It is painted a military color scheme, was found on a transporter normally used for tanks and - as an Iraqi defector has described Iraq's mobile labs - contains a fermentor and a system to capture exhaust gases, Cambone said.

Maybe Saddam just really, really liked beer.

12:20 PM

 

So wait just a cotton-pickin' minute here--now the Times says that there wasn't widespread looting at the Baghdad National Museum. Nearly all of the stuff was just hidden away. So all of that fuss, all of those gullible journalists, all of those anti-american rants, for nothing!

Most Iraqi Treasures Are Said to Be Kept Safe
By BARRY MEIER


top British Museum official said yesterday that his Iraqi counterparts told him they had largely emptied display cases at the National Museum in Baghdad months before the start of the Iraq war, storing many of the museum's most precious artifacts in secure "repositories."

The official, John E. Curtis, curator of the Near East Collection at the British Museum, who recently visited Iraq, said Baghdad museum officials had taken the action on the orders of Iraqi government authorities. When looting started, most of the treasures apparently remaining in display halls were those too large or bulky to have been moved for protection, Mr. Curtis said.

He and Neil MacGregor, the British Museum's director, were in New York for the opening of an exhibition, "Art of the First Cities," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In a news conference at the museum and a subsequent interview, Mr. Curtis said he believed that American authorities now knew the locations of the artifact repositories but that as a precaution against further looting were not disclosing them.

In Iraq yesterday, American and Iraqi officials appeared to support this assessment, saying they still did not know precisely what was missing from the National Museum, because they had not yet had access to sites where art objects may have been hidden, or to rooms inside the building that were among the looters' targets.

And...

Mr. Curtis's remarks may help explain recent reports by both Iraqi officials and American authorities that losses at the National Museum are less extensive than previously feared. For instance, Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine reservist who is investigating the looting, said recently that Baghdad museum officials had listed only 25 artifacts as definitely missing.

Mr. Curtis said it appeared that a vast majority of the looting at the National Museum had not taken place in its display halls but in its basement storage rooms, where more commonplace objects were kept.

11:43 AM

Tuesday, May 06, 2003  

If this report is true, it sounds like the Iraq WMD issue is about to break wide open, along with some very prominent political careers. DEBKA says that Washington has a long, long list of foreign politicians, diplomats, and businessmen that collaborated illegally with Iraq. This I do not doubt. However, DEBKA goes on to make some specific predictions, namely that several "senior cabinet members" in Qatar and Jordan are going to be resigning tonight, and that charges of collaboration will be leveled at Jaque Chirac and--get this--Mohammed El Baradai, the head of the International Atomic Energy Commission (nuclear weapons inspectors). There's more:

US officials are holding to the public position that more time is needed to turn up Saddam’s arsenal of forbidden weapons. However, last week, Syria handed over two key scientists who ran Iraq’s bio weapons programs, Dr Hudah Salih Mahdi Ammash, the anthrax expert and Dr. RihabTaha – “Dr. Germ”, as well as her husband the “Missile Man”, Gen. Amir Muhammed Rasheed. These scoops must have given the Americans much of the information they were after on the nature and locations of the weapons of mass destruction. However, Washington is now waiting for President Bashar Assad to respond to the ultimatum secretary of state Colin Powell slapped down last Saturday in Damascus. He was put on notice to report on the arsenal’s whereabouts in Lebanon after he removed this hot potato from Syria. Only then, will the Bush administration decide how to handle the information accumulated.

None of this contradicts any facts that I know of, but I would still treat this report with quite a bit of scepticism. What I'm going to do is watch for resignations in Qatar and Jordan over the next few days. If this happens, then the rest of it is likely to be true. If so, then hang on to your hats!

9:44 PM

 

An interview with Hernando de Soto, the oracle of third-world property rights, on how property rights might affect the rebuilding of Iraq. An excerpt:

NRO: How important is the establishment of property rights in a post-totalitarian country such as [we're hoping postwar Iraq will be]?
HDS: It's obviously crucial. If you want to create a market society, that's what it's based on. . . . [T]he starting point, the genesis of a market society is property rights because it relates to the issue of what belongs to whom. Once you determine that, you know who starts with what poker chips. And once people see that the law protects rights that they already have, then people begin to believe in the rule of law.

By way of Instapundit. (I'm a lazy blogger today. Not that that's anything new.)

11:32 AM

 

Perfidious Quai D'Orsay: "The French government secretly supplied fleeing Iraqi officials with passports in Syria that allowed them to escape to Europe, The Washington Times has learned."

Again, by way of Instapundit.

10:33 AM

 

Daniel Drezner writes about another anti-U.S. slam from an NGO. This time on the subject of foreign aid. He concludes that yes, the study is biased against the U.S., but we should still spend more on aid. I'm not so sure--I think this falls under the "work smarter, not harder" category.

If Portugal spends two buckets of money to no good effect, and we spend one bucket of money to no good effect, who's being more effective? We are, but only in that we're not doing as much damage as they are. I think that aid to developing nations is one of the more critical tasks facing us in this century, but in the past aid has encouraged dependency and corruption. There is little correlation between the amount of foreign aid received and improvement in living conditions. It's like the quarter you give to the panhandler on the street--yeah, it makes you feel better, but did you actually do anybody any good? So I think the more critical task is to identify or invent types of aid that actually help people in the medium-to-long term.

I've not found any links to support this argument, but I'll keep an eye out. Unfortunately, this was a hot-button issue about two years ago and most of the publications on the topic are now in the subscription-only category. But in the meantime, just ask yourself if Africa, to pick an example, is better off than it was 20 years ago....

By way of Instapundit.

10:07 AM