June 21, 2003
Iraq Museum Regains A Famed TreasurePhotograph of the Warka Vase accompanying the cheery Washington Post story:This is how it happens in Iraq today. A shiny red Toyota, or maybe it’s a Nissan, pulls up in front of the National Museum, along a busy roundabout on the Tigris River. Three men in their twenties step out cradling an object wrapped in a blanket and, eschewing the usual social niceties, hand it to museum officials.
The officials say thank you. The men drive away.
Thus was recovered one of the greatest treasures of Mesopotamian antiquity, a three-foot-high, 5,000-year-old ritual vase carved with intricate images of men, a goddess and nature. It is the Warka vase, a priceless artifact gone missing during the looting of the Baghdad museum after the fall of the city in April.
Retrieved on Thursday, no questions asked.
“I am delighted it has been returned,” Pietro Cordone, senior adviser on culture for the U.S. civil authority, told the Associated Press. He happened to be there when the “Ali Babas,” as thieves here are called, showed up. He was able to thank them before they sped off in the midday heat. “It is reason for people all around the world to celebrate,” he said.
Actual condition of the returned Warka Vase:
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Friday, April 11, 2003:
Let me say one other thing. The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, “My goodness, were there that many vases?” (Laughter.) “Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?(Via Body and Soul.) [09:49 PM]
I wondered why there were no photos accompanying the story. A story like this should have pictures. I got out onto the web and started searching. I couldn't find them anywhere.
I was afraid it was something like this.
This — not just the vandalism, but the ceaseless glossolalia passed off as reporting and the cheap dissembling by the usual suspects — is flat-f%#$ing-out unforgivable. What with the constant backtracking on the facts, I feel less confident about the details of what happened with each passing day, but it's becoming clear that something irreplaceable has been lost.
But that's okay. Those two tractor-trailers sure do make up for it.
The think about the Warka vase is that it wasn't found in one piece.
Archaeological reconstruction of things like the Warka vase isn't designed to be robust -- it's designed to do as little damage as possible. The fragility of the piece is one probable reason why it was left behind while many less important pieces were stashed elsewhere.
When something like that breaks, it tends to break along the lines of the pre-existing fractures. If all of the fragments were returned, and the picture shows the largest whole chunk of the vase, while reassembling the vase will be difficult and time consuming, it shouldn't be any more difficult -- it shouldn't be as difficult -- as it was the first time that was done.
On the other hand, if what you see is the whole of what they got, well, there's not much that can be said to ameliorate the damage.
This is like the Mona Lisa being stolen, then having the lower half of it sent back and having someone go, "Hey, at least we got her tits."
There was a fascinating, yet distressing, documentary on the BBC the other day about the ransacking of the Museum of Antiquities. Dan Cruickshank had been over to Iraq before the war started to look at sites of historical importance that might get trashed by the fighting, and when the fighting had stopped he went back to try to find out what exactly happened at the museum.
His conclusion was that many of the missing artifacts were taken long before the battle for the museum happened, that the subsequent looters found little to actually steal, and that the museum had indeed been used as a military position.
He found more evidence to support the American military's version of events than the Iraqi museum officials'. That was something that surprised me - most of the media had assumed that the Americans were lying, but it seems that maybe they weren't.
This is the BBC site for the programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/iraq/iraq_after_the_war_01.shtml
Suw:
>He found more evidence to support the American military's version of events than the Iraqi museum officials'.
I read the piece you link to and that's not how I read it. Rather, he seems to me to raise a number of issues that make it hard to know exactly what artifacts left when. (I just woke up and haven't finished my coffee, so maybe I missed something.)
Patrick's point about the happy distortions of the US media of every piece of good news regarding recovered antiquities is an important one.
Alter, if you follow the link under the words "actual condition," you get a page at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, which captions the image "Warka Vase as recovered."
It's notable, indeed, that the portion of the vase shown in the Washington Post's happy-talk story is, in fact, entirely missing from the fragment that was returned.
I'm quite aware that many fine antiquities exist in pieces, and that when displayed they're sometimes filled out with reconstructed parts. What I don't seem to be conveying is that my point isn't primarily about the Warka Vase. I'm glad some of the antiquities are coming back, even damaged. My point is about the media.
