Word: museums
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Correct. In fact the museum was closed in September of 1980 when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran and Iran started lobbing missiles into Baghdad. So the museum was closed from that time until opening for a day in 2003 and then until this opening. [It's] only been open fewer than a half dozen times and never open to the general public. The museum itself, in the last several decades has been called Saddam's gift shop by the average Iraqi. (See pictures of treasure hunting in Afghanistan...
...lived in the museum for my entire first tour in Iraq in 2003. What it took to get from there - a devastated, closed, sealed-shut museum that had been looted by neighborhood residents, government officials and some museum staff members - to today where it's able to open a couple of galleries for a couple of hours relied almost exclusively on the extraordinary heroism, conscientiousness and integrity of the Iraqi people. From April of 2003 until November 2003 - the last time I physically hand-counted the items - almost 2000 different antiquities stolen from the museum were returned to the museum...
...also took some courage on the part of the Iraqi government. There is controversy within the government. The minister of culture believes that the museum should not be opened until all galleries are able to be opened and the security situation improves. That's a legitimate, fair argument. I disagree with that argument, but it's a fair one. The ministry of tourism and antiquities, on the other hand, shares my belief, which is: open it today, one gallery for one hour. And tomorrow it's one gallery for two hours. And on and on. And you enable...
...think it is fair to say the looting of the Iraq museum is symbolic of the chaos in 2003. Perhaps it is another reason why the Iraqi government felt so strongly about opening it to proclaim, if you will, "The chaos is over." Or that the chaos has been controlled to the extent that we can control chaos...
There is a lot of mythology about the looting of the Iraq museum. By and large that mythology has been debunked. And I've spent the better of more than 5, 6 years attempting to debunk it. But we should be clear on something: the looting could not have been avoided. It couldn't. It could have been and should have been lessened. But we should also be clear that the vast majority of the items that were removed were removed long before the war. So the war itself is not the reason the sine qua non of the looting...