Two Cultural Advisers From The Bush Administration Resign Over Iraq Museum Looting

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.nbc6.net/news/2120977/detail.html

Advisers: U.S. Military Should Have Protected Antiquities
Reuters

POSTED: 7:40 p.m. EDT April 17, 2003
UPDATED: 7:42 p.m. EDT April 17, 2003

Email This Story | Print This Story
Sign Up for Breaking News Alerts


WASHINGTON -- Two cultural advisers to the Bush administration have resigned in protest over the failure of United States forces to prevent the wholesale looting of priceless treasures from Baghdad's antiquities museum.

Martin Sullivan, who chaired the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for eight years, and panel member Gary Vikan said they resigned because the U.S. military had had advance warning of the danger to Iraq's historical treasures.

"We certainly know the value of oil but we certainly don't know the value of historical artifacts," Vikan, director of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, told Reuters Thursday.

At the start of the United States-led campaign against Iraq, military forces quickly secured valuable oil fields.

Baghdad's museums, galleries and libraries are empty shells, destroyed in a wave of looting that erupted as U.S.-led forces ended Saddam Hussein's rule last week, although antiquities experts have said they were given assurances months ago from U.S. military planners that Iraq's historic artifacts and sites would be protected by occupying forces.

"It didn't have to happen," Sullivan told Reuters. "In a pre-emptive war that's the kind of thing you should have planned for." Sullivan sent his letter of resignation earlier this week.

[Tom Joad]

1. news from four years ago.

[WCGreen]

2. Late Late Breaking News....

[phaseolus]

3. I remember when this was first reported

...there were anonymous sources among antiquities collectors who had interesting things to say to journalists. In those circles, there have always been dealers trading in illegally looted and stolen items. These dodgy dealers told their prospective clients even before Bush started his little caper that there would be treasures coming onto the market from Iraq.

I'm guessing that corrupt Iraqis and corrupt Americans planned much of the looting well before the invasion, and we'll probably never learn the whole story...

[KoKo]

4. "Private Collectors" have all the loot now. They worked with the Bushies on

"Privatization of Antiquities." Like that guy in the James Bond Movies with the "Persian Cat" who "had it all" and sought to "control it all."

[orleans]

5. okay, i give up: WHERE ARE THEY NOW? n/t

[CBHagman]

6. There have been articles recently on the libraries.

Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have had recent arts section features on the libraries of Iraq -- and the misery and danger faced by the librarians. On top of all the bloodshed and warfare, which will affect the country for decades and perhaps centuries to come, the U.S. invasion has meant the cultural and archaeological losses on a scale that perhaps has not yet been determined.

The Post article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/06/AR2007040602196.html

After the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, looters pillaged and burned the library. Now, on the brink of the fourth anniversary of Saddam Hussein's fall, and several weeks into a new security offensive, Eskander and his staff are struggling to preserve the fragments of Iraq's ancient heritage at a place he calls the "historical memory of the country."

"What makes a Kurd or a Sunni or a Shia have something in common is a national library," he said. "It is where the national identity of a country begins."

The library today is humming with young employees. Religion and politics are checked at the door. But the same forces fracturing Iraq are slowing the library's progress: violence, bureaucracy, sectarianism, political rivalries and a lack of basic services.