Subsequent reporting by the Guardian on a staff revolt at the National Museum backs up the idea, which I gather comes across in the Cruikshank report, that the director Dony George misled reporters originally. The staff say he gave them weapons and told them to fire on the Americans:
>The staff say he gave them weapons and told them to fire on the Americans
However, this subject is a very slippery slope: so much of this is about spin. We read stories about armed hospital orderlies protecting hospitals, and it seems obvious why orderlies would need guns. If I were the director of that museum, I might well have wanted to arm the staff. If you think about all of the middle-eastern and asian antiquities in major European and American museum and think about how they got there, I can well-imagine why the director might have suggested that his staff use their guns to keep Americans out.
And if I were a member of the staff, there are a number of reasons I might want the director of the museum out, starting with the political offiliations necessary to hold that job and indeed, (as mentioned in the article) the evidence that some of the looting was an inside job.
But if he is replaced, the happy folks in the American media will weave this into the fantasy that the museum wasn't really looted in the first place. That will be the story's significance.
Kevin, interestingly enough the Mona Lisa was sawed down, centuries ago, to fit a frame. They pretty much know when by the difference in copies made before and after the event.
So now we have a -good- reason that it doesn't matter about the vase. We wanted to put it into a smaller display case anyway. Why do all you vase huggers hate America?
To clarify what I was thinking.
One of the key disputes as I understand it is whether the museum was used as a military position or not, as that understandably had a direct impact on whether or not the Americans could have better protected its contents from looting. The Iraqis have said that it was not defended and that the Americans were lax in their protection of the Iraqi heritage stored within. They said that the dugouts were used as shelters, not positions from which to fire on the Americans. The Americans have said that the museum was fortified and that they had to deal with it not as a museum but as a military position.
From watching the program, it was clear that most of the evidence pointed to the Americans telling a closer approximation to the truth than the Iraqis. I hesitate to say 91the truth92 because as has been rightly pointed out, much of the info we have about such events has been spun out of all recognition. But that was the point I was attempting to make with the line that Kathryn quoted.
The second issue is whether or not the looting was as bad as the Iraqi officials made out. Again, from watching the programme it was clear even to a casual observer that many of the cases in the various galleries had been cleared by someone with a set of keys - none of the glass display cases had been smashed, they were all intact but empty. Looters tend not to mind so much about the cases, they92re just after stuff they can sell.
Whilst much of the material was supposed to have gone into safe storage, it appeared that either no one knew where the crates had been stored, or they weren92t going to tell anyone, or that the crates had not been stored but removed. Yes, it92s clear that there is a lot of confusion (and/or obfuscation) about which artefacts left when and where they went, but it does imply that the people responsible for the removal of the majority of missing antiquities were not actually the looters, but museum officials or people connected to them.
Of course, there are a whole load of reasons for museum staff to blame the looters rather than corrupt officials - it92s easier, it saves face, it allows some of the blame to fall on to the American military and finally, it helps to cover up the godawful mess that the museum appears to have been in prior to the war in terms of cataloguing and storage.
Some of the saddest scenes from Dan Cruickshank92s documentary were of the un-touched storerooms. There were artefacts broken and scattered on the floor in jumbled heaps. The place looked like it had been turned over. But when pressed, it was admitted by the museum staff that that was just how they had been storing stuff for years. They had no idea what artefacts they had, no catalogues or records, it was just a horrendous mess.
It92s really awful to see artefacts that have survived for thousands of years being broken by someone treading on them accidentally.
This started off as such an easy story - easy to take the Iraqi figures at face value, easy to blame the American military. It's obviously not such an easy story anymore, but it seems that the temptation to ignore the complications that surround it is too much to resist for some of the press.
Reading that article, the fate of the coin collection is pretty telling: It was saved because in the middle of the looting, someone dropped the keys in the store room.
Since coins are valuable, small, and portable, and much easier to fence than golden bulls heads and such, the freeperati's cry of "All the good stuff was stolen years ago!" rings pretty hollow. The coin collection is GREAT stuff, and if that wasn't stolen years ago, there'd be a lot of other stuff--especially less easily fencible stuff--that would also have not been stolen years ago, but would have be stolen, say, in those three days of looting.
Besides which, if all of this really great loot had been stolen that many years ago, it would have been sold off and some of it would have come to light, for the simple fact that the people rich enough to buy things that pricy are often old and tend to die, leaving their heirs with things they usually want to sell. In particular if they could get arrested for having them without having a convenient corpse to blame for receiving stolen goods.
