The loss of the museum

I still believe it's a good thing that the people of Iraq have been liberated from a brutal dictatorship. But I also believe it should have been possible to do this without losing the entire contents of the National Museum of Iraq.

It's been compared with the loss of the Library of Alexandria

While I don't know all the facts, there's some evidence that Donald Rumsfeld is personally responsible for this; it was his idea to have only just enough troops to defeat the small proportion of the Iraqi military that might fight back, and not nearly enough to maintain order once Saddam's regime collapsed.

Rumsfeld blames the messenger, and idiotically accuses TV of showing the same woman taking the same vase over and over. Truth is, like a depressing proportion of militarists throughout history, he's a total bloody philistine; he couldn't care less about the irreplaceble archeological treasures lost. Nothing, but nothing matters more than short term military gains.

"Who cares about a few rocks?", said one right-wing 'usual suspect' on Pyramid Online, typifying the neo-conservative attitude. I suspect a few on the right-wing lunatic fringe even dislike museums on principle, seeing them as statist, socialist institutions, and believe the place for irreplacable archeological artefacts is the hands of wealthy individual collectors.

I wonder how these fools would feel if a mob destroyed the last surviving copies of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" and Heinlein's "Starship Troopers"?

Scott is also very angry about this.