Liquor Dealer

While the press went wild accusing the US of blatantly allowing the looting of the Baghdad Museum and destruction of the treasures of Baghdad it seems that little was actually taken and most of what is still missing was an inside job. There was no evidence of forced entry and the cases had been unlocked with keys available only to museum employees.

http://www.statesman.com/nationworld...raqmuseum.html

BAGHDAD — The vast majority of the Iraqi trove of antiquities feared stolen or broken have been found inside the National Museum in Baghdad, according to American investigators who compiled an inventory over the weekend of the ransacked galleries.

A total of 38 pieces, not tens of thousands, are now believed to be missing. Among them is a single display of Babylonian cuneiform tablets that accounts for nine missing items.
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In addition, investigators have counted 22 items that were damaged, including 11 clay pots on display in corridors. Most of those damaged artifacts are restored pieces and can be restored again, museum officials told investigators.

The most significant of the damaged pieces was the Golden Harp of Ur. But investigators determined that the golden head on the damaged antiquity, feared missing, was only a copy. Museum officials confirmed this week to investigators that the original head was placed in a storage vault at the Iraqi Central Bank sometime before the war.

The single most valuable missing piece is the Vase of Warka, a white limestone bowl dating from 3000 B.C

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oane

Actually, even if articles were stolen, it wasn't that big a deal. Ok, US should have put marines but that's hindsight.

Frankly, the articles stolen are of little value, even acaedmically, I say. Imagine an Iraqi with some 1000 year old artifact in his basement. It's value is zero. They are not going to get value by selling them in the auction circuit, besides the risk of being caught.

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The_Dude

well, whatever they showed on tv was bad

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sixate

maximusveritas

propaganda? cmon, the media will hype any story, regardless of the beneficiary. This is the sensationalist media at work. Nothing new, nothing special.

crewsor

Yeah, but everyone was sure quick to crucify the military for something that shouldn't have even been on their list of priorities. They were ar war. Relics mean nothing compared to lives. And its not like they were the ones doing the looting.

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The_Dude

the place was in shambles from what i saw on tv.

and i dont think they staged that

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smooth

Yeah, they were too busy doing the killing .

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crewsor

Yeah, they did do some killing, but like I said, it was war. Thats what happens.

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hlprmnky

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.

reconmike

Across town was a place where a platoon might have been slaughtered.
If the people (and I use this term loosely) who ransacked these buildings had no respect for their own countries relics, why should we risk lives to defend them.
I believe the command made the right decisions in how to take the city of Baghdad and some relics happen to be just another casuality of war.

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drewg

The real problem is not the Museum looting, but all the other looting going on. One of the huge problems facing the invading forces is to establish law & order, and stop the looting gangs who terrorise Iraq.

maximusveritas

As a followup, John Ashcroft says the looting was done by professionals:
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/126/...q_done_:.shtml

Personally, I don't trust the guy at all It seems like more work needs to be done to get a clearer picture of just what happened here.

splck

that's kinda what I think. Let's hope a lesson can be learned from this mistake.

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Dragonlich

My problem with this whole debate is that it's so one-sided: the US should have done this, and should have done that, and shouldn't have done that, etc, etc.

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.

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!

Perhaps in a few years, when the smoke clears, the data comes out, and everyone has calmed down a bit, we'll all look back and see that this wasn't all that bad, and that - given the circumstances - the US actions were as good as can be expected.

hlprmnky

Granted, this is true. War is, in the immortal word of Sherman, hell.

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.

suviko

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Dilbert1234567

i gut got word on CNN that only about 42 peices were stolen, the rest were hidden befor the looting began in the valts below and in the bank. so almost all the items were gone, just not stolen

just a Misscommunication?

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Dragonlich

No, that's called "Media Frenzy"...

I'm willing to bet that some other terrible things that happened were also slightly overstated; the hospital lootings, for example.

