You're hysterical.
Calm down, wait a few weeks, and most of the stuff will be returned, after the army pays off the thieves.
The hand-wringing over this museum is, frankly, incomprehensible to me. It happened, it will be fixed to the extent possible.
Bitching and bellyaching and acting as if soldiers should have paid attention to a friggin' museum when a shooting war was going on is a bit unrealistic.
Amen and amen. I think two things are at work here. (1) The operation was such a howling success that the armchair critics forget that it was still a combat situation and our soldiers were still being shot at (and in some cases killed). (2) The folks who hate George Bush and this administration are going to seize on ANYTHING to criticise him, and frankly this looks like the only game in town, such as it is.
I don't recall any of these people having such an overwhelming interest in art and archaeology before this thing came down. Why do they suddenly care so much? I took a lot of undergrad courses in Classical Archaeology (primarily Greek & Roman, but some Middle and Near East as well) and I love and honor the work of the past, but I can't see all this vitriol about what is COMMON FORM in any war. Ask any Arch. major about what happened to all the precious golden Mycenean artifacts in the Berlin Museum after WWII (the Russians looted 'em, though they denied it for 50 years), or the Rosetta Stone, or even old Belzoni walking on golden mummies "as thick as autumn leaves in Vallambrosa."
That assumes that there was anything actually still left in this museum to loot . . . which I think is highly unlikely. This was in all likelihood a coverup for the systematic liquidation of the museum's collection by Saddam and his cronies.
But, but...Rummy promised!
"I'm kind of old-fashioned. I begin with a couple of principles: one is the job of the Pentagon to prepare for contingencies we do that all across the globe, we have all kinds of contingency plans that we've prepared."
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"And as a matter of fact, I think I've mentioned to some of you that we've issued some new contingency planning guidance which is classified and we are significantly changing the process for contingency planning. The speed of the cycle for contingency planning is going to be accelerated and they are going to be less stale and more current than they have been in the past, which I think is critically important for this country."
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Meantime, Rumsfeld commenting about the news reports of various US plans to attack Iraq said yesterday "One of the responsibilities of the Department of Defense is to see that we have thought through a host of different contingencies and possibilities."
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"What we expect is that it's our job to be prepared for any conceivable contingency. And therefore all the way from that unhappy thought -- and dangerous thought -- all the way over to catastrophic success where so many people surrender so fast that the task becomes very quickly humanitarian assistance and medical assistance and water and those types of things. So they have developed contingency plans for the full spectrum of contingencies."