Very naive of the Babu to expect objectivity on the looting of Baghdad’s museum and library from The Wall Street Journal. Even so, he didn’t expect Andre Emmerich to put forward this argument with a straight face: “The major lesson to be learned from the Iraq disaster is the desirability of dispersing widely the art of past civilizations.” Or, as the strapline suggests, “what were those antiquities doing in Iraq anyway?” Emmerich makes an exception in one case: American imperialism. “We are a country of immigrants, coming from countries all over the world, and surely have a moral claim to reasonable access to the buried treasures of our common ancestors.” All Bush wants is your hearts and minds–he’ll get to the oilfields and oh yes, the museums, later. In The Spectator, Ron Liddle has a divergent perspective after delving into the intricacies of the looted art treasures market: “I suppose it’s going way too far to say that the Americans are rapacious crooks out to make as much money as they can — corporately and individually — from a country which they have enthusiastically destroyed.”