Looters Revealed
Tigerhawk finds a fascinating article buried in the current Atlantic magazine.
Remember all that looting of Iraqi museums, that the U.S. was supposedly helpless (or unwilling) to stop, after the fall of Saddam? It's been known for a long time now that that never happened on anything like the scale once presented in the media (though the story continues to form a foundation of the anti-war narrative). I attended one of the first press conferences entirely on that issue, at the University of Pennsylvania, and I was astonished to see the number of total artifacts given later in the media as the number of missing artifacts, when the archaeologists were saying, "this is the number of items in the catalogue which we have to go in and account for, and at the moment we do not have an account of them."
Now, it turns out, that the real looting was done before the war, by Saddam and his circle:
Tigerhawk notes that the fiercely anti-Bush editors of the Atlantic manage to present the story while circling away from its obvious conclusion: that the U.S. intervention protected and preserved Iraq's archaeological heritage from Saddam's depredations.
[Hat tip Solomonia]
Remember all that looting of Iraqi museums, that the U.S. was supposedly helpless (or unwilling) to stop, after the fall of Saddam? It's been known for a long time now that that never happened on anything like the scale once presented in the media (though the story continues to form a foundation of the anti-war narrative). I attended one of the first press conferences entirely on that issue, at the University of Pennsylvania, and I was astonished to see the number of total artifacts given later in the media as the number of missing artifacts, when the archaeologists were saying, "this is the number of items in the catalogue which we have to go in and account for, and at the moment we do not have an account of them."
Now, it turns out, that the real looting was done before the war, by Saddam and his circle:
[Donny] George said ... there had ... been two phases of looting: the widely publicized one that began with the occupation of the city, and an earlier, secret one that ran throughout much of Saddam Hussein's rule and was in no small measure permitted by the regime. The earlier looting, as I discovered during a trip to Iraq last fall, was carried out so systematically, and on such a large scale, that it dwarfs the thefts that occurred after the fall of Baghdad. Moreover, the April looting may have occurred in part because it would provide cover for the prior thefts.
Tigerhawk notes that the fiercely anti-Bush editors of the Atlantic manage to present the story while circling away from its obvious conclusion: that the U.S. intervention protected and preserved Iraq's archaeological heritage from Saddam's depredations.
[Hat tip Solomonia]
Labels: archaeology, Donny George, Iraq, looting
