MUSEUM LOOTING THE WORK OF BAATHIST OFFICIALS? Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi dissident now back in Iraq, reports the following in his War Diary in the New Republic online (via Instapundit again:

I spoke by sat-phone with friends in Baghdad... One friend told me that the looting of the National Museum--something that cut deeply into me--was the work of newly deposed Baathist officials, who had been selling off our patrimony as they saw their days were numbered. As the regime fell, these (ex-)Baathists went back for one last swindle, and took with them treasures that dated back 9,000 years, to the Sumerians and the Babylonians. One final crime perpetrated by Saddam's thugs.

If true, this puts the whole episode in a rather different light.