Did you see the news that looting reports in Southern Iraq were fabricated, exaggerated, or otherwise untrue–I’m sorry, I mean inaccurate? Well, M.A. Orthofer of the Literary Saloon was in Iraq several years ago and saw some of the places reportedly looted. He suspects that some, maybe a lot, of art and history destruction occurred just because we’ve been fighting over there. Armies break things. Better to break something and save a life than avoid breaking it while failing to save that life.

Orthofer’s main point is that the first press reports of this did not link readers to the original report, from which Orthofer quotes. Make your judgment on that report, but I think we could easily read that quotation as a confession of the surveyors desire to confirm that looting did occur, despite their lack of evidence.