In Addition to Which, They'll Probably Need New Docents

I HAVE A FEELING I'm about to make a lot of people mad. I don't want to, you understand, but there's something I've had on my mind, and I think it'll make a bunch of folks angry. Maybe not so much angry, as horrified. Yeah, that's it, horrified and disbelieving. Aghast; agog. They'll gasp, stagger back, clutch their chests, and pinwheel their arms for balance, all the while looking around for someone to confirm their indignation. As I said, I'm not going for this reaction, but if that's the way it is, that's the way it is. So. Here we go.

I don't give a rat's crack about what has or hasn't happened to some damn museum in Iraq.

I'll pause here to allow readers to be held up and fanned by stouter relatives, and others to complete their swoons, back of the hand pressed to foreheads, muttering, "My salts, my salts . . ."

Everyone all right? Good.

First of all, I don't know about you, but I didn't know the place had a museum. If they did, what was the big draw, the torture exhibit? ("See, Bobby? In the old days, the secret police didn't have metal clips and electricity, so they used to just cut things off with knives." "Wow, I bet that really hurt." "Right you are, son, and took up a lot of extra time doing it, too. Hey, maybe we can play a joke on Mom with something from the gift shop.")

Of course, nothing in the National Museum of Iraq was a big draw, or any draw at all, because, as Louise Witt writes in Salon, it "had been closed to the public for years." But let's stipulate this: Saddam and his guys built a museum, and after coalition forces took over the country, lots of Iraqis looted it. Virtually all of them were disappointed, too, because it was loaded with stuff that was useless to regular people looking for something to sit on or eat, but chock full of things valuable to--I don't know, who? Collectors? Curators? Guys like Robert Wagner in "It Takes A Thief"?

Now, am I happy the joint was hit? No, but what are the priorities in the middle of a war? Save soldiers or clay pots? You might say, let's worry about winning the war and saving our guys. But you'd be wrong. At least according to some of the terrific folks Witt interviewed.

As she writes, on January 24 of this year, McGuire Gibson, a professor at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, met with Pentagon officials to tell them how the U.S. military could protect this stuff in case of war. As McGuire told her, "I pointed to the museum's location on a map of Baghdad and said, 'It's right here.' I asked them to make assurances that they'd make efforts to prevent looting, and they said they would. I thought we had assurances, but they didn't pan out." To be honest, I have to give the Pentagon ten points right off the bat for not just saying to the guy, "Okay, you've got to get out of here immediately."

It gets better. (And how could it not?) Last October, reports Witt, Ashton Hawkins, the president of the American Council for Cultural Policy, wrote an article for the Washington Post with Maxwell L. Anderson, president of the American Association of Museum Art Directors. (Are you catching these monikers, by the way? "McGuire" Gibson, "Ashton" Hawkins, "Maxwell" Anderson? Let me ask you something: Do you think guys like this are born with those names and decide they might as well do something artsy, or do you think they become intellectuals first and then realize they could use a dumb name to go with it?)

Anyway, in the article concerning what was, at the time, the possibility of war, they wrote, "We should not allow our primary objectives in this region to overshadow our cultural responsibilities." Okay, how about this: We should not only allow our objectives to overshadow culture, we should insist on it.

Are these people crazy? Like foxes. Ms. Witt writes, "Some archeological and art experts think that the sack of Baghdad may be a result of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's decision not to commit more ground forces." Get it? And you thought you were an armchair general. Turns out that the loss of whatever it was that was taken is, according to a slew of guys with second names for first names, simply due to a bad war plan. Gee, I thought it was a brilliant and miraculously well-executed plan, but what do I know? Clearly not as much as Ashton and Maxwell.