And so down through the ages of the Persians, Greece and Rome The Parthians and Sassanids, and Muslims more well known,
objects of majestic culture survived and then were stored –
until the twenty-first century when from the west came war

This conqueror was different; no trace of the past he sought
so he let the treasures of millennia be looted by a mob
Now all the world is poorer for the knowledge that’s been lost
of Ur and the Gardens of Babylon how can one assign a cost
Some day he’ll be remembered but not for what he thought
Rather for all the destruction to our heritage he brought

A harp of gold from Sumer, and Hammurabi’s code
that first spoke of rules to guide our lives from youth until we're old
The final books of Gilgamesh, that first heroic tale
All these things and so many more were accumulated there

In January, the Pentagon promised a team of U.S. scholars that the troops would do their best to protect Iraq's archaelogical heritage. Of special concern to the team was the fate of Iraq's museums -- especially Baghdad's National Museum of Antiquties, which --until five days ago -- housed 170,000 artifacts, worth billions of dollars on the open market, that reflect the culture of Iraq from founding of ancient Sumer around 3,500 B.C. to the end of Islam's Abbasid Caliphate in 1258 A.D. Yet US troops stood by while the museum's collections were systematically looted--very possibly by some professional thieves connected to smuggling networks. According to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, policing Baghdad wasn't appropriate for troops that were still fighting a war. Dismissing concerns about rampant looting, Rumsfeld stated, "stuff happens... it's untidy. Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." But in a tearful Reuters interview, deputy museum directory Nabhal Amin said that the disaster could have been easily avoided: