True enough the British looted most places they went pretty systematically. The upside of that this paradoxiaclly makes possibleis the kind of thing reported in this story today: "The British Museum has announced a taskforce of conservators and curators, funded by an anonymous private donor, to go to the rescue of Iraq's ravaged museums."

The major tragedy in all this isn't so much the big monuments and treasures, it's the records preserved and recovered over generations of painstaking archeology, for example the tablets which provided a record of all kinds of things in the vanished past.

I suppose what this shows is that, when it comes to being imperialists, the Americans aren't very good at the skills involved. I just hope they don't get too practiced at this kind of thing.

Here's a story which sums up the whole thing pretty well: "'The collection lies in ruins, objects from a long, rich past in smithereens'"

"This is a tragedy with echoes of past catastrophes: the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258, and the fifth-century destruction of the library of Alexandria. For the loss is not just Iraq's but ours, too."