Mother of All Conspiracy Theories: "Cultural Cleansing in Iraq"

The Iraq Crisis List has publicized a new book entitled, "Cultural Cleansing in Iraq Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered."

According to Iraq Crisis,

Convention sees accidents of war and poor planning in a campaign to liberate Iraqis. The authors argue instead that the invasion aimed to dismantle the Iraqi state to remake it as a client regime.

See https://lists.uchicago.edu/web/arc/iraqcrisis/2009-11/msg00011.html

As further set forth in Iraq Crisis description, this nefarious plan was supposedly accomplished in a manner that would have made Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin proud-- with US government complicity in the extermination of Iraqi intellectuals and in the destruction of Iraq's cultural heritage.

The archaeological commmunity has certainly used gross exaggeration about the looting of the Iraq Museum and archaeological sites as a "wedge issue" to further both an anti-collecting ideology and to shame Western governments into spending millions to fund their work "to save Iraqi archaeology." See http://culturalpropertyobserver.blogspot.com/2009/11/myths-of-babylon.html and http://culturalpropertyobserver.blogspot.com/2009/11/babylon-revisited.html Yet, the allegations in this new book take matters to a whole new level.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has blamed the recent bombings of government buildings in downtown Baghdad on members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party allied with the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. See http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/10/25-1 Perhaps, the authors of this new work might also want to consider the part these groups played in creating the post-Invasion chaos that Iraq only seems to be leaving behind ever so slowly.