It might be easier to take you at least a little bit seriously, Hubster, if you didn't wear your ignorance like a badge of honor. Have you ever considered doing some fact checking before posting your pronouncements?

Some of the artifacts were found to have been safely hidden, but a huge number were, in fact, stolen, and many will probably never be recovered. It is a huge loss, not only for Iraq, but for history as well.

http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/04/040408.looting.shtml

"A year after the looting of the Iraqi National Museum, archaeologists at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute continue to track missing artifacts. Their work has played a pivotal role in helping recover items stolen from the museum in Baghdad between April 9 and 11, 2003.

'This event provoked great outrage around the world and attracted new attention by both media and the public on the Mesopotamian civilization, Iraq's cultural heritage,' said Oriental Institute Research Associate Clemens Reichel. Reichel initiated a Web-accessible database to document the destruction and theft of artifacts last April, following the museum's looting...

...Press reports following the museum looting last April initially had suggested a total loss of the museum's collection - about 170,000 registered objects.

'Such reports fortunately turned out to be exaggerations; thanks to the foresight of the museum staff, a lot of objects had been stored away in safe locations before the outbreak of hostilities,' Reichel explained...

...As the year developed after the looting, reports both highlighted the damage and confused the issue. Some news outlets began to speak of 'only 40' objects being taken from the museum.

Those reports, said Reichel, 'only referred to objects on display in the gallery but omitted any reference to objects stolen from the storerooms and magazines of the museum. The losses encountered there were sizeable, though even now it remains difficult to put an exact figure on it.'

The destruction of the archives that recorded information about the museum holdings complicated the job of totaling the loss. 'By fall 2003, the figures quoted by Donny George, director of the Iraq Museum, and Col. Matthew Bogdanos, (U.S. Marine Corps) who led a U.S. team investigating the museum looting last year, put the number of objects stolen at over 10,000. This figure, however, has recently been revised by George to about 15,000 pieces, indicating this tally is far from final at this point,' Reichel said."