Iraqis Say Museum Looting Wasn't as Bad as Feared

The Wall Street Journal ^ | Thursday, April 17, 2003 | YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

[mass55th]

Thanks for the ping on this article. It only confirms what alot of us have been saying all along.

[mass55th]

Donny George is hardly an Iraqi name. Where did they get him?

I believe the name George is Middle Eastern. I used to work with a guy who had that last name and he was of Middle Eastern descent...possibly Lebanese.

[LocalYokel]

Arrgh!

As the old saying goes: A lie has made it around the world before the truth has gotten out of bed.

Hello CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC? Did you get the word or have we "missed the news cycle"? Again.

[mass55th]

""We never thought it could be looted". "

They're lying through their teeth. Ordinary store owners knew enough to close up and barricade their shops in time to protect them from looting. If Joe Schmo knew...the mutants at the museum knew.

[mass55th]

"Oh, so Saddam looted the place already."

Yeah, back in '91. They needed the money. There was an article published about that on FR a while back. Sorry, I don't have a link.

[mass55th]

"Clinton could feel your pain, Bush can make it go away."

That would make a great rally sign...hey! even a campaign slogan.

[JasonC]

Of course. But they can't even get their lie straight and stick with one version.

[LocalYokel]

The blame-America crowd has screamed the following . . . No blood for oil! Quagmire! Not enough troops! Poor planning! Didn't count on the Fedayeen! Bombing innocent Iraqis! Shooting innocent Iraqis! Starving innocent Iraqis! Thirsty innocent Iraqis! Sick and dying innocent Iraqis! Homeless innocent Iraqis! Depleted uranium killing innocent Iraqis!

I don’t want to sound insensitive to the horrors of war but this has got to be the funniest war I’ve ever heard about. Comical Ali will be the person everyone remembers and associates with IraqWar 2.0. I stand agog at the panic of the Leftists, dashing around screaming at each other: Everyone to the left! No! Back to the Right! They’re diving overboard when the dock is about 10 feet away. You can set your watch by the predictions of doom from the LeftWingMedia. News of Terrible Things just in? Ok, right about….. now! And the evidence blowing them away comes in. How many times can you pull the pants off these people before they start to get embarrassed?

The Media demands full and complete access to the battlefield? Ok, fine. Now the stories of heroic achievements that their own reporters have recorded are evidence they’ve been Seduced By The Dark Side. Not getting the Real Story out, you see.

Has anyone else noticed the shared goals of the Bathists and the Leftists? They both want America to fall on it’s face. I’m almost surprised there hasn’t been a Clinton connection found yet.

[FairOpinion]

"Interesting that the freaking guy in charge never thought the museum would be looted, but damn if the world can't point the finger at the U.S. military for not thinking of it."

Excellent point.

[FairOpinion]

And there was this article too:

"In fact, in the main collection, it now appears that few items are missing, and very little seems to have been the victim of mob violence. "


from:

Detroit Free Press:
http://www.freep.com/news/nw/iraq/loot17_20030417.htm

[hotpotato]

Thanks for the hard work :-)

[geedee]

Has anyone else noticed the shared goals of the Bathists and the Leftists? They both want America to fall on it’s face. I’m almost surprised there hasn’t been a Clinton connection found yet.

Excellent analysis!

The best thing about all the Leftists' claims is the internet is the GREAT EQUALIZER. Normal folks like you and I can do our small part in pointing out the errors they make -- sometimes these errors are purposefully put forward when they know better. But they can't get away with it with impunity now.

Fox News never would've been a success in the 1980's . . . Nor would many other conservative media outlets. The internet and websites like Free Republic has given us conservatives a forum to congregate together and take united stands and actions that never would've been recognized in the days the liberals had a monopoly on the media outlets and microphones. And what happened with Fox News was one conservative watched it . . . and told three friends about it . . . and posted a comment on the internet about it. Then another one did the same thing. Then another. Then suddenly, VOILA!, Fox News is wildly successful. And the liberals are scared to death!

Now when some jackass like Garbarfalo makes hysterical, nonsensical, idiotic, anti-American comments . . . these comments are engraved into internet stone and she'll be held accountable by millions and millions of conservatives. Mark my word, Peter Jennings is on the way out. Slowly but surely the word is getting out about his liberally-slanted views and, while ABC won't take action because Jennings' views mirror their own, Disney is responsible to share-holders. Conservatives have discovered the most powerful weapon known to man -- THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR!