I haven't heard of any instances of this, so it's a reasonable conclusion that most of the collection was still in the museum or stashed away for safekeeping in various vaults. Many of which were looted.
Is it just me, or does that vase look utterly unlike the original? Look at the curves--they don't match up at all. I'm not an expert at all, but I can't conceive of any way in which the vase that was recovered is part of the other vase pictured.
Is it just me, or does that vase look utterly unlike the original? Look at the curves--they don't match up at all
What he said. After a bit of looking, I can see where the recovered piece came from, but boy does it look different. I wonder how much of that is due to the high-contrast gray image compared to a flat low contrast color image.
Is it just me, or does that vase look utterly unlike the original? Look at the curves--they don't match up at all.
Note that in the colour picture the remnants of the vase are on its side, lying on some green cloth. Folds in the cloth partically obscure the vase. And the angle is as if the second photo is taken from a much lower p.o.v. compared to the first. (Un?)fortunately definitely the same vase.
PS: I really hope the following from the article is true:
She said the vase had been taken not, as previously reported, from its glass case in an exhibition room, but from a restoration room in the back of the museum where experts were working on the piece. "It had been broken in half in antiquity, and had been repaired in the past. ... It was brought back in exactly the same condition it left the museum. It hadn't suffered any more damage," she said.
Well, facts are powerless in the face of Talk Radio and Washington Times columnists. As recently as yesterday, a letter was printed in the paper here excoriating us dum liburuls for crying when there was only 50 items stolen. As if that (even if true, which it fails by a factor of 120) would be hunky-dory.
I'd write in, but I just had a letter published, so they won't print it. I guess I'll send them an e-mail anyway to see if they might be inclined to fix such an egregious error of fact. After all, they're a newspaper. They care about the truth.
About whether the Museum was being used as a makeshift fort: It is possible that in the first days of the fighting for Baghdad, it was. However, a small team of Marine occupied the Museum on Friday, April 11 (I think I have the date right) and then abandoned it to continuing looting.
The museum had stopped being a fort by that point, and we could have stopped further looting. It's possible that there was nothing left to loot by then, but we didn't know that then.
Sorry about having missed the link the first time around -- I tend to be a poor reader of hypertext.
However, having checked both links, I'm still not certain whether or not the state the vase was in when recovered was significantly worse than the condition it was in when it was taken from the museum.
The coalition spokesperson says that it was returned in exactly the same condition as it was taken. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (at the University of Chicago?) strongly implies that it isn't, though they don't actually say so, by giving the 1962 image of the whole vase as a "before" shot, and an uncredited third party picture of half the vase as an "after" shot.
The title of the post is "Mechanics of the Lie". And I'm honestly confused about who's lying here. It's possible that it's the nice Mehta woman. Lord knows that it wouldn't be the first time that a military spokesperson has not been completely frank with the people of the country that spokesperson ostensibly serves. And it's equally possible that it's the implication of the OI at UC's webpage, though that's something they can weasel out of, as it is only an implication, rather than a direct statement.
It's also possible that the Washington Post didn't have access to the picture on the OI's website, either through laziness on the part of the guy getting the pictures for the article, or because the copyright on that image might be legitimately hard for them to track down, let alone get. It might not even have been taken when the Washington Post ran its article -- the OI page was last updated June 20th. If that was the picture being put in, they got it later than the Post's article, which ran on the 14th.
If the Post didn't have access to the picture of the recovered vase, the 62 picture is what they had to work with, and using a close-up rather than a picture of the whole vase is actually what I would have done; the Warka vases importance is the figures more than the shape of the vase as a whole, and there wouldn't be enough space to run the picture of the whole vase while still maintaining the detail.
As far as focusing on the vase rather than on the media in general, I'm not sure that's a hazard of arguing from the specific to the general that it's possible to avoid. I have to admit, I'm far more interested in the vase than in the newspapers. However, to make a comment on your main argument, if there is a lie here, it's something that's more attributable to laziness and a general lack of interest in testing a previously adopted point of view than it is a deliberate attempt to force a lie down people's throats. And I think that's true regardless of whether it's the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago or it's the Washington Post whose pictures are conveying a false impression of what happened to that vase.
Rumsfeld is such a Philistine.
