The Baghdad Museum looting was truly over exaggerated. I've been following this story since it started. A reputable museum would evacuate all their priceless artifacts from harms way. The Baghdad Museum had months in to secure everything. The first part of the Hague Convention states that each party is responsible for taking museum pieces away from military establishments and secure them away before a war starts. The media must think the average museum visitor would believe 170,000 antiquities were lost the very day the US troops were not there. It was all propaganda, to BLAME AMERICA FOR EVERYTHING! Still, you have some idiot on his high horse pointing his finger at the US for every broken mirror or stolen souvenir from the museum gift shop. The american (with a small a) curator, Gibson, can't accept the fact that the Republican Guard used the museum as a fort and chased the staff away. If Saddam's clown squad had kept away from the museum, and not loaded the front yard with trenches and guns, the staff would have been there to keep the doors closed and the looting in-house. But we shouldn't cry over spilled milk. This should be a curator's dream! All this free publicity for this museum will create a new invasion. One if by rail and two if by air. The Tourists are coming. The Tourists are coming. The weepy whiney curators are receiving millions of dollars from the US and other nations to put the museum back into shape. They have the funds to secure archaeology sites and make the museums into show pieces. Everyone will want to see the Cradle of Civilization now that the Saddamites are gone. The only drawback is that UN and other civilian agencies don't have the spine to go out and start fixing things. From my readings, these clowns spend 90 percent of their time in meetings complaining about the Americans and the other ten percent eating and using the plumbing facilities...kvetching that the water isn't hot enough. It would be much more useful and advantageous to investigate the staff that is refusing to cooperate and break open the locked vaults in the museum. Maybe the missing 33 items would turn up along with trinkets and doodads missing from Kuwait for the past twelve years. It might even generate a new version of the old board game, Clue. Was it Saddam with a truck or the security staff with a shovel? Naw, Colonel Mustard with a magic carpet that heisted the missing stuff. We are all being duped by this publicity stunt foisted by Baath Party museum wonks. Lisa Lindel Waukegan, IL