Nimrud’s Earrings

President Obama says the war’s over but according to the newspaper an odd problem has cropped up in Iraq:  A 4,000 year old statue of King Entemena of Lagash has vanished. In fact it turns out over our seven years in Iraq a lot of antiquities have disappeared.
 
Now when it comes to plunder we Americans aren’t in the same league with the Russians (who in 1945 shipped every piece of machinery in Germany that wasn’t nailed down, plus a hundred German nuclear physicists, back to Moscow) or the British – the British Museum in London is a monument to genteel plunder as practiced during the British Empire. The British absconded with what was left of the Parthenon after the Ottomans blew it up, the tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs and the jewels of Mughal Emperors.
 
But we are about to set a record of our own: We are about to become the first nation in the history of the world to return our plunder after a war we won.
 
The credit for this noble deed goes to the U.S. Army; last year, General David Petraeus dispatched an army plane to fly the first of 632 plundered artifacts back to Baghdad from Washington and, as we speak, a second jet’s leaving for Baghdad with another cargo of antiquities including a pair of gold earrings that belonged to Nimrud and a chrome plated AK-47 that belonged to Saddam Hussein.
 
But there’s one problem.  
 
The first load of plunder (returned to Baghdad) has disappeared.  Vanished into thin air. As the Iraqi Ambassador explained it to the newspapers:  “They” – the missing antiquities – “went to the Prime Minister’s office, and that was the last time they were seen.”
 
The Prime Minister of course didn’t take that lying down. His spokesman, Ali al-Mousawi, shot back saying, Not so, then denied the Prime Minister had ever laid eyes on even one of the missing antiquities. Then al-Mousawi turned mean saying the missing antiquities had arrived in Baghdad on a U.S. Army plane and that, by Allah, the Army ought to come clean and account for every one of them – which ought to prove to the Army no good deed goes unpunished.
 
In Iraq democracy is in full bloom: There’s a thief in the Prime Minister’s office and the Iraqi politicians’ adroitly sidestepped the whole mess by blaming the U.S. Army. The United States Congress couldn’t have handled it any better.
 
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Carter Wrenn

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Nimrud’s Earrings

President Obama says the war’s over but according to the newspaper an odd problem has cropped up in Iraq:  A 4,000 year old statue of King Entemena of Lagash has vanished. In fact it turns out over our seven years in Iraq a lot of antiquities have disappeared.
 
Now when it comes to plunder we Americans aren’t in the same league with the Russians (who in 1945 shipped every piece of machinery in Germany that wasn’t nailed down, plus a hundred German nuclear physicists, back to Moscow) or the British – the British Museum in London is a monument to genteel plunder as practiced during the British Empire. The British absconded with what was left of the Parthenon after the Ottomans blew it up, the tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs and the jewels of Mughal Emperors.
 
But we are about to set a record of our own: We are about to become the first nation in the history of the world to return our plunder after a war we won.
 
The credit for this noble deed goes to the U.S. Army; last year, General David Petraeus dispatched an army plane to fly the first of 632 plundered artifacts back to Baghdad from Washington and, as we speak, a second jet’s leaving for Baghdad with another cargo of antiquities including a pair of gold earrings that belonged to Nimrud and a chrome plated AK-47 that belonged to Saddam Hussein.
 
But there’s one problem.  
 
The first load of plunder (returned to Baghdad) has disappeared.  Vanished into thin air. As the Iraqi Ambassador explained it to the newspapers:  “They” – the missing antiquities – “went to the Prime Minister’s office, and that was the last time they were seen.”
 
The Prime Minister of course didn’t take that lying down. His spokesman, Ali al-Mousawi, shot back saying, Not so, then denied the Prime Minister had ever laid eyes on even one of the missing antiquities. Then al-Mousawi turned mean saying the missing antiquities had arrived in Baghdad on a U.S. Army plane and that, by Allah, the Army ought to come clean and account for every one of them – which ought to prove to the Army no good deed goes unpunished.
 
In Iraq democracy is in full bloom: There’s a thief in the Prime Minister’s office and the Iraqi politicians’ adroitly sidestepped the whole mess by blaming the U.S. Army. The United States Congress couldn’t have handled it any better.
 
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Carter Wrenn

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