Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its Treasure Many years ago I was a freshman at the University of California at Berkeley, and not having a strong sense of what I wanted to study, I spent a year studying ancient Middle Eastern Art History. I remember spending hours pouring over wildly expensive books full of beautiful photographs of statues, jewelry, and other artifacts. We had to know the name of each one, who it represented and where it was found. Today, reading this article in the New York Times, I can see that many of the pieces I studied in awe so many years ago are now lost, mostly due to the irresponsibility of men who go in to wage a "war" in which they face little or no opposition and who don't stop to think about the consequences of destroying the local legal forces. Again, the Americans show themselves to be so utterly ignorant of other countries and cultures.