ROBERT SCHWARTZ wonders if the museum-looting reports aren’t missing something important:

So, lets think about this. The Museum, full of priceless antiquities, is located in a country run by a ruthless tyrant who has treated the country and its treasures as his personal playthings. It has been closed to the public for years. War has been threatened for months, and the tyrant knows that the city will be bombed, so does the museum staff. Rumors abound that the tyrant, his henchmen and their families are stashing treasure in foreign countries against the possibility of flight. When the army of liberation arrives, the Museum is empty, its displays and vaults ransacked. The staff blames an anonymous mob of civilians. . . . Motive, Means, Opportunity; isn’t that what Miss Marple would wonder about? The tyrant would certainly have them in spades.

I think he’s onto something, as this report from Kanan Makiya seems to fit nicely with Schwartz’s theory:

I spoke by sat-phone with friends in Baghdad. According to them, the breakdown of authority familiar to the world is getting better. Citizens groups are forming to keep order in the streets, and meeting little preliminary resistance. People want to be safe, and now that the ministries have been ransacked, it appears the worst of the looting has passed. In Basra, too, I understand these same groups are forming. 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.

(Emphasis added.) So how come the ever-so-inquisitive Big Media folks in Baghdad didn’t even mention the possibility that something like this was going on in their reports? Perhaps CENTCOM should check their luggage as they leave town. . . .

UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus had speculated on this on Sunday, and links to this AP story that quotes one Iraqi to the effect that it may have been an inside job. Why hasn’t this gotten more attention?

PIM FORTUYN’S KILLER is getting off easy — he’ll be out of jail in 2014.

MORE UNENTHUSIASM FOR THE BBC:

Caught a bit of a BBC World roundtable talkfest this a.m. on cable. . . .

The Muslims were mad. The American was reasonable, the British presenter was just trying to keep it all on track and the Frenchman was a goddam waste of space. . . .

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Broken link (#@$! blogger) — go here.

ATKINS DIET FANS (of whom there seem to be a lot in the Blogosphere): Talkleft has an update on Dr. Atkins’ condition.

IT’S ALL ABOUT OOOIIILLL — er, and alimony:

THE former chairman of Elf-Aquitaine, the French oil group, apologised in court yesterday for “delegating” his divorce settlement to subordinates, who gave his ex-wife almost £2 million from a company slush fund.

Loik Le Floch-Prigent is on trial in Paris, along with 36 other defendants, on corruption charges relating to his period as chairman between 1989 and 1993. He is accused of using the firm’s money to appease his wife, Fatima Belaid, as they went through a divorce in 1991. . . .

M Le Floch-Prigent has said that he asked his colleagues to handle the divorce settlement when his “passionate love affair” with Mme Belaid turned into a “nightmare”. He said that she subjected him to “psychological harassment that was incompatible with the role of company chairman”.

Hmm. Think she was threatening to spill the beans on something unless she was paid off?

And funny, isn’t it, how some people were saying that the Enron scandal was proof of the bankruptcy of “American-style capitalism?” I wonder why those people aren’t so eager to take lessons from this scandal regarding “European style crony capitalism?”

UPDATE: This item from The Economist is amusing:

Wim Duisenberg agreed to an indefinite extension of his tenure as president of the European Central Bank past his planned retirement in July, until a (French) successor is found. Jean-Claude Trichet, the leading candidate, is awaiting verdict in a trial relating to a 1980s financial scandal. If he is found guilty, the French have a couple of other candidates up their sleeves.

And stellar folks they are, I’m sure. (Via Corporate Lackey).

INTERESTING:

Former chief UN weapons inspector Richard Butler backed US claims that Syria helped conceal Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, saying he saw evidence of this, he told ABC Radio.

The former Australian diplomat said he had seen intelligence when he headed the UN team in Iraq from 1997 until 1999 which seemed to indicate Syria had helped keep Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction hidden.

“I was shown some intelligence information, from overhead imagery and so on, that the Iraqis had moved some containers of stuff across the border into Syria,” Butler was quoted as saying on ABC Radio.

“We had reason to believe that those were containers of chemical weapons and perhaps some other weapons.

Hmm.

UPDATE: Then there’s this:

Intelligence information indicates a top Iraqi nuclear scientist recently spent time in Syria . . . .

The scientist, Jaffar al-Jaffer, left Syria and went to another Middle Eastern country, where he turned himself over to authorities during the past few days, officials said Monday. He was being interviewed by American officials.

I wonder what he’s saying?

ANDREW BOLT:

But when we say the Left got this war wrong, we must be clear that this was no innocent error of judgment. Too many wilfully let a self-indulgent loathing of capitalism, or the US or John Howard blind them to the real truths and the real evil.