"Let me say one other thing. The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it92s the same picture of some person talking out of his ass, and you see it 20 times, and you think, 93My goodness, were there that many Philistines in our government?94 (Laughter.) 93Is it possible that there were that many asshole Philistines in the whole country? "
http://www.cronaca.com/archives/001115.html
Iraqis in violation of Hague convention with regard to Baghdad Museum.
For completeness' sake, so no one else feels compelled to go hunting around for it the way I did, The Hague Convention of 1954. (Both the Cronaca link and the ArtNews story assume everyone knows the full text of it, I guess-- ArtNews, at least, is probably making a fair assumption.)
I don't believe anyone here would feel a desire to defend the military practices of the Ba92athist leadership (pardon me, but I'm getting really tired of the word "regime") in this matter. Heck, pretty much *any* matter. I doubt the museum curators had much choice-- their responsibility would be to get as much of the collection out of the combat zone as they could. At least someone made an effort to lock things away, though that's not very effective when the looters have access to the keys.
While we're on the topic of the Hague Convention and culpability, note that Article 11 does not release the opposing party from the convention, it only revokes the museum's immunity while the violation exists. Come to think, in the initial reports of the looting, I recall U.S. soldiers stating that they hadn't defended the museum because it wasn't on the list of places they'd been ordered to protect-- maybe that was why. But if so, why did it take them so long to get back there and start defending the place? And hey, if the museum had been safely closed since the *first* Gulf War, why did they open it again right before the *second* war?
It sounds to me like there's blame enough to go around on this one, but as usual, everyone's pointing the finger at someone else. It's tragic that any of this had to happen, no matter whose fault it was. It's shameful of the media to try to downplay the damage. No matter how hard we try to agree on treaties and conventions in sane, rational times, someone's always going to flout them in the middle of a war. Yeah, war is hell, and culture is often one of the first things sacrificed. It's painful for a librarian to admit, but if the choice came down to saving my skin or saving the last copy of a book for future generations, I'd probably focus on the painfully immediate future. (Well... were ita book I *really* loved, I'd probably loot it, just to keep it out of unsafe hands. I'd give it back later. No, honestly. Don't look at me that way.)
Anyway, lies or not, I think some good things came of the looting outcry. It got the world's attention focused on the threat to the collection, it netted them some pretty talented help in a hurry, and it probably made the artifacts too hot to sell easily. Damaged or not, it means they're getting their things back. The end justifies the means? Hm. I think I'll fall back on the "war is hell" statement again.
Well, sorry this was so rambling... oh, my, look at that, it's 4:30 in the morning. That's probably why. (It's Neil Gaiman's fault, for pointing me to this absorbingly interesting blog in *his* blog. Bah.)
Prior to the American troops arriving in Baghdad, the museum curators did not think that the museum would be damaged by fighting and bombing? They did not take steps to protect their treasures from a fierce street-by-street battle that everyone was predicting? They left these priceless things out in the open to be damaged by stray small arms fire or misdirected bombs? All the shopkeepers were preparing for looting prior to the war by moving their goods, boarding up their shops and buying weapons with which to protect their property. Why didn't museum officials have the same sense of urgency about protecting their valuable objects before the Americans came as the shopkeepers and everyone else? How many museum officials participated in the looting? They would know what is valuable and was is not.
Recently we have seen pictures of the recovery of beautiful objects that were stored in the vaults in the Bank of Baghdad. Why weren't other objects put into secure storage like these were?
Blaming the Americans is easier than taking responsibility for the mismanagement and theft of national treasures.
Madjayhawk, if you care to read this you will be better informed than you presently are.
Yonmei. I read it.
Thousands of artifacts were initially reported missing and this was extensively and shrilly hyped throughout the media as something that the administration should have somehow planned for and prevented. The administration was adroitly pictured by the media and the usual collection of detractors as almost being in the same league as the looters. Secretary Rumsfeld was even continually characterized as a buffoon for his remarks about the extent of the looting. As it turns out he was more correct than those in the media who believed the museum management and seriously reported what initially looked like a major anthropological disaster based on information they received from museum staff. Also, every media account seemed to always to include some snide reference in the article about the US protecting the Oil Ministry before it protected the museum.
Then it turns out that initial reports of number of missing treasures were inaccurate. (Who is responsible for the inaccurate stories that caused so much concern throughout the world? Jayson Blair again?) The museum management staff DID protect most of the artifacts but not all. Whether it is thousands of priceless artifacts or a few, who is to blame for those remaining unprotected artifacts being looted? Again, we can assume that the management had more than enough time to protect those objects. They didn't. So why blame the administration for the IM's incompetence? That is my point.
