Iraq and History
Mar. 19th, 2007 07:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brdgtOn the anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, some history related news stories...
Assessing the losses to Iraq's heritage
Source: AFP (3-15-07)
CAIRO -- Archaeology in Iraq these days, explains the new caretaker of the country's 5,000-year-old heritage, is less about making new discoveries than finding out what has already been stolen.
"We need a government that takes responsibility for protecting the monuments of all Iraqis," antiquities director Abbas Ali al-Hussainy told AFP in an interview during a recent visit to Cairo.
"Right now we need to take measures to figure out where the sites are and know the extent of the damage and looting at each one," said the slight, bespectacled man.
The pillaging of the Iraqi National Museum in the immediate aftermath of Baghdad's fall in April 2003 shocked the world.
But while many of those antiquities have since been recovered, looting has taken off in the archaeological sites scattered around the perilous countryside.
The stuff of history, Iraq War's statistics are elusive
Source: Washington Post (3-19-07)
The U.S. war in Iraq enters its fifth year today. That, and 3,197 U.S. military deaths reported by the Pentagon as of 10 a.m. Friday, are among the few numerical certainties in a conflict characterized from the start by confusion and misuse of key data.
In the fog of modern counterinsurgency warfare, statistics have replaced conquered territory as measures of success. Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld once dismissed questions about the level of combat-ready Iraqi troops by saying that numbers are only numbers and "misleading" as to the truth, but the Bush administration has supplied a steady stream of them...
Assessing the losses to Iraq's heritage
Source: AFP (3-15-07)
CAIRO -- Archaeology in Iraq these days, explains the new caretaker of the country's 5,000-year-old heritage, is less about making new discoveries than finding out what has already been stolen.
"We need a government that takes responsibility for protecting the monuments of all Iraqis," antiquities director Abbas Ali al-Hussainy told AFP in an interview during a recent visit to Cairo.
"Right now we need to take measures to figure out where the sites are and know the extent of the damage and looting at each one," said the slight, bespectacled man.
The pillaging of the Iraqi National Museum in the immediate aftermath of Baghdad's fall in April 2003 shocked the world.
But while many of those antiquities have since been recovered, looting has taken off in the archaeological sites scattered around the perilous countryside.
The stuff of history, Iraq War's statistics are elusive
Source: Washington Post (3-19-07)
The U.S. war in Iraq enters its fifth year today. That, and 3,197 U.S. military deaths reported by the Pentagon as of 10 a.m. Friday, are among the few numerical certainties in a conflict characterized from the start by confusion and misuse of key data.
In the fog of modern counterinsurgency warfare, statistics have replaced conquered territory as measures of success. Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld once dismissed questions about the level of combat-ready Iraqi troops by saying that numbers are only numbers and "misleading" as to the truth, but the Bush administration has supplied a steady stream of them...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-03-19 12:58 pm (UTC)