On April 10, 2003, because the global watched a statue of Saddam Hussein come crashing down within the middle of Baghdad, a mob of looters attacked the Iraq nationwide Museum. regardless of the presence of an American tank unit, the pillaging went unchecked, and greater than 15,000 artifacts—some of the oldest facts of human culture—disappeared into the shadowy world wide marketplace in illicit antiquities. within the 5 years because that day, the losses have merely fastened, with gangs digging up approximately part 1000000 artifacts that had formerly been unexcavated; the loss to our shared human background is incalculable.

With The Rape of Mesopotamia, Lawrence Rothfield solutions the advanced query of ways this wholesale thievery was once allowed to take place. Drawing on huge interviews with infantrymen, bureaucrats, battle planners, archaeologists, and creditors, Rothfield reconstructs the making plans failures—originating on the maximum degrees of the U.S. government—that ended in the invading forces’ utter indifference to the security of Iraq’s cultural historical past from looters. frequent incompetence and miscommunication at the a part of the Pentagon, unchecked via the disappointingly vulnerable advocacy efforts of globally renovation advocates, enabled a tragedy that keeps even at the present time, regardless of frequent public outrage.

Bringing his tale as much as the current, Rothfield argues forcefully that the foreign neighborhood has but to benefit the teachings of Iraq—and that what occurred there's prone to be repeated in destiny conflicts. a robust, infuriating chronicle of the disastrous conjunction of army event and cultural destruction, The Rape of Mesopotamia is key examining for all interested by the way forward for our past.