June 15, 2003

Iraq non-looting update

Skip the excerpt from the Mark Steyn article, which, funny as it is, is just snark -- and has been linked to a thousand times already. Go to the part of Glenn Reynolds' post where archeologists are quoted as worrying that their profession, or at least the current members of that profession, has lost credibility over the way they acted. And then there is this link to an article in Archaeology magazine. It was written before the war. It's about the Baghdad Museum's preparations for the impending invasion. Read it: the museum officials knew full well that looting was a danger and were preparing accordingly.

Posted by Andrea Harris at June 15, 2003 11:38 AM
Comments

so let's just forget that "the entire contents of the National Library are lost beyond retrieval" and "1,500 modern paintings and sculptures from the city's Museum of Fine Arts are still missing". in other words, so far as i know there are parts of the looting story that are still true.

Posted by: adam at June 16, 2003 at 11:15 AM

Adam: no one is saying nothing was destroyed. However, you need to do some more research before you go off half-cocked in your eagerness to stomp all over my right-wing hatefest. Here, for instance, is a post in Cronaca on an article in the Boston Globe on how 90% of the National Library's contents were saved. The link in the post no longer goes to the relevant article in the Globe, but I am sure that an enterprising, concerned young man like you can unearth it.

Posted by: Andrea Harris at June 16, 2003 at 11:23 AM