Who is to blame for the widespread looting in Baghdad following its conquest and occupation by the US army?
Well, obviously, blame the Iraqis who looted. But who is responsible for the breakdown in law and order that allowed (and encouraged, according to some eyewitnesses) such widespread looting?
Ultimately, legally, according to the Geneva Conventions, the US army is responsible. The occupying army becomes responsible for law enforcement in the areas in which it is in occupation.
Who is responsible for the US army, and especially, who was responsible for the invasion and occupation of Baghdad? Donald Rumsfeld.
What was Donald Rumsfeld's reaction when faced with the terrible results of his failure to visualise what would happen when the US army invaded Baghdad?
He didn't apologise: he didn't acknowledge that what was happening was the result of his own appalling misjudgement: he didn't even acknowledge that what was happening was a terrible, horrifying result of the US invasion.
He cracked a joke.
If Rumsfeld is being "continually characterised as a buffoon" for his remarks about the looting, this sounds to me like a rather kind reaction: what should be happening is calls for his resignation due to criminal incompetence.
MadJayHawk, I hope that you've been misinformed, fear that you're mistaken, and don't want to believe that your errors proceed from any other cause.
As you said:
"Thousands of artifacts were initially reported missing..."They were in fact reported missing. Unfortunately, thousands of them are still missing, and the looting is still going on.
It later developed that one museum official at one museum overstated that institution's losses of certain categories of artifact; but given the museum's continuing vulnerability, that was arguably a prudent thing for him to have done.
Reporters on the ground in Iraq observed the looting going on, and reported it as such. Some of them photographed or filmed it. The story went out to newsfeeds around the world.:
"...and this was extensively and shrilly hyped throughout the media..."I've read the stories. They weren't shrill. They weren't hype, either. They were fairly straight news reporting. The available information has changed as the story develops, and those changes have been reported too.
The characterization of these stories as "shrill hype" is false if taken literally, and a meaningless disparagement if taken as the code phrase that it is.
(By the way: changes in a developing story are a normal characteristic of real-world news reporting. It tends to indicate that the thing being reported on is real; that multiple journalists are interacting with that thing; and that the collective media understanding of the story is shifting and adapting as their reports come in. When you see standalone stories that never develop or change, and never interact with other events and other stories, you should give them extra scrutiny. Such stories can occur naturally, but they're very rare. More commonly, that static non-interactivity means the story was more manufactured than it was reported.)
"...as something that the administration should have somehow planned for and prevented."Yup. That's part of the straight news reportage, and those stories go back to before the start of the invasion. Assorted and very respectable scholars, institutions, and organizations were trying even then to get the administration to pay attention to this issue. It didn't.
It's passing hard to argue that we're not responsible for the maintenance of basic civil order in a country we've invaded. We're the United States, not the Mongol Horde. And it's impossible to argue that the administration isn't responsible for our not having the resources to do so, since Rumsfeld personally and repeatedly insisted on drastic cutbacks in troop allocations for the invasion, over the repeated protests of the Pentagon's professional military planners.
He'd be responsible for it anyway. That's what being in command is all about. But the blame accrues to him personally as well.
"The administration was adroitly pictured by the media and the usual collection of detractors..."No. I'm sorry, but there you're dead wrong.
First: neither "adroitly" nor "the media" is an appropriate characterization for a story that was independently reported by so many non-collusive sources. "Pictured by", as in "gave the appearance of", with its implication that there was falsification involved, is another unearned derogation. And "the usual collection of detractors" is just plain cheap. There is, as I'm sure you'll realize if you'll think about it for just a moment, no such thing.
In general, the impression you give in that portion of your post is that there's a degree of coordination and collusion -- and, implicitly, falsification -- present in those news reports. It simply wasn't there. You cannot dismiss this story by pretending that the world's news media conspired to make it all up.
"...as almost being in the same league as the looters."Perhaps someone, somewhere, said something like that (stupid people have freedom of speech too), but no way you can call that the general opinion. The real one was much more sensible: the administration was held responsible, and considered to be at fault. Surely that's enough.
