One of the reasons the story about antiquities has gone so far and lasted so long is because it is the one story that upper middle class Americans can relate to. Everything else is looting and shooting. We have no idea what the tone is in Iraq because all we hear are stories about the Iraqi on the street. But what of the Iraqi off the street? What about the Iraqi government functionary who hates his job but shrugs his shoulders? What kind of middle class functions in Iraq?
It has been said that the wealth of oil in Iraq will lead it further from democracy. The argument is that digging wealth out of the ground and selling it on the open market requires a lot less middle class give and take. People don't have to discipline themselves and comport themselves in professional ways. You want oil? You get oil. You don't care about my attitude. Iraq may be destined to remain incompatible with Service Economy.
The cruel irony of religious freedom is that once Americans rebuild the civil infrastructure of that nation, Iraqis will be free to thank Allah for it. I heard a quote from a soldier just north of Basra in the early going, which said something to the effect that he'd only been there a week and he already hated those ingrates. It is a sentiment we are bound to hear again and again. And yet I doubt that there will be much sting in our colonial whip. Our troops are, much to the consternation of many loopy conservatives, politically correct, diverse and otherwise respectful sorts of warriors, crankiness aside. We are not calling them godless monkeys.
For all the talk of peace at any cost, I have yet to see any real rapproachment with the Iraqi people as equals and as brothers. I want to see this from any quarter and I hope to see it soon. Then again, I expected that American pacifists would put their dollars into charitable relief organizations. Instead, it seemed that they put together a political coalition with ANSWER, a strange and often repulsive bedfellow. I will be looking forward to hearing from the bleating anthropologists and archaologists and other museum buffs of their upcoming foreign exchange programs, and scholarships for Iraqi students. Those who have called for and gotten the resignation of Martin Sullivan needn't be proud. I am of the opinion that everything worth knowing:
Among the priceless treasures missing are the 5,000-year-old Vase of Uruk and the Harp of Ur. The bronze Statue of Basitki from the Akkadian kingdom is also gone, somehow hauled out of the museum despite its huge weight.
would have been stolen one way or another. Further it is unclear to me what the average Iraqi cares about such treasures. They are certainly not Islamic. They very well may have been destroyed with the same abandon as the great totems of Afghanistan were by the Taliban. All we know is that it was an inside job.
Until such time as we can be convinced that Shiapundit is a CIA plant, I trust those words.