Can you believe it?

After the international uproar over the looting and destruction of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad on Friday - which got plenty of press by Sunday - we now learn this:

Dateline Tuesday 15 April:

Ancient archive lost in Baghdad library blaze

As flames engulfed Baghdad's National Library [Monday], destroying manuscripts many centuries old, the Pentagon admitted that it had been caught unprepared by the widespread looting of antiquities, despite months of warnings from American archaeologists.

But defence department officials denied accusations by British archaeologists that the US government was succumbing to pressure from private collectors in America to allow plundered Iraqi treasures to be traded on the open market.

Almost nothing remains of the library's archive of tens of thousands of manuscripts, books, and Iraqi newspapers, according to reports from the scene.

It joins a list that already includes the capital's National Museum, one of the world's most important troves of artefacts from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations.

Rumsfeld is a goddamn motherfucker.

An eye-witness account by Robert Fisk is here. And the associated FreeRepublic thread is here. Comments we noted:

• Tsk, tsk, Fisk. Robert, you just don't seem to grasp the historic nature of this operation, it has often been said to destroy a country you must first destroy it's history. I call this a good start.
  
  
• You mean that 1400 years of the records of one oppresive, murderous regime after another has gone up in smoke? That sounds liberating to me as if the burden of centuries of repression is lifted from one's shoulders. Too bad it couldn't have been done symbolically, but maybe this is the only way to do it.
  
  
• You know... I didn't think there was anything in the world that could cause me to rationalize the burning of a library.
  
  But the image of Fisk silhouetted against the flames, howling dismally like a kicked dog over the loss of the sacred written treasures of his beloved Islam, is delectable enough to make me think it *might* be something for which it *would* be worth burning a library...

Oh, and while we're on the subject of wanton destruction, here are some thoughts from Rush Limbaugh (specifically about the museum looting):

• If anything, the Iraqis have engaged in "targeted looting," taking back what the Baath Party and other Saddam thugs have stolen from them in the past three decades.
  
  
• [Soldiers are] not there to "arrest" people. They're there to kill people and break things.
  
  
• I don't buy this "great treasures of Iraqi culture," anyway. Saddam ruined their culture.
  
  
• It's also possible that the media simply seeks to find fault in anything the government does - that is, when Republicans are in power.
  
  
• As I told many of you e-mailers who objected to my statement that Iraq has no culture: it was looted and destroyed by Saddam these past 30 years.

Every statement by Limbaugh is False.

This is the ultimate triumph of anti-intellectualism.

Richard Hofstadter wrote about this phenomenon 40 years ago, but surely he didn't think it would get this bad.

ADDENDUM: Not to be outdone, Jonathan Foreman writes this in the New York Post: (excerpt, emphasis added)

Yes, even the most benign and directed looting can quickly turn ugly - and some of it is indeed quite awful (obviously, the looting of the National Museum and Library is a tragedy). Still, you can surely forgive the people of Baghdad for taking advantage of the disappearance of a brutal and oppressive state to (in the words of Col. Willie Williams) "take back some of what had been stolen from them."

For the first time in three decades, they are breathing the fresh air of freedom. They may take their new liberty too far. But there's definitely something creepy and cruel about the cry for order. And it's to the credit of the U.S. Army that it's not leaping to defend the possessions and privileges of the old regime.

The commentary above was linked to by Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review over at The Corner, who agreed with the "creepy and cruel" characterization and thought the fuss was the result of the "media's hysterical looting coverage".


posted by Quiddity at 4/15/2003 01:48:00 AM