"Secretary Rumsfeld was even continually characterized as a buffoon for his remarks about the extent of the looting."No. He was characterized as a callous, venal lout -- and, worse, a rank amateur at statecraft -- whose grossly inappropriate remark damaged America's interests and cost us friends in every country that heard about it. I wish he'd just been seen as a buffoon. He'd have done far less harm that way.
"As it turns out he was more correct than those in the media who believed the museum management and seriously reported what initially looked like a major anthropological disaster based on information they received from museum staff."Let's start with the objective, literal meaning. What he said on that occasion wasn't true in anybody's book. He said that the news media photographed one guy running out with a vase, then replayed that same footage twenty times a day. He then suggested there weren't that many vases in the country.
That wasn't what had happened. And there are, in fact, more vases than that in Iraq.
I must suppose that what you're trying to say is that the brief round of news stories minimizing the extent of the looting and loss turned out to be more accurate than the initial reports. They aren't. They also aren't more accurate than the numerous reports that have followed them.
There was one story that rather mysteriously set the total loss at 33 "irreplaceable" and several thousand more minor artifacts. It's been quoted a lot. It is, by the way, a good example of a standalone article that doesn't interact much with the rest of the universe of news around it. There's been an odd dearth of followup substantiation and documentation of its strangely precise reckoning. It's also odd that it talks about the losses in terms of irreplaceable vs. minor artifacts, which is more the language of antiquities dealers than archaeologists.
There've been a number of articles about the Baghdad Museum's fib that it was stripped to the walls. Few have noticed that it was a prudent thing to do, given that the museum was still undefended. Not many have given the museum credit for ceasing to fib about that as soon as it was safe to do so. And almost no one is talking about the fact that it wasn't the only museum that got looted, or that major archaeological sites are also being looted.
I wish the reports of serious losses weren't true. It looks like they are. And when I say it looks like they are, I mean multiple reports from respectable sources.
You can't scoff this off. I don't know why you're trying.
"Also, every media account seemed to always to include some snide reference in the article about the US protecting the Oil Ministry before it protected the museum."Yes. It's been established that they did that. Saying so isn't snide; it's a relevant datum. It tells us that this was a situation in which it was possible for US forces to protect major institutions, that there had been a decision made to protect some institutions, and that the museum wasn't one of them.
"Then it turns out that initial reports of number of missing treasures were inaccurate. (Who is responsible for the inaccurate stories that caused so much concern throughout the world? Jayson Blair again?)"See above. First, it's been a developing story. Second, a museum official told a useful fib while the museum was still in danger. It is not reasonable to conclude from either of these circumstances that no significant looting has gone on, and it doesn't exculpate us for our grievous negligence.
"The museum management staff DID protect most of the artifacts but not all."They protected some artifacts, in one museum. Though you didn't mention it, the staff at the library there also managed to stash a lot of their collection before the library burned. But that's more than you can say for the museum at Warka (which was Erech, which was Uruk), or for numerous other institutions, or for Iraq's major archaeological sites.
The loss is grievous. If we are not solely to blame, we nevertheless were and are culpably negligent.
"Whether it is thousands of priceless artifacts or a few, who is to blame for those remaining unprotected artifacts being looted?"We are. When you break the existing systems for maintaining social order, especially if you do so while attempting to seize control, you're responsible for what happens. The looters are also to blame for their own misdeeds, but that doesn't get us off the hook.
"Again, we can assume that the management had more than enough time to protect those objects. They didn't."We can't assume anything of the sort, and it's pretty damn high and mighty and heartless to sit safely at your computer over here and say they did. We have eyewitness accounts of museum employees, who were trying to defend the place, having to retreat in the face of gunfire from the looters. We also have eyewitness accounts of museum employees being utterly heartbroken at the devastation afterward.
My guess is that they trusted in the safety of their vaults and other normal security measures, not anticipating that the looters would be allowed to rampage unchecked to anything like the extent that they were. If the museums had only been hit with small-scale opportunistic looting, their vaults and bolts would have stopped the worst of it.
"So why blame the administration for the IM's incompetence?"Because it's an astounding piece of arrogance to write it all off as the museum's incompetence, and doubly so when you've provided no substantiation for the claim beyond your own assertion of it.
Because defending a museum's holdings, day after day, unsupported by the police or the military, against a tidal wave of looting and civil disorder, is beyond what anyone could reasonably expect of a bunch of scholarly museum staffers, and a site that wasn't primarily designed to be defensible.
