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Looters Ransack Baghdad's Antiquities Museum
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By Hassan Hafidh

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Looters have sacked Baghdad's antiquities museum, plundering treasures dating back thousands of years to the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia, museum staff said on Saturday.

They blamed U.S. troops for not protecting the treasures.

Surveying the littered glass wreckage of display cases and pottery shards at the Iraqi National Museum on Saturday, deputy director Nabhal Amin wept and told Reuters: "They have looted or destroyed 170,000 items of antiquity dating back thousands of years...They were worth billions of dollars."

She blamed U.S. troops, who have controlled Baghdad since the collapse of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s rule on Wednesday, for failing to heed appeals from museum staff to protect it from looters who moved in to the building on Friday.

"The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened," she said. "I hold the American troops responsible for what happened to this museum."

The looters broke into rooms that were built like bank vaults with huge steel doors. The museum grounds were full of smashed doors, windows and littered with office paperwork and books.

"We know people are hungry but what are they going to do with these antiquities," said Muhsen Kadhim, a museum guard for the last 30 years but who said he was overwhelmed by the number of looters.

"As soon as I saw the American troops near the museum, I asked them to protect it but the second day looters came and robbed or destroyed all the antiquities," he said.

ARMED GUARDS

Amin told four of the museum guards to carry guns and protect what remained.

Some of the museum's artifacts had been moved into storage to avoid a repeat of damage to other antiquities during the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites).

It houses items from ancient Babylon and Nineveh, Sumerian statues, Assyrian reliefs and 5,000-year-old tablets bearing some of the earliest known writing. There are also gold and silver helmets and cups from the Ur cemetery.

The museum was only opened to the public six months ago after shutting down at the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War. It survived air strikes on Baghdad in 1991 and again was almost unscathed by attacks on the capital by U.S.-led forces.

Iraq (news - web sites), a cradle of civilization long before the empires of Egypt, Greece or Rome, was home to dynasties that created agriculture and writing and built the cities of Nineveh, Nimrud and Babylon -- site of Nebuchadnezzar's Hanging Gardens.

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10 Iraqis Killed, 100 Wounded As US Fires On Crowd
16.04.2003 [02:01]


United States troops opened fire on a crowd hostile to the new pro-US governor in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Tuesday, killing at least 10 people and injuring as many as 100, said witnesses and doctors.
The incident overshadowed the start of US-brokered talks aimed at sketching out a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq and was sure to ignite anti-US sentiment sparked in protests in Baghdad and at the talks in the southern city of Nasiriyah.
Witnesses reported that US troops had fired into a crowd that was becoming increasingly hostile towards the new governor in the northern oil city, Mashaan al-Juburi, as he was making a pro-US speech.
"There are perhaps 100 wounded and 10 to 12 dead," said Dr Ayad al-Ramadhani at the city hospital.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, said it was not yet prepared to declare victory after nearly four weeks of war on Iraq, but US commanders expressed hope the main stage of hostilities was over with the fall of Saddam's home town of Tikrit on Monday.
The commander of a 16 000-strong Iraqi military unit surrendered control of an area of western Iraq extending to the Syrian border, after US central command said it was continuing to consolidate its position.
Shi'ites boycotting talks
US officials switched their focus to neighbouring Syria, alleging that Damascus has been developing weapons of mass destruction, prompting appeals for calm from the United Nations and Arab and European governments.
The US-sponsored meeting in Nasiriyah is the first since the launch of the war on March 20 and was billed as a major step forward in the search for a new Iraqi leadership.
But the man tipped to become Iraq's next leader, Ahmad Chalabi, head of the US-backed Iraqi national congress, was not due to attend.
Iraq's leading Shi'ite Muslim opposition group was also boycotting the talks, amid distrust with the US role and division about who should lead Iraq.
Chalabi, who has insisted he wa not a candidate for a post in the interim administration to be run by retired US general Jay Garner, planned to send a representative.
Dozens of representatives from Iraq's fractious mix of ethnic, tribal and opposition groups, including those formerly in exile, were said to have been invited although no official list was given.
The New York Times quoted Garner as saying his mission to rebuild Iraq's political structures would be messy and contentious.
His fears appeared justified as the talks in the Shi'ite bastion sparked a demonstration estimated by journalists to number about 20 000 people, led by religious figures.
"Yes to freedom... Yes to Islam... No to America, No to Saddam," the crowd chanted in the centre of Nasiriyah.
The meeting came against a backdrop of renewed differences across the Atlantic, this time about Syria.
US officials have accused the regime of President Bashar al-Assad of state terrorism, developing weapons of mass destruction and harbouring fugitive Iraqi officials.
US secretary of state Colin Powell said: "We will examine possible measures of a diplomatic, economic or other nature as we move forward."
White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer branded Syria a terrorist state, while defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed Syria had carried out a chemical weapons test "over the past 12, 15 months".
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon joined the offensive, describing Assad as "dangerous," and urging Washington to put "very heavy... political and economic pressure" on Syria.
'Israel has the weapons'
But Syria's ambassador to the United Nations denied the allegations, accusing Washington of double standards in its support for Israel, the strongest military power in the Middle East.
"We don't have weapons of mass destruction," Rostom al-Zoubi said in an interview with CNN, describing the US charges as "baseless".
"It is Israel, which has a big arsenal of weapons of mass destruction."
European Union foreign ministers called on Washington to tone down its rhetoric.
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said on Monday: "What we need now is to cool off the situation, not to increase the tension, we have enough tensions in the region... not to create more."
The Arab League and the Egyptian government also condemned the accusations, while UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that statements directed at Syria could destabilise the whole Middle East.

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Did Bush and his SLAVE , Colin Powel went to war for oil? ----->NIGERIAN-KIND.

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This is one reason why the black race will never advance or succeed in this world at least economically...Because people like you are fixated with slavery and white man's burden. In your reasoning, blacks in America cannot be republican or conservative but librals, any deviation is seen as a slave and his master. You never get a over it, the blame theory while black children from different nations are on TV begging for food and cow milk.

Colin Powel has been called all sorts of names, from Uncle Tom, slave, N word, and house N. Quite Amazing, considering he holds the second highest position in President Bush.. Sometimes I wonder if most of these responses comes from juvenile or adults.

Hail Biafra


[ May 23, 2003, 02:28 PM: Message edited by: Waypoint1Biafra ]

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What is the open question is how many stocks they had, if any, and if they had any, where did they go? And if they didn't have any, then why wasn't that known beforehand?

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Why is the foreign policy nanny acting like a foreign policy ninny?

Hitting the morning shows to do damage control after David Kay's scalding admission that we flew to war on a false premise, Condi Rice made a tyro error. She mirrored.

Saddam, she told Matt Lauer, had secretively refused to account for missing stockpiles of botulinum toxin and anthrax, even though he knew he would face serious consequences: "I don't know how you could have come to any other conclusion but that he had weapons of mass destruction."

A conservative, ice-skating Brahms aficionada from Birmingham had assumed that a homicidal, grenade-fishing Sinatra aficionado from Tikrit reasoned just like her.

Bush officials, awash in the vice president's Hobbesian gloom, deduced that Saddam would not hide if he had nothing to hide. Even after all their talk about a Bernard Lewis clash of civilizations and a battle of good versus evil, they still projected a Western mind-set on Saddam.

Ms. Rice argued that the U.S. was right to conclude that Saddam had W.M.D. and attack him because the dictator was not behaving rationally. But why did she think someone President Bush deemed "a madman" would behave rationally?

Cheney & Company were so consumed with puffing the intelligence to try to connect Saddam with 9/11, Al Qaeda and nuclear material, they failed to challenge basic assumptions.

The closer the inspectors got to the truth that Iraq didn't have weapons, the more the Bush hawks asserted that only war would uncover weapons. Their threats to Saddam made him bluff that he had the weapons that they said he had.

"Most intelligence failures are about missing something happening," said a former Bush official. "What's so bizarre about this is, they thought something was happening that wasn't. This is right up there with Pearl Harbor and Bay of Pigs."

Even Paul Wolfowitz observed last May that it was important not to assume that foes like Saddam "will be rational according to our definition of what is rational." Interviewed by Sam Tanenhaus for Vanity Fair, Mr. Wolfowitz said bad intelligence came from mirror imaging — assuming people would behave like us: "The kind of mistake that, in a sense, I think we made implicitly in assuming that anyone who was intelligent enough to fly an airplane wouldn't commit suicide with it."

Saddam's old lieutenants have said that the dictator did not admit his paucity of weapons because he wanted his Arab neighbors to see him as a great leader and he hoped to deter America from war.

Jerrold Post, a former C.I.A. psychological profiler who calls Saddam messianic but not irrational, speculates that he may have built a Potemkin arsenal after his conventional arsenal was decimated in the first Persian Gulf war. "If he came across as an impotent leader capitulating to the West," Dr. Post said, "he might have been pushed out of power or killed."

Besides, according to Dr. Kay, Saddam was both finagling and finagled. "Did he really think he had the stuff because scientists were scared to tell him he didn't?" wondered a G.O.P. foreign policy expert.

Saddam was isolated. And the Bush hawks wanted to isolate themselves from less-paranoid allies. They had come into office itching to replay the '91 war and try out their democracy domino theory in the Middle East — mirror imaging writ large. They grabbed 9/11 as an opening, yanked power away from Colin Powell and persuaded the popular diplomat to compromise his integrity by touting sketchy evidence at the U.N., with the puppet Tenet as his wingman.

The moral of Vietnam was supposed to be that we would never again go to war without understanding the culture of our antagonists, or exaggerate their threat to us.

Some of those involved in running the '91 Iraq war think the U.S. should cut its losses, forget about Iowa-style caucuses (mirroring again), get the U.N. in there and let Kofi Annan and the Iraqi Governing Council negotiate with Ayatollah Sistani, who won't talk to the U.S. anyway.

The White House will have a lot of explaining to do if Iraq exchanges one form of dictatorship for another, or if it takes on a fundamentalist Islamic cast that sets Iraqi women's rights back 40 years.

"These guys created the exact can of worms we tried to avoid," said a Bush 41 official. "Guess what? Baghdad is ours."


E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

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Asked if he would have recommended an invasion knowing Iraq had no prohibited weapons, Powell replied: "I don't know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world." He said the "absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer you get." --- Washington Post 3 February 2004.

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