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If you look at some historical references, the US has been fighting with extreme restraint, and has been doing a great job so far. I mean, compare this situation with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, where thousands were tortured and executed by the invading army (and lots of treasure was looted!)... or compare it to the North-Korean capture of Seoul, where potential enemies (civilians!) were executed. In fact, compare this to any other war in history, and you'll see that this stuff happens, and most of the time, it's much worse.
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Granted, this is true. War is, in the immortal word of Sherman, hell.
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But when a US-led war has some problems and fuck-ups, it's all over the news, and everyone stands in line to criticize, even when it's the Iraqis that are doing the looting, and it was the Iraqis that were fighting dirty... People just assume that the US does everything on purpose: they're not protecting the museum, so they're out to destroy Iraq's heritage. They're not protecting hospitals, so they don't care about the Iraqi people. They've secured oil fields, so it was all about oil after all. It's not always that simple!
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I never said that the US was out to destroy Iraqi culture. I referred to this event as a "cock-up", which is not something one does on purpose. I don't think that the American forces did anything more vindictive than fail to plan for a rapid establishment of order in Baghdad, which allowed professional thieves, using the rioting masses as cover, to make off with cultural treasures. Treasures, by the by, which survived even the Mongol sacking of the city in the 1200's. As I said originally, I would
love to discover that Liquor Dealer's originally-cited article is correct, and that only a very few items are really missing. Well, other than the 5000 or so "less-valuable" items, and the records of every archeological dig done in Iraq since the British started them in the 1930s, which would have been in the offices that were "destroyed".
I seem to recall a very large to-do about a certain Taliban destroying a bunch of irreplaceable Buddhist relics a couple of years ago, not to mention the consistent and in-depth coverage of the stupid and evil shit that regime did generally. The US military is not the only force in the world called to task for what it does. I just happen to expect more from them than I do from other militaries and organizations, because I think they rock harder than anyone else and should therefore have to play to a different level.
Also, media coverage of world events is so, so much more pervasive today than it was even twenty years ago (before CNN, even!). There really can be few comparisons made between the scrutiny our troops (and their leaders, let's not forget) face today, and what the North Koreans had to deal with in the 1950's, etc., etc.
Let me state this one time, explicitly and for the record. I think that our soldiers deserve every parade we can throw at them. If I ran any sort of business, discharged and furloughed soldiers would get a 10% discount from me for life, no questions asked. I think that the average US infantryman has done much better than can be expected in almost every situation we've put them in these last 200 years.
My problem is that I expect more of their leaders. I expected there to be a contingency plan in place for the event of a rapid takeover in Baghdad (especially since Saddam still had Tikrit to run to). There was none. I expected the commanders on the ground to have access to the numbers of troops they would need to push a supply line 400 miles into Iraq and then take and hold the city in reasonable order when they got there. They did not. One of the consequences of this is that many priceless relics of unimaginable antiquity have been stolen from the Iraqi people. That is regrettable, and as the people who drove out the previous keepers of order, some of the blame for it does and must fall to us. Even the Geneva Convention says that occupying forces are responsible for the cities they take.
In closing, I would just like to say that in 150 years, only specialists will know or care very much about the causes, characters, and narrative of the Second Gulf War. But 1500 years from now, specialists, and scholars generally, will still be feeling the loss of the Code of Hammurabi, as will the Iraqis from whom it was stolen. Inasmuch as we might have stopped that from happening with a little more planning, a little more expense, the commitment of some more soldiers up front (rather than, as one US general put it, "doing it on the cheap"), I will always feel that we screwed up.