The Iraq War: Loss of Art

It’s deplorable the way people pillage and destroy their own culture or even others for that matter. I can understand in times of war sometimes things such as this can happen and have happened in the past, many times. But now-a-days it is unacceptable behavior especially when we know the historical value these objects can hold. What would have happened if someone destroyed the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the Rosetta stone? We would never have been able to unlock the secrets we have. Without art there is a lot about our past we would never have learned. So with this knowledge we have concerning these matters there is no reason why we should destroy art. Even if it’s from a culture different from our own, after all who knows what we could learn from an object older then our own country (and many others for that matter.)

Many of the artifacts have been destroyed or lost due to our soldiers and looters. So, I believe in order to prevent our soldiers from doing damage, pay docking could be put into effect or the stripping of ranks for a large offense. (After all there’s no reason America should be giving its self any worse of a name by destroying history.) As for the looters I believe there is a few ways to handle this. One of which would be more geared toward the citizens who wish only to protect the art and artifacts of their town. The idea would be to set up security and gate people off from locations that have artwork/artifacts in them. The citizen soldiers who would be watching over the art work wouldn’t be pro or con for the war but only in place to protect the art as to keep from being made a target. Another solution could be using our war money to build them a nice museum or rather a place to store (and protect) their art. Honestly there are dozens of ways to at least prevent people from harming the art. There is just too much we can learn from it to let it be destroyed like this.