NOR can we let the myth grow that the Left always knew the war would be won easily, and was worried more by the peace.

Not true. Below, I will recall just some of “peace” activists’ predictions to show how they dreamed of a war in which millions died, and Iraqis greeted our soldiers not with kisses but bullets. Overseas, too, anti-war propagandists luridly dreamed of American honour drowning in Iraqi blood.

These are now many of the same people sneering that Iraq has plunged into anarchy, and will forever be a sleazy “puppet state” of the US. How lovingly they linger on news of looting.

Iraq may indeed go sour, although with effort, help and much time, it probably won’t. But however Iraq turns out, we at least know it is no longer a threat. And whatever troubles it faces, they will not be greater than the horrors it has endured.

Iraq’s future we cannot tell, but one thing we do know is that most of those now preaching doom were spectacularly wrong about the war itself. Why would they be so right now?

It is time we held them accountable. No more must they lightly skip from one disreputable cause to another — preaching woe in the first Gulf War, disaster in Afghanistan, apocalypse in Iraq — and always warning of the catastrophic consequences of resisting evil.

Read the whole thing. (Via Tim Blair).

MORE ON LOOTING:

The hysterical tone of some press reports may reflect the fact that some of the reporters who have been sitting in Baghdad for months have lost sight of the nature of the Saddam regime: They are mystified by the exhilaration felt by so many liberated Iraqis.

But the failure of so many reports to mention the fact that many of the looted stores, institutions and even hospitals were linked to the regime is more troubling. These institutions were dedicated to the exclusive use of Ba’ath Party members – the ordinary public could not make use of them – or were owned and operated by known supporters of the regime.

It’s not clear if this whale of an omission reflects disingenuousness or genuine ignorance.

Probably healthy portions of both.

TURNING THE SCREW:

Arab diplomatic sources said the U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq shut down the Iraqi-Syrian oil pipeline that extended from Kirkuk to the Syrian port city of Banyas. The Iraqi oil then continued via pipeline to the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli.

The sources said the U.S. move was meant to punish Lebanon and Syria for its open support of Iraq during the war against the coalition. Both Lebanon and Syria provided safe haven to senior members of the regime of President Saddam Hussein. They also sent volunteers and weapons to Iraq.

As I’ve mentioned before, crossing the United States should be expensive.

TOUGH TIMES AHEAD FOR CHIRAC:

“Poor Mr Chirac,” said an editorial in the Le Parisien newspaper last week.

“I bet he could scarcely bring himself to watch those TV images of the victorious Americans being welcomed in Baghdad.”

“The King of Peace without a crown,” sneered the left-wing paper Liberation, “Chirac is now threatened with diplomatic isolation.”

Reportedly, Chirac is counting on Tony Blair to help him stave off irrelevance.

UPDATE: More gloomy news for France.

MORE ON CNN’S JOURNALISTIC ENRON SCANDAL — along with other thoughts on media coverage — over at Winds of Change.

This column by Victor Davis Hanson is worth reading, too. Excerpt:

Personally, I was more intrigued that in passing the same reporter at last fessed up that during all of her previous gloomy reports from the Palestine Hotel of American progress, she and others had been shaken down daily for bribe money, censored, and led around as near hostages. It is impossible to calibrate how such Iraqi manipulation of American news accounts affected domestic morale, if not providing comfort for those Baathists who wished to discourage popular uprisings of long-suffering Iraqis.

There is something profoundly amoral about this. A newsman who interviewed a state killer at his convenience later revisits a now liberated city and complains of the disorder there. A journalist who paid bribe money to fascists and whose dispatches aired from Baghdad in wartime only because the Baathist party felt that they served their own terrorist purposes is disturbed about the chaos of liberation. Now is the time for CNN, NPR, and other news organizations to state publicly what their relationships were in ensuring their reporters’ presence in wartime Iraq — and to explain their policies about bribing state officials, allowing censorship of their news releases, and keeping quiet about atrocities to ensure access. . . .

So while it is censorious of politicians and soldiers, the media is completely uninterested in monitoring its own behavior. Would Mr. Rather have gone to Berlin amid the SS to interview Hitler in his bunker as the fires of Auschwitz raged? Would NPR reporters have visited Hitler’s Germany, paid bribes to Mr. Goebbels, and then broadcasted allied shortcomings at the Bulge, oblivious to the Nazi machinery of death and their own complicity in it?

If any other institution had performed as badly, the media folks would be all over it and demanding government action.

UPDATE: Read this story about Nick Kristof, too.

DONALD SENSING has been on a hot streak. Just keep scrolling.

ECONOMIST STEVEN LANDSBURG is sounding a lot like Scott Ott.

