Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Well, that's just great.

By now I suppose everyone is aware that the great joy of liberation, felt by the Iraqi people as the yoke of tyranny has at last been lifted from their backs and the millstone of Saddam Hussein has been removed from their necks, has turned to that most predictable of human endeavors when joy and lawlessness mix: looting and rampant destruction, which is bad enough when it destroys businesses and economic infrastructure -- infrastructure that, as the WaPo article linked above points out, was left intact after all of the bombing only to be demolished by Iraq's own people -- but becomes downright tragic when hospitals are ransacked and the halls of the Iraq National Museum, a repository of some of the oldest artifacts of human culture, are plundered and their contents either stolen or smashed outright. The human impulse to celebrate through destruction is one of our species's ugliest traits, and given the antics that surround big sporting events in this and other "more civilized" countries, it seems to be pretty universal.

I've tended to think of the war in Iraq as a case of the United States doing the right thing for the wrong reasons (and doing it in ham-handed fashion, to boot). That part of the price has to be yet another bit of excision of our cultural memory -- and by "cultural", I mean the entire human species -- makes me sick at my stomach. By destroying the Museum, the people of Baghdad have exacted a heavy price on every human being for this war.

I'm a bit unsure of whether the American forces could have prevented all of this looting and criminal behavior -- there probably aren't enough troops there to really control as populous a city as Baghdad. But they could have done more than simply sit by and watch, evidently waiting for it to die down and the looters to go to sleep. They could have protected the museum, the hospitals, and some of the more important governmental agencies in Baghdad whose functioning was essential to the daily business of the city, and whose destruction now will just make what I fear will be a rather half-assed exercise in nation-building that much harder. And I must admit that while I've never bought into the occasional left-wing idea that this war was only about oil, I've never abandoned the notion that it was at least in part about oil. The only question was, to what degree. Reading in this article that the only governmental facility in Baghdad to receive significant American protection after the conquest was the Oil Ministry does not bode particularly well.