Cutting Off the Iraqis from Their Cultural Heritage, and Why Aren’t They Protecting Hospitals Instead? And if they had acted with force to stop looters, we would be hearing stories about Massacres of Starving Iraqi Citizenry. But I digress.)

I also note that it wasn’t the Marines doing the looting. It wasn’t the Army, or the Air Force, or a madcap contingent of British troops up from the south.

It was Iraqis.

He said many of the looters appeared to be from the impoverished districts of the city where anger at Mr. Hussein ran at its strongest, but that others were middle-class people who appeared to know exactly what they were looking for.
“Did some of them know the value of what they took?” he said. “Absolutely, they did. They knew what the most valued pieces in our collection were.”

Looters, by and large, are scum. Frankly, if I’d been there with a machine gun, I’d have been still pulling the trigger when the magazine was empty.

And then I’d have been hauled up on war crimes charges myself.

Under the Geneva Conventions, the Coalition troops do have a responsibility to maintain civil order in areas that they’ve occupied. But in mid-war, that’s neither easy nor instantaneous. To consider this all the fault of the Americans is to invest in the cult of victimhood. The poor Iraqis couldn’t help it! They were angry/greedy/brainwashed into disregarding the value of human life and culture by the wicked Saddam regime! US troops should have stopped them. Thus, it’s all the US troops’ fault.

Mr. Muhammad, the archaeologist, directed much of his anger at President Bush. “A country’s identity, its value and civilization resides in its history,” he said. “If a country’s civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation. If we had stayed under the rule of Saddam Hussein, it would have been much better.”
The looting appeared to have its heaviest impact on a security guard at the museum, Abdul Rahman, 57, who said he had tried to stop the first band of looters breaking through to steel gates at the rear of the compound on Thursday morning. He said he gave up when the looters started firing in the air with pistols and rifles. “They were shouting, `There’s no government, there’s no state, and we will do what we like. We will take anything we want.’ They said `Open up, open up, there’s no more Saddam so we can do what we like.’ ”

And, as Andrea notes, what were the curators doing for the last few months? Polishing their glass cases? War’s a-coming, folks. Bombs a-droppin, too. Were they just crossing their fingers that an errant shell or PGM wouldn’t come a tumblin’ in?

Or was there anything left there?

A full accounting of what has been lost may take weeks or months. The museum had been closed during much of the 1990’s, and like many Iraqi institutions, its operations were cloaked in secrecy under Mr. Hussein.
So what officials told journalists today may have to be adjusted as a fuller picture comes to light. It remains unclear whether some of the museum’s priceless gold, silver and copper antiquities, some of its ancient stone and ceramics, and perhaps some of its fabled bronzes and gold-overlaid ivory, had been locked away for safekeeping elsewhere before the looting, or seized for private display in one of Mr. Hussein’s myriad palaces.

Regardless of what happened to some of the more valuable (or gaudier) items, this is still doubtless a tragedy (I think of looters in the Brit, and shudder). And, in hindsight, I might have wanted a more concerted effort to stop this sort of looting, though not at the expense of the actual military operation.

But ultimately, the responsibility for what happened at the museum is not on the shoulders of the US military. It’s on the shoulders of those looters — or, if you really want to absolve them of responsibility, then on the repressive regime whose fall was like a cork popping out of a bottle.

And now we see what it was all about. Not empire. Not religion. Not even oil.

It was all about the all-consuming hegenmony of … American fast food.

Stephanie Schaudel, co-coordinator for Voices in the Wilderness, an anti-war group in Chicago, said the “richness of culture” in Iraq is going to be subjected to Americanization by U.S. corporations during the post-war rebuilding of the war-torn nation. The result, she indicated, would be difficult for Iraqis to swallow.
“Some people would think that seeing a KFC (formerly Kentucky Fried Chicken) on a street corner is a sign of progress, I certainly don’t,” Schaudel said.

Okay, so it is all about oil — oily food.

Peter Cook, an organizer with the radical anti-war group International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism), agrees about the threat of American culture to the Iraqis.
“The U.S is putting in place an old-fashioned colonial regime [in Iraq]. We can be pretty sure that the U.S. is going to be impacting all aspects of Iraqi society,” Cook said. He also does not believe Iraqi citizens will benefit from America’s influence or rebuilding.

Hmmm. I’ve always had the impression that, in Britain at least, the colonial period eventually enriched the British palate by expanding the food types available. Heck, maybe this will lead to chickpeas becoming a much more popular food in the US than before.

Dustin Langley, a spokesman for International A.N.S.W.E.R. in Washington D.C., sees the Americanization of Iraq as inevitable.
“What we will see is they will enter this homogenized McDonalds culture and of course we will see a loss of local traditions and a local way of life,” Langley said.

That’s right — we’re going to round up the Iraqis (like Iraqi dissidents used to be rounded up), ship them off to surplus prison buildings formerly run by Iraqi secret police, and brainwash them into giving up their healthy local food (when they could get it) in exchange for Big Macs and Cokes.

Poor little brown brothers, unable to avoid the temptations of Capitalist Big Fast Food — we must save them from themselves!

(via SDB)