Macheath

This article goes into some detail as to what was significant about the 5000 or so small items that were stolen, and also what happened to Iraq's National Library. (I've heard no overstated 'propaganda' about that before).
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Humble clay tablets are greatest loss to science

New Scientist vol 178 issue 2394 - 10 May 2003, page 8


ONE month after the looting of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, it is clear that the consequences will be devastating. The plunder is already being compared to the legendary destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria centuries ago.

But the losses that will wound archaeologists most deeply are not the stunning sculptures whose photos have filled newspapers since the looting. These great artistic treasures have already been studied closely by archaeologists, and there is little more to learn from them. The greatest loss lies in the mass of information recorded in thousands of cuneiform tablets and other small artefacts that have been reported missing.

These items formed one of the most comprehensive records of the lives and thoughts of Mesopotamian people thousands of years ago. "What's really interesting about this civilisation is not the high art," says Paul Zimansky, a specialist in Mesopotamian antiquities at Boston University. "Most of the stuff I dug up that went into that museum would not strike anyone as terribly beautiful. But they tell us how people lived in our first civilisation, and that's very important."

Fortunately, not all the information from such artefacts will be lost. Archaeologists keep careful records of the material they excavate - especially if, as in Iraq, foreign workers are often not allowed to take the objects out of the country. Instead, they photograph everything, write careful descriptions, and often make casts of the originals to take home for further study.

These records form a back-up of the original material, scattered among universities and museums around the world. Archaeologists are now trying to pull these back-ups together into a coherent, usable archive. "There's been a real mobilisation of scholars to try to start assembling this information," says Ellen Herscher of the Archaeological Institute of America in Boston.

But these secondary records can never provide as much information as the originals. In recent years, for example, archaeologists have begun analysing the clay from which cuneiform tablets are made, and using this to track the tablets to their source. "This is something that even 20 years ago nobody even thought of. In 20 or 50 years from now, there will be new techniques that people will want to apply. There's no substitute for the originals," says Herscher.

Worse, no secondary records exist at all for much of the material that was held in the Baghdad museum. Many of the artefacts, especially those excavated in the past decade, had not yet been catalogued or described, says Mark Altaweel of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. Many had not even been photographed, because the trade embargo imposed by the UN after the first 1991 Gulf war restricted the import of photographic equipment and supplies.

This lack of back-up is particularly serious when it comes to the thousands of cuneiform tablets held by the museum that have never been read or translated. "There's a whole world that opens up as a document is deciphered," says Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. "If it's never read, it's a loss to our collective past."

Among the unread tablets reported missing are those containing a second copy of the Gilgamesh epic, one of the oldest recorded stories in the world. These could have filled in the gaps left by missing or broken tablets in the first version of the tale. Other tablets record more routine information: business transactions, inventories of livestock, legal records and the like. Yet even such apparently trivial information can be valuable to archaeologists, especially when they uncover a complete archive as they did in the late 1980s in the city of Sippar, south-east of Baghdad.

Such sources provide a snapshot of what people considered important and how they organised their lives and possessions, providing a rich picture of the workings of an early civilisation. Much of that value is lost if the archive is scattered or partially destroyed. "Are you ever going to get those materials back together so they can be studied? You're not. This is a great loss to humanity," says Samuel Paley, an archaeologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

There is, however, some good news: most of Iraq's archaeological treasures remain buried in its soil, awaiting discovery. "Archaeologically, Iraq is very underinvestigated," says Zimansky. "There's much work to be done there. And that, in the long term, is the hope. In another century, we could refill the museums."

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Iraq's libraries. The National Library in Baghdad, and several others, were destroyed in the aftermath of the war. Among their contents were Korans and other texts going back five hundred years, as well as more recent papers documenting the founding of the modern state of Iraq after the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. "The library is a disaster on a different level," says Irving Finkel, an archaeologist at the British Museum in London. "Burnt manuscripts are gone forever."