Wow. So there it is.

One month of war = 10,000 years of history down the drain.

Hmmm. I wrote about this on March 18, 2003. You would think that our government and military would have been informed of this threat way before the information trickled down to little old me.
Ancient archive lost in Baghdad library blaze
By Oliver Burkeman for The Guardian

As flames engulfed Baghdad's National Library yesterday, destroying manuscripts many centuries old, the Pentagon admitted that it had been caught unprepared by the widespread looting of antiquities, despite months of warnings from American archaeologists.

But defence department officials denied accusations by British archaeologists that the US government was succumbing to pressure from private collectors in America to allow plundered Iraqi treasures to be traded on the open market.

Almost nothing remains of the library's archive of tens of thousands of manuscripts, books, and Iraqi newspapers, according to reports from the scene.

It joins a list that already includes the capital's National Museum, one of the world's most important troves of artefacts from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations...

In Washington Colin Powell, the secretary of state, said the US "will be working with a number of individuals and organisations to not only secure the facility, but to recover that which has been taken, and also to participate in restoring that which has been broken _ the United States understands its obligations and will be taking a leading role with respect to antiquities in general, but [the museum] in particular".

A Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said no plans had been made to protect antiquities from looters, as opposed to ensuring that historical sites were not caught up in the fighting itself.

Here is the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,937094,00.html

Ancient archive lost in Baghdad library blaze

Oliver Burkeman in Washington
Tuesday April 15, 2003
The Guardian

As flames engulfed Baghdad's National Library yesterday, destroying manuscripts many centuries old, the Pentagon admitted that it had been caught unprepared by the widespread looting of antiquities, despite months of warnings from American archaeologists.

But defence department officials denied accusations by British archaeologists that the US government was succumbing to pressure from private collectors in America to allow plundered Iraqi treasures to be traded on the open market.

Almost nothing remains of the library's archive of tens of thousands of manuscripts, books, and Iraqi newspapers, according to reports from the scene.

It joins a list that already includes the capital's National Museum, one of the world's most important troves of artefacts from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations.

Calling the looting of historical artefacts "a catastrophe for the cultural heritage of Iraq", Mounir Bouchenaki, the deputy director-general of the UN cultural body Unesco, announced an emergency summit of archaeologists in Paris on Thursday.

In Washington Colin Powell, the secretary of state, said the US "will be working with a number of individuals and organisations to not only secure the facility, but to recover that which has been taken, and also to participate in restoring that which has been broken _ the United States understands its obligations and will be taking a leading role with respect to antiquities in general, but [the museum] in particular".

A Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said no plans had been made to protect antiquities from looters, as opposed to ensuring that historical sites were not caught up in the fighting itself.

But the official rejected charges in a letter from nine British archaeologists, published in the Guardian yesterday, that private collectors were "persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq's heritage by prevention of sales abroad".

The American Council for Cultural Policy, a New York-based coalition of about 60 collectors, dealers and others, had received "no special treatment," the official insisted, despite reports that members of the group met with Bush administration representatives in January to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws.

Last night the group denied that it was lobbying for plundered Iraqi treasures to be traded. "The ACCP will seek _ to find ways to shut off the import of objects that may have been taken from Iraq, and to close the domestic market in such material," Ashton Hawkins, the organisation's president, said.

John Henry Merryman, a law professor at Stanford University and a member of the ACCP, said allowing a private trade in the artefacts would better protect them until they could be returned to Iraq at a later date.