Babylon Revisited

Melik Kaylan has elaborated further on his recent Wall Street Journal Opinion (see http://culturalpropertyobserver.blogspot.com/2009/11/myths-of-babylon.html ) in a Forbes article entitled, "Babylon Revisited." See http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/19/babylon-iraq-art-history-mideast-opinions-columnists-melik-kaylan.html

As I commented,

There needs to be a full accounting of the archaeological community's collaboration with Saddam Hussein's regime before the war, the extent to which archaeologists' self-interested relationships with their Baathist colleagues shaped their noisy campaign against US foreign policy of the Bush I, Clinton and Bush II Administrations, the degree to which looting of archaeological sites and the Iraq Museum was exaggerated to further both an anti-collecting ideology and to shame Western governments into spending millions to fund their work "to save Iraqi archaeology," and whether all this money has been wasted or wisely spent. There has been virtually no serious study of any of these issues other than Alex Joffe's 2004 "Museum Madness in Baghdad" and the Sandler article Kaylan mentions in his own piece. See http://www.meforum.org/609/museum-madness-in-baghdad