MELISSA SCHWARTZ is back and blogging.

I LOVE THIS:

Iraqi Muslims came to the aid of Baghdad’s tiny Jewish community yesterday, chasing out looters trying to sack its cultural centre in the heart of the capital.

“At 3am, I saw two men, one with a beard, on the roof of the Jewish community house and I cried out to my friend, ‘Hossam, bring the Kalashnikovs!'” said Hassam Kassam, 21.

Heither Hassan nor Hossam, who is the guard at the centre, was armed at the time but the threat worked in scaring off the intruders.

Often, I’m told, merely brandishing a weapon will scare off an intruder. Apparently, sometimes you don’t even have to do that. . . .

EUGENE VOLOKH HAS MORE ON VIBRATORS AND DOUBLE STANDARDS — not the sort of thing you usually expect from the Volokh Conspiracy, but done with characteristic thoroughness and elan.

AMISH TECH SUPPORT HAS MOVED. Well, there goes another neighborhood. . . .

Meanwhile, Stacy Tabb has shut down Blogatelle and moved to new digs at Tricksy.org.

UPDATE: And DefenseTech has left blogspot, too, which I think I forgot to mention earlier.

OKAY, HOW MANY OF YOU READ THIS AND IMMEDIATELY THOUGHT “I wonder if John Howard reads blogs?”

Prime Minister John Howard wants to reform the United Nations, saying the presence of France as a permanent member of the Security Council “distorts” the council.

He wants Japan, a South American country and India to be represented on the Security Council. France was there only because it was a global power at the end of World War II, he said.

Chortle.

HERE’S A NICE PIECE from the Chicago Tribune on that new paper that Matt Welch and Ken Layne are starting with some guy named Riordan.

(Via — where else — the L.A. Examiner).

ROLLING YOUR OWN: Here’s an interesting article on a Hollywood bigshot’s decision to go independent. His film was rather more expensive than my wife’s documentary was (he was paying Screen Actors’ Guild members, etc.), but still cheap by Hollywood standards. His conclusion: “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

In the past five years or so, the home-studio revolution has had more and more bigshot musicians doing their own recordings. I wonder if we’ll start to see the same dynamic apply to the movie industry.

MICHAEL CROFT WRITES:

Why do I bother trying to write satire when it’s indistinguishable from actual events? Tom Lehrer retired from performing music because “Political satire became obsolete when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” I know how he felt.

The equivalent event in Croft’s life was the — allegedly genuine — report that former RIAA head Hilary Rosen will be helping the new Iraqi government write its intellectual property laws.

It wasn’t all about oooiiilll — it was all about mp3s. . . . So why were Madonna, et al., opposing the war?

I’m skeptical, especially upon listening to the audio stream of the report, but you never know. After all, Kissinger did get the Nobel Peace Prize.

And so did Yasser Arafat.

TIM BLAIR WRITES:

IRAQI information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf is now universal journalistic shorthand for comical inaccuracy. Kinda funny, considering how mainstream outlets like the BBC weren’t treating him like a joke when he was actually saying all the stupid things in the first place.

Yeah, go figure.

ROGER L. SIMON HAS A NEW BLOG, designed by no less a figure than Charles Johnson. It looks good.

THE FILIBUSTER WONDERS IF THE HAWKS WERE RIGHT:

(1) A high-profile Iranian conservative calls for a reexamination of Iran’s relationship with Israel.
(2) North Korea may enter multilateral talks — the kind that the Bush administration has demanded — about its nuclear program.
(3) Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has picked a reformist cabinet. (Arafat, the power-hungry jerk, has rejected it.)
(4) Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, ally and champion of settlement builders, may uproot his West Bank base “faster than people think.”

There are lots of links in the original.

IT’S NICE TO SEE SOMEONE RECOGNIZE THAT HE HAS A PROBLEM — but this cure seems rather drastic:

I HAVE BEEN REMARKABLY DILIGENT in keeping up with the news from the war in Iraq–some might say a little too diligent. I was the first one on my block to track the Command Post hour by hour, and I recall with a surge of pleasure the first time I got to a juicy story before Glenn Reynolds could link to it on Instapundit. But when I realized that it had become my chief goal in life to get Andrew Sullivan to post one of my letters on his website, I began to wonder if I had not misaligned my priorities. Clearly it was time to take a break from the passionate intensity of war reportage, the struggle to sift through the vast complexities of Operation Iraqi Freedom and bring some order from the chaos of data. In short, I needed some light entertainment.

So I started reading Robert Fisk.

Ouch. I know that treating an addiction requires forceful steps, but. . . Wouldn’t a coffee enema or electroshock have been drastic enough?

Oh, well. At least he’s not blogging on his honeymoon.