From: "Mark Hessey" 

"Judy Folkenberg"  wrote: I
merely saying efforts should be made to protect a country's cultural
artifacts...efforts should be made to make them a high priority--over gold
bars, over oil.  Surely you can agree with that?

I don't disagree with that in principle. However, I still don't believe it
was prudent to send a small detail out to the museum while the outcome of
securing Baghdad was not necessarily a given. I'm not buying into the
wailing protests about protecting the oil ministry over the museum either,
from the various reports I read at the time many were of that ilk -
bringing up the museum and carping on the ministries being
"guarded" instead. But other sources indicated that a still shot
of a tank merely passing by any given building can be captioned at will to
tell a different story. In other words I doubt very much any special extra
effort went to guarding an oil ministry building, there were no downside
consequences as outlined below:

Too, securing the oil heads in the south is in a different realm of the
battle time-line. i.e. that they were protected does not equate to an
"either the oil or the artifacts" situation either. The purpose
there was two-fold, future economics as well as environmental
considerations - both for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

Your earlier comment: "Only the dimwits at the upper levels of the
miliary seem devoid of all soul and hell bent on not lifting a finger to
protect a nation's history." also strikes me as an interesting
condemnation of the US government that would be more appropriately
attributed to the Saddam regime - a regime hell bent on destroying the most
precious history of all - the Garden of Eden, part of the almost totally
decimated Marshlands. The future of the ecological balance in that region
is by no means assured, but the scientists are hopeful they can bring it
back - another 12 years of impotent UN resolutions would have allowed
Saddam to finish off the cradle of civilization once and for all and
probably would have also resulted in countless precious metal artifacts
being melted down to make toilet fixtures in palaces.

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