"Babylonian Booty"..more on those like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney...

who walk around totally free and unpunished for their lies. I guess I am angered over the fact Shinseki had to resign because the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq overwhelmed the VA system. Yet those who allowed the plunder of the cradle of civilization get to criticize him.

Newsweek 2003:

Babylonian Booty

Our soldiers dug for souvenirs at the tower that was symbolized the birthplace of the biblical patriarch, Abraham.

When most Americans watched the bombing on television, they were not aware that this area was one of the 7 Wonders of the World.

It had been conquered and re-conquered a dozen or more times, by (among others) the Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Parthians, Arabs, Ottomans and British, and in February 1991, yet another foreign power raised its flag over the ancient city of Ur, near the mouth of the Euphrates: the Americans. Daring the allies to bomb the birthplace of the patriarch Abraham, Iraqis had parked their jets near Ur's 4,000-year-old ziggurat, but the planes were shot up all the same. American soldiers toured the ancient tower, then got out their entrenching tools and began digging for souvenirs. A forlorn Iraqi gatekeeper ran among them, wailing protests in Arabic, until U.S. officers put a stop to the looting. Last week, when NEWSWEEK visited the site, it was virtually deserted, except for a lone guide, the son of the old gatekeeper, keeping a wary eye on the American and British warplanes streaking overhead. "Ninety-nine percent of Americans don't know the country they'll be bombing is Mesopotamia," says Dr. Huda Ammash, a high-ranking Baath Party official. "Our country has served humanity for so long, now it's up to the international community to help protect Iraq."

....In 1991, with Baghdad's iron --control over the country shattered, "nine of 13 regional museums were completely looted," says Richard Zettler, associate curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Iraqi civilians began tearing into unexcavated sites with front-end loaders, carrying away anything of value. The plunder has been turning up ever since in dealers' catalogs and at auctions around the world. Last week on eBay, sellers were offering 4,000-year-old cuneiform-tablet fragments ("Be sure to bid on this fantastic piece of history!&quot and a Sumerian silver necklace from 2500 B.C. "There are Iraqi antiquities everywhere you look," says John Malcolm Russell, an authority on the region at Massachusetts College of Art. "And they didn't all come from someone's basement. There are very few legitimate objects on the antiquities market."

This week I have remembered a blogger who posted about this in 2007 with much frustration. I was able to find his post again, but the pictures are not there anymore. I kept some of them in older posts of mine.

From the blog Cogito:

Raping History

After the first Gulf War, there were widespread reports of looting of museums, so the Pentagon created special units designed to protect cultural sites that happened to be inside a combat zone. Then came the war in Iraq.

As is now well known and documented, the Baghdad Museum, perhaps the single most important repository of material culture from the Cradle of Western Civilization, was sacked and looted. The cultural protection units who might have stopped this were not even deployed. No more than fifty men would have been enough to secure this treasure house, but it was left to the ravages of the mob. Then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld shrugged it off with his usual indifference to tragedy, and the world took a few steps closer to viewing the invasion of Iraq as the work of the forces of a militarist, imperial government ruled by a mad cowboy.

I have never heard a more apt description Rumsfeld than "mad cowboy". It would fit his boss well also.

Unfortunately, the recovery of much of the Baghdad Museum collection is just a small ray of light amidst a much larger, growing darkness for those who value our common history. For centuries, the great civilizations of Babylon and Assyria lay buried and forgotten, save for some references in biblical and classical literature. The earlier Sumerian civilization was lost completely to history, and only rediscovered within the last 150 years.

But in spite of tremendous progress during that time, thousands of archaeological sites remained unexcavated. Say what you will about the late President Hussein, he did value his country's heritage even if it was for his own self-serving ends. The point is that these sites were protected and viewed as a source of national pride. Now, a report by Robert Fisk in the British newspaper The Independent reveal that the chaos spawned by the war in Iraq has created conditions where entire cities are being raped by looters and wildcat diggers clear down to bedrock. Illegal antiquities are flooding the black markets. An artifact removed from its context without proper documentation becomes useless for archaeological purposes. The vast, unknown history of the origins of our civilization is being systematically destroyed before it can be read. It is being plundered both by opportunists, and by people who have no other means of support. Some of this may be recovered, but there will always be issues and problems we will never be able to solve because critical contextual information was lost.

He ends with saying that "War is a destroyer of cultures, but in this case the culture is that of the western world, along with a fair share of the east. I do not doubt that fairly or unfairly, future scholars and historians will mention the American invasion of Iraq in the same breath along with the Germans at Louvain, or the Romans or Muslims at Alexandria."