--- "Miller, Jeffrey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Do you think they'd take that deal? Because by > God > > you talk like you think they would. > > I'm merely pointing out the lack of perspective in > saying that the loss of "only" 33 major artifacts > and "only" 3,000 "minor" artifacts is nothing to be > concerned with. I don't understand how that equates > to burying the children of Iraq alive. :) > > -j-
Because that's where they were a little while ago. We just dug up a mass grave with hundreds of children in it, _buried alive_ by the Hussein regime. I'm not making this stuff up. Now, I don't happen to believe that most of the losses at the Museum had _anything_ to do with the invasion. The Ba'ath regime had been plundering that country for a generation. They appointed Ba'ath party flunkies to run the museum. Why anyone was foolish enough to think that they were telling the truth - that the museum had been looted after the invasion - completely escapes me. But let's suppose it was. Let's suppose that the invasion was the trigger for looting the museum. So what? I mean, really, so what? Given the two alternatives, which one was preferable? Now we know that the museum _wasn't_ plundered. Despite the hysterical claims of many people - no few of them on this list - at most, a small amount of its collection was stolen. Something which, may I point out, I said was probably the case _as soon as reports of the thefts came out_. Compared to what the invasion stopped, so what? The only reason this is an issue at all is that people were so desperate to believe bad things of Americans in general and Bush in particular that they credulously grabbed onto this story as something they could use to diminish an astonishing achievement. Now, even that has been taken away, and what we're seeing is the remarkable extent to which the war's opponents were practicing nothing more nor less than the politics of bad faith - defending a tyrant simply for their own spite and domestic political battles. So I return to my question about credibility. All the people who talked about the looting of the Museum as a cultural catastrophe akin to destroying the Louvre or the Smithsonian or what have you - given their dismal record, when do we stop listening to them entirely? ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
