Kinda feel bad for the Iraq Musuem?

Some people think it was a planned attack. The looters were organized.... they said the looters went straight for the most valuable items(targeted items) where normal people had little knowledge of.

 

Excape, you have a few elements of the story right, but you've put them together like a Picasso painting.

Try again.

 

$$$$$$$$$$

 

Well there is some speculation that it was more planned than just widespread looting.

 

Wait - looting artifacts is good for the world economy, no?

The items will be purchased by some people for lots of $ instead of sitting in a stuffy musuem. So rich people will spend cash for them, cash that is sent back into the underground economy, but its still spent.

So it a small part of pulling the world out of global recession - awarding those capitalists with daring and initiative. That's good, no?

Then these rich folk will have parties to show off their new "treasures", which will require lots more champagne and caviar and foie gras.

So dammit, LiveFreeorDie was right - the French are winning this one!

 

This is the most overblown story of the war. These items are priceless when sitting in a museum but worthless when stolen. It's not like you can go out and sell these products on eBay. All these artifacts will turn up soon, when the idiot looters realize their mistake.

 

99.9% of artifacts stolen during Gulf War I have not been recovered.

 

You obviously don't know anything about
any of this ( not surprising because, as I recall,
you called what was stolen "things"):

These "items" are worth a lot of money to
people who have...a lot of money and just
want to have them in their home.

Argue with me if you wish, but I know this
market very, very well.

 

If there is no resale value on the open market then the "things" are worthless. 99.99% of art investors will have nothing to do with stolen products and you cannot even market these things to this group. Thus, they are worthless. The TV in your living room has value because you can resell it to your neighbors. The fact is that much of this stuff were replicas as Saddam has been selling off the real deal for over a decade. It was also an inside job:

1. Museum employees could evacuate artifacts in 24 hours.

2. Pentagon said no protection would be forthcoming prior to U.S. entering Baghdad so Museum curators knew.

3. Looters had keys.

4. Do the math.

 

Of course, but Ian doesn't care about any of this except how it relates to the USA. It's just an American PR issue

 

There was no place to go, what with the city under siege. Assuming your rather optimistic 24 hour deadline holds up -

Where did you read this?

"Give us the keys or we'll kill you" is how I read the conversation went.

Also, if it's an inside job, running to the Army and asking for protection is kind of, well, counterproductive.

I will if you will.

This "inside job" is CYA drivel. There are pictures of looters, the Library was burnt down afterwards - the military could have prevented nearly all of the damage, and most of the theft. They didn't.

If the cult could just admit that the junta occasionally makes mistakes...but then, if they could, they wouldn't be a cult, and there wouldn't be a junta, so there you go.

 

Will they turn up before or after we find bin Laden and Hussein?

 

Oh yeah, it's not like they didn't have FOURTEEN MONTHS advance warning that Baghdad would be invaded. I don't want to shock you here, but this was not a surprise attack.

 

...but I thought Bush hadn't made up his mind until...I thought if Saddam destroyed his WMD then....

Actually, I agree. Bush decided to invade Iraq long before Karl Rove brought it up in August of 2002. There was no reason for it, of course, and everything anyone in the administration said about Iraq from March 2002 onward has been a total lie, but that's okay. We got a crowd of dozens flown in from Washington to cheer a statue falling over, so it was all worth it.

Of course, how Baghdad museum curators were supposed to know top secret intentions kept from the freaking Security Council, let alone Congress and the American people, is beyond me.

 

On the plus side, my new antique Gilgamesh statue will look stunning on my end table.

 

Sigfile.