[ckilmer]

Why a Museum?
Wall Street Journal ^ | April 18, 2003 | ERIC GIBSON


Posted on 04/18/2003 5:48 AM PDT by knuthom


We shouldn't have been surprised that, after the looting of Baghdad's antiquities museum last weekend, negligent Americans, not the looters themselves, got most of the blame. For much of the media, every bad thing since the invasion has been America's fault. So adding another charge to the indictment was an easy call.


That view is going to need a little revision, though, in light of Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov's story yesterday that the Americans couldn't protect the museum because they were taking fire from the building. He also reported that the damage was less than originally thought. Staffers from the Iraqi Antiquities Department, he wrote, had "preserved the museum's most important treasures, including the kings' graves of Ur and the Assyrian bulls," by hiding them in vaults that the looters didn't touch.


Still, just who was responsible? Or to put it another way: Why would the Iraqis plunder their cultural heritage?


We've seen riots and looting in this country. But at no time during such disturbances were art museums or libraries attacked. Yet when civil order broke down in Baghdad, the museum and national library became targets. Why? Word yesterday out of a UNESCO meeting in Paris was that it was a professional job. Looters had keys for the vaults and discriminated between originals, which they took, and copies, which they left behind.

"I have a suspicion it was organized outside the country," the University of Chicago's McGuire Gibson told the Associated Press. The implication is that it was a contract job by organized crime or some shadowy figure in the illicit traffic of antiquities. Nobody in the art world seems to have thought of Saddam Hussein.

But "I would personally suggest it was done by Saddam's circle, and my prime suspect would by Uday," says Con Coughlin, author of "Saddam: King of Terror," in an interview. "Saddam and his family are basically cultural vandals. When he left Kuwait he trashed the place. So it makes sense that when he leaves Iraq he took the most valuable items." Saddam's family is essentially "a Mafia family, and Barzan [Saddam's half-brother], the guy arrested Thursday, was basically the bagman."

Saddam had been busy looting the museum long before the war began. A decade ago, Iraq Opposition Radio alleged that "several antiquity collections have found their way outside Iraq and been sold for the benefit of Saddam's family and his cronies." And in October the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported that Saddam had started moving--to a remote town in northwestern Iraq--several truckloads of "gold bars and artworks from museums in Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul."


But clearly he hadn't moved it all, and at least some of the looting, to judge by press accounts, was done by ordinary Iraqis on a spree. Again: Why? It's not as if there is an easy resale market in such things. In fact, the word "museum" is misleading: It means something different in Saddam's Iraq than it does here. Totalitarian regimes are not uninterested in culture. But unlike the citizens of liberal democracies, for whom culture has a value in itself, dictators look on culture as politics by other means. Politics was the target of the looting, too.

Modernist art in Russia all but died in the 1920s, when Lenin denounced it as bourgeois and decadent, decreeing that the purpose of art was to glorify the revolution and the worker. The Nazis' looting of private art collections from Jewish families was not only mercenary but aimed at destroying a people by robbing it of its culture.


Saddam's regime was no different. "You have to understand that Saddam's propaganda ministry made great play on Iraq's cultural heritage, and he was forever linking himself with the great figures of Mesopotamian history such as Nebuchadnezzar," Mr. Coughlin says; Babylon was "turned into a Disney theme park." Saddam bulldozed large parts of the ruins, replacing them with bricked walls. "Tens of thousands of bricks used in the construction bore a special inscription," writes Mr. Coughlin in his book, "reminding future generations that the 'Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar was rebuilt in the era of the leader President Saddam Hussein.' "


In short, Iraqis laid waste to the museum in Baghdad because it had become the symbol of a hated regime. And little wonder. Saddam stole his country's treasures, hauling off truckloads for his enrichment. But he also misappropriated Iraq's history by making it a tool of his personality cult.


In time some of those objects may find their way back to Baghdad. But with Saddam now gone, their past is once again their own.

[mtbopfuyn]

Makes one wonder what Chiraq has stashed under his bed.

[SunkenCiv]

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