Quote:
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Investigators found that the basement storage area, which held thousands of small items not deemed suitable for display, had been disturbed in one of the four rooms. They broke through a cinder-block barrier to the room to find hundreds of cardboard boxes intact and about 90 plastic boxes, containing about 5,000 less-valuable items, missing
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That's from the last paragraph of your same article; emphasis is added. To claim, based on this article, that we
know that only a "few" items were taken, or indeed that it is yet known what the state of the collection is at all, reeks of apologism for something that will, no matter the final damages bill, go down in history as a world-class cock-up by the Coalition forces.
I would absolutely love to believe your article, but it does fly in the face of
all reporting to this point. In three months' time we should all agree to visit the UNESCO website and see what kind of official tally exists.
Also, the really big-ticket items
were obviously stolen by professionals. Little wonder; the very wealthiest collectors in the world have been trying to get around the laws in our country and others which would prevent them from swooping in and buying such stuff for years and years; why then would the not spend a fraction of the value of the items to put some professionals on the ground there and spirit them out? High risk, but as countless American Express commercials attest, getting what you really, really want is priceless - danger pay for your mercenaries is less than priceless.
Also, I think that the correct argument to be made with respect to what the coalition forces should or should not have been doing in Baghdad is not "They didn't protect the museum! waaaah!", but rather "If they could find the manpower and the time to maintain order at the Oil Ministry HQ, they could damn well have spared a platoon for the relics of human civilization in a building across town"
I mean, the Oil Ministry houses, I'm sure, records of oil surveys which would be terribly expensive to reproduce, and which will be very imporant to the Iraqi people as they move toward having the freedom to go out and bring their oil production and capacity into the 21st century.
It's just too bad that no amount of oil-based prosperity will let them buy back the things that were stolen from the musuems looted in Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul.