Mickey Kaus on the museum looting.

Via David Nieporent's Jumping to Conclusions, though this passage wasn't his primary focus:

P.S.: I don't see why it gets the U.S. off the hook if the looting was an "inside job." You can protect against inside jobs too, by preventing things from leaving the building -- like priceless statues that take ten men to lift. The issue isn't who did the stealing, but whether or not we screwed up and failed to do what we could. To the extent that our forces were taking fire from the museum and unable to safely protect it, we obviously didn't screw up. To the extent our forces didn't even know for several days that there was a museum there to protect (but did know there was a bank), or to the extent they decided to protect water storage facilities and other infrastructure rather than art work, it was a screw-up. Islamic terrorists twenty years from now won't be wooing recruits with the story of how the evil Americans smashed a water storage facility. They will be telling them about how the Americans burned ancient copies of the Koran and destroyed the heritage of the Arab world. ...

They'll be lying, then, because it wasn't the Americans looting the museum, it was fellow Iraqis. I can't say it often enough: I do not give a shit about this because they robbed themselves, and if they were that concerned about preserving their cultural heritage, they could have done something about it themselves. Museums are not the US military's primary concern, nor should they be; those institutions that were protected by the military--yes, including the fucking oil ministry--are far more necessary to post-war efforts to rebuild the country's economic and political structure than the damn museum. The people who survived this war to bitch about the loss of their artifacts twenty years hence should count themselves lucky to be able to do so.