Because we were repeatedly warned in advance that the museum, and other components of Iraq's cultural heritage, would be put in jeopardy by our invasion. Not that it should have been necessary to warn us; anyone who'd thought about it for three minutes would have known that the museum's vulnerability was going to be a problem if we didn't act to protect it.
Because when you decide to throw your weight around, play top dog, and take over other people's countries, you have to take responsibility for maintaining civil order and normal services. It's one of the things that distinguishes us from barbarians and vandals.
Because for some damnfool mysterious reason, Bush and Rumsfeld decided to undertake this invasion with only a fraction of the troops our military planners told them would be necessary. They didn't stumble into that position by accident. They were set on it, and fought hard for it. They're on record as having predicted that the Iraqis would roll over and play dead as soon as we showed up.
They were wrong.
When you're in command, you're responsible. It doesn't get much more basic than that.
"That is my point."And those are my points.
There was one story that rather mysteriously set the total loss at 33 "irreplaceable" and several thousand more minor artifacts. It's been quoted a lot.
Truly. Columnist Kathleen Parker and various letter-writers have taken that to mean that "only" 33 items are unaccounted for. I got a letter published pointing out that she's off a bit in her reckoning there. In her column, she accused the liberal press of fostering a 'rush to judgment' mentality. I was pleased to see another letter suggesting that if she wanted to work at a nice relaxing weekly paper in her own state of Florida, she could apply at the National Enquirer.
I just posted to Making Light that the figures are continuing to change (see 'Corrected Corrections Corrected'). Now it's about 60,000 from the Baghdad Museum (13,000 from storage, 47,000 from display cases, and a lot of stuff smashed). Did we mention that there are other museums there as well?
And what's that I hear from the "liberal alarmists owe us an apology" camp? Could it be an apology?
No, it's just the crickets, saying "Clinton, Clinton, Clinton..."
By the way: changes in a developing story are a normal characteristic of real-world news reporting.
Yup. Anyone else remember the fatality estimates on and immediately after 9/11? Six thousand, five thousand, three thousand.
Teresa: You go, girl! There's exactly one line in your discourse that I can't quite believe:
You can't scoff this off. I don't know why you're trying.I'm almost certain you do know why he's trying...
When you break the existing systems for maintaining social order, especially if you do so while attempting to seize control, you're responsible for what happens. The looters are also to blame for their own misdeeds, but that doesn't get us off the hook.An example of the principle that blame does not attenuate.
Christopher, I truly don't understand that one. Few of them give a damn about archaeology. It's a political thing. But why that one? It's an indefensible position. The more we find out, the higher the numbers go. That "rush to judgement" trope looks worse and worse.
Rumsfeld's equally indefensible. His crude remarks cost us dearly. There's nothing like sneering at someone else's loss and grief to make you look like a complete jerk. His confident predictions about the course of the war are just embarrassing at this point, and our worst problems in the fight in Iraq are traceable to policies he personally instituted.
So why do they keep pushing this point? What are they getting out of it? They can't win the argument. They can't even look smart while they're losing it.
I think they're just so committed at this point that backing down would be "caving" or "wimping out." It's better to be blatantly and obviously wrong than to admit you were wrong at some previous time; that would be tantamount to admitting you have no dick.
A strange viewpoint. But I've seen exactly that problem make total fools of many a guy - and an occasional woman, though why they don't want to admit to not having a dick is beyond me, I must say.
An accusation of a "rush to judgment" over the extent of damage to Iraqi museums sounds especially risible when coming from the camp that rushed to judgment over Saddam being responsible for 9/11, or Saddam having WMD, or that we've won the war in Iraq, all's fine, story over, go home.
Certainly there was a primae faciae case that Saddam had WMD, but the new evidence suggests that he didn't have just 33 of them, but none whatever.
And the shame of Rumsfeld is that, when the first story of museum looting was on the books, he didn't deny it: he dismissed its significance. His attitude appeared to be: If you've seen one redwood tree, er I mean ancient vase, you've seen them all.
Teresa wrote, "So why do they keep pushing this point? What are they getting out of it? They can't win the argument. They can't even look smart while they're losing it."
For a remarkable earlier example of the same thing, see the 1992 election controversy over how many times Clinton raised taxes as governor. Michael Kinsley nicely eviscerated the Republicans' continued defense of a completely indefensible position, in a couple of essays reprinted in his book Big Babies.
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
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