Conservative Voice

Museum Whine:The latest whine that has surfaced to complain about the liberation of Iraq is the looting of the Iraqi National Museum (see Missing: 5,000 years of history in the Boston Globe, 4/21/2003). There are many reasons this is more whining than a true reason to criticize the liberation.

First, it has been reported that many of the most valuable and important artifacts were actually stored in vaults during the liberation to protect them and therefore, were not looted. Second, without the liberation of Iraq, nobody was ever going to see the stuff anyway. Of course, the main reason not to complain about this is that to protect the museum would have meant leaving Saddam in place. Is a murderous, terrorist dictator really worth protecting to protect historical artifacts? It’s like one commentator’s analogy about the general looting complaints - “Sure, it’s great Hitler is gone, but now we don’t have the Gestapo to keep order around here.”