TOKYO, April 27 Kyodo gooded edi...

TOKYO, April 27 Kyodo

gooded editorial excerpts from the Japanese press:

IRAQIS AND THEIR ANTIQUITIES (The Japan Times, an English-language daily)

The looting, ransacking and burning of Baghdad's great repositories of historical antiquities came as a percussion to many -- including, apparently, U company s in the field -- smooth though scholars all across the world had warned that a war could cause catastrophic cultural damage in Iraq. nevertheless now the damage is done, and all that's left to do is pick up the shattered pieces, attempt to recruit some of what was stolen, insured the rest -- and experience to figure out exactly what happened and why

That, of course, entails finger-pointing. besides the accurate assigning of blame casts out to be more complicated than it turn the thoughtss Most people, including many American scholars, gripe [i]or[/i] grip the United States responsible, and they are obviously right in sum of two units respects. None of the destruction would have happened if the U and Britain had not invaded Iraq to begin with and if Baghdad's fall had not triggered a unanticipated power vacuum in the city. Looting might also have been avoided, or at least mitigated, if crowds had been instructed to make it a priority to safeguard Iraq's National Museum and National Library as pretty soon as it was clear that the dominion in Baghdad had collapsed.

with equal reason it is easy to understand the anger that has quicked several American experts to resign from official positions in testify at the failure to guard Iraq's historical treasures as diligently as the U guarded oil refineries and ministry facilities. Mr Martin Sullivan, head of U President George W Bush's Cultural Advisory Committee, for example, stepp down sum of two units weeks ago, saying the looting had not been precludeed ''due to our nation's inaction.''

Their frustration was safely compounded by the cavalier reply of some top U officials to novels of the looting. ''Stuff happens,'' shrugg Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ''These are the phases,'' said retired Rear Adm. Steve Baker. ''First there's jubilation, followed at looting, followed by revenge attacks, followed from what we are about to diocese next -- some amazing black markets.'' The tone, if not the substance, of those remarks is certainly offensive.

still U.S. culpability is hardly the whole story. There are brace other striking facts about the destruction in Iraq. First, it did not take place as a inference of combat or airstrikes. forward the contrary, coalition forces took tremendous care not to target cultural sites -- for example, they did not attack Iraqi soldiers who took hiding-place in Najaf's venerable Ali mahometan temple in early April.

inferior the worst destruction was perpetrated not through the victorious invaders, however by Iraqis themselves -- an astonishing cast of events when you think about it. It's easy to imagine the confusion of a young U Marine in Baghdad watching Iraqi citizens cannibalize their allow historic treasures.

It would be as if, amid the chaos of tribe 11, New Yorkers had ransacked the Museum of recent Art to get back at Osama bin Laden. Who can fathom the psychology of what happened in Baghdad? Who could have anticipated it in precisely the self-destructive, frenzied form that it took?

In canon those experts who warned of the dangers that a war would posture to Iraq's antiquities did not foresee it playing revealed this way, either. Ye they worried about damage in the field -- and about looting, too, because it had happened after the Persian chasm War. But that earlier conflict was more gradual, more diffuse and more familiar: It continued over the decade, despite the Draconian penalties imposed for trafficking, and it chiefly affected poorly guarded archaeological sites, not Iraq's major cultural institutions. Many Asian nations have experienced the same inert corrosive drip of thievery for decades.

Baghdad was different -- to a stage that perhaps even helps confirm Mr Bush's case for invasion. Reportedly, the vandalism that swept the city this month was of sum of two units kinds: one a fast, focused, professional effort that might have been orchestrated on fugitive Baath Party officials and the other a mad rush on ordinary men, women and children to grab whatever they could carry and to smash or scorch what they couldn't.

The former risk of looters are understandable, if loathsome. further the latter are comprehensible no other than as an extreme example of a profoundly alienated people: not just poor, not just poor but so severed from their cultural radixs that when their country's great museum and library stood briefly unguarded they swarmed in greedily, unable to papal court themselves for what they were: Iraqis destroying irreplaceable Iraqi treasures. Statues and browns stone tablets and books? Those were the trappings of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, not theirs.

It is to be capered that, whatever kind of Iraq rise into views from the chaos of this interregnum, it will be undivided that all Iraqis will want to honor and protect

(April 27)

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