Looting update

Some Iraqis looters are having second thoughts and returning the things they stole last week, thanks in part to Sheik Ali Jabouri of Najaf, who has asked women to withhold sex from looter husbands. The story is a popular one on the newswires today, especially in Australia. We're sure the Sheik was guided by the Koran, but coincidentally, he was also taking a page from Greek drama, specifically the Aristophanes play Lysistrata. And also coincidentally, that very play was performed on five continents March 3 as an antiwar protest. 

Elsewhere on the looting front, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld missed his cue. He could have explained that that vase he mentioned last week was being carried out of the Baghdad museum. Instead, he pooh-poohed reports that the museum was looted in much the same way he dismissed widespread reports of widespread looting as coalition forces moved in. "We didn't allow it," he insisted on Meet the Press, "It happened." There are also widespread reports that the U.S. was warned repeatedly before the war that the museum might be looted.

Some of the artifacts in the museum were more than 4,000 years old. But the fossil fuel administered by the Oil Ministry is even older. Maybe that's why the U.S. forces made such a point of guarding the Oil Ministry while leaving the hospitals, museums, power plants, waterworks and the rest of the city to the looters. To be fair, the Australian newspaper The Age reports that there was one 30-minute interruption in the midst of two days of looting, "when pleading staff convinced members of a Marines tank unit to go to the museum and scare off the looters with a few warning shots over their heads."