I understand what Deb is attempting to say. Don't
believe the jaded, opportunistic, American media.
Now that might be entirely valid if one only read the
American news sources. Some of us read the press from
many countries on sensitive subjects and formulate
opinions based on the "press releases" of countless
sources.
Will we know all parts of what happened? No. An
eyewitness to an event can't know everything that
happened front end and back as well as the history and
evidentiary sieving will provide. But there's a hell
of a lot of stuff out there to be had that lead up to
this war, and it wasn't just the boogie monster under
the bed. Some of us have been reading the events that
lead up to it with fervor and general disgust.
Be that as it may, the museum WAS looted.
Museum professionals DID go to the US before and ask
to have protections in place to preclude what
happened.
The US and other "allies" have heretofore taken
measures, even in war time, to protect the treasures
of the world.
That DIDN'T happen this time.
Great artifacts were forever lost.
Please don't let your need to defend America attempt
to defend the indefensible.
You can try to rationalize/justify this with:
o A dictator was deposed (we helped to put him into
office years ago).
o We stopped the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction (but none have yet been found, and these
WMD exist in many other nations we're NOT going
after).
o We rescued some very oppressed people (who have
promptly told us to pack up our jaybird behinds and
get out of Dodge).
But we used our superior powers to wage war on a
first-strike basis upon a third world nation and,
while doing so abrogated our responsibilities as
self-perceived "superior" beings and yet we willfully
allowed the destruction of treasures entrusted to us
by countless precedent generations. We did not have
the common decency to protect the treasures that
belong to our children's children's children's
children. We were in such a hurry to prove we were
militarily superior that we exposed our collective
arrogance and ignorance and sacrificed things that can
never be replaced.
What is done is done. No Magic Rub eraser can remove
this blight, and no amount of yes buts can sanitize
the foul odor left behind.
Now the choices are two:
1. To assist in the recovery and restoration of what
has and will come back and can be repaired.
2. To learn from this episode and lobby for efforts
to ensure that mechanisms are put in place that ensure
this kind of travesty does not occur at the hands of
the Americans again. We may not be able to stop war,
but we can lobby our "leaders" to pass legislation
and/or sign treatises that compel our military to use
extreme caution when it comes to the legacy we should
be protecting.
All these current American disavowals and dismissals
of what transpired because things are now coming back
and the numbers of items lost are being reduced daily
sound as though they were scripted by Baghdad Bob
himself!
Deb said
> You know, I don't think I've seen one message in the
> whole looting
> discussion
> about how the press has really distorted this whole
> issue. Yet people on
> this
> list - who are probably better educated than 99% of
> the world's population -
> are quick to belive what they read and slam the US
> and the troops for first
> not
> protecting the museum adequately and then for trying
> to gloss over the whole
> incident.
>
> Could it be that the press - to use a quaint
> Southern expression - is
> "letting
> its mockingbird mouth get ahead of its jaybird
> behind"? (Sanitized for
> propriety's sake. ;)
>
> I live in the Washington, DC area and during the
> sniper attacks of last
> year,
> got a very eye-opening view of how quickly the press
> is to jump on a little
> fact, irregardless of its significance or validity,
> and make a full-blown
> story
> out of it. I had just been laid off so needless to
> say I wasn't sleeping
> well
> and spent many nights flipping channels. After one
> attack, the vehicle
> description of the "sniper van" literally changed
> every hour. The main
> suspect
> vehicles for the whole incident were a white box
> truck or a white cargo van.
> For this shooting, it started out that way, then
> turned to a cream colored
> van,
> then a cream colored van with right tail light out,
> then a cream colored van
> with the left tail light out, then it was a cream
> colored van with just a
> tail
> light out but also keep looking for that box truck
> and that ubiquitious
> white
> cargo van. When the sniper was finally caught, he
> was in a blue Chevy
> hatchback. Yet the press had everyone in the area
> practically in a panic
> every
> time they saw a white cargo van, one of the most
> common vehicles on the
> road.
>
> During the war, the press was criticized for
> reporting just the war and
> doing
> very little commentating on it. Wow, for once they
> were just doing their
> jobs.
> It's kind of hard to spin information if you are on
> the battlefield and
> getting
> shot at and have strict controls on what you are
> allowed to say. But now it
> seems like the press is more than making up for it
> by latching on to any
> little
> story and running with it. The US press is very
> liberal as a whole and
> doesn't
> like Bush, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld or getting into this
> war but rallied around
> the
> troops like everyone else. Now the main fighting is
> over and they are back
> to
> picking on the troops, and the whole Bush
> administration. I'm sure some of
> it
> is warrented like the lack of planning for looting.
> But I'm really skeptical
> about how blown off UNESCO experts were or how
> little the troops did to stop
> the looting. Given that in the sniper case, a blue
> Chevy hatchback was
> turned
> into a white box truck, cargo van and cream colored
> van with a tail light
> out,
> I'm not surprised to hear that the Iraqi museum went
> from completely
> stripped
> to "Oh, sorry, we forgot we put all these artifacts
> down here. We really
> only
> lost about 30 or 40." Loosing artifacts is tragic,
> don't get me wrong, but
> it's
> a far cry from a bunch of troops sitting on their
> duffs while people
> blithely
> walked in and carted off 4000 years of history.
>
> So people, please. Don't jump to conclusions about
> what is in the press.
> Like
> most major happenings, the whole truth rarely comes
> out until many years
> afterwards when it can be looked at objectively from
> all angles. Right now,
> we're too close to the entire war to really
> understand what happened, what
> went
> wrong and the major impacts of it and probably won't
> be in a position to
> understand it for years to come.
>
> Deb
>
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