Enough hyperventilating about casual or unsubstantiated remarks regarding Iraq's future: on to my appraisal of the unfortunate skimming of the Baghdad museum's inventory.

Glenn Reynolds has been hammering the subject like a good blogging Vulcan. He's offering links that share the insights of others into this attempt by the anti-liberation front to energize sketchy details of theft into a full-blown ubertragedy, with the intention of laying it squarely on the back of allied troops and America proper.

It won't happen. Like the equally precious mystery about well-hidden weapons of mass destruction, the cultural looting is bound to find itself a rather down-to-earth explanation. The smug critics, all-too-inappropriately enjoying the fondling of a new position of "We told you so" moral superiority, will find themselves intellectually pink-slipped. Again.

I don't understand the broadside harangue. Marines, without the luxury of bathing for days, were working around the clock to protect civilians from being murdered by their former masters; attacking Fedeyeen Saddam and all varieties of Republican Guard, Special, Super-Special and French Vanilla. Glenn notes, dutifully, that if allied forces could have broken up the crime, they should have. But most of us would agree that sticking to the primary objective - eliminating Saddam and his gang - was by far the most important. Valuable objects lack body, soul and sentiment. They're worth far less than Iraqi lives, however badly Saddam's thirty-year-rule may have distorted human dignity to Iraqis.

Which begs the question: what would the people beating their breasts about gemstones from the papyrus days think if allied forces had in fact sent the troops to the museum, only to find out that scores of people had been slaughtered in allied absence?

Not a single story would have been written about the museum.

And then we have the various tidbits poking here and there (hat tip to Glenn) that suggest a vacation of all artifacts by Ba'athists, occurring before the offensive had begun or else during the chaos of Baghdad's liberation.

For whatever blame one could possibly assign to the allies, guilt hangs on Saddam one thousandfold. During the London Blitz, precious objects like the Wright Flyer were spared Hitler's incendiary by being stuffed underground. Saddam easily wins the prize for Near East Dictator with Most Gratuitously Excavated Hardened Bunkers. Saddam cared deeply for his Arabist Iraq and its stalwart people, right? So what was he doing keeping Baghdad's "public" treasures in harm's way when they could have been safeguarded? All together, now: "Saddam kept them above ground because, like civilians, they'd be lost one way or another and useful idiots would blame the Americans!"