The Museum in Bagdad

As I mentioned below, I have parted ways with the talk radio broadcast locally. One of the areas of cleavage was the looting of the Bagdad museum. Unlike the anti-intellectuals on the airwaves, I took the loss of cultural treasures seriously. I was suspicous of the reports of the damage, and suspected that stolen artifacts would turn up quickly as the looters converted the artifacts into cash. I had been looking out for Victor Davis Hanson's take on the issue, because as a classicist he would not blow off the loss of antiquites. He writes, "the "178,000" destroyed priceless icons are slowly being downsized to a few hundred — and were mostly lost through the complicity of the Baathists themselves." As I had suspected, an inside job. Hanson has it all on this issue, as far as I am concerned. An educated man, an expert in a related field able to comment intelligently on the issue of preservation, and pro-war. Someone in his position is able to make a reasonable attempt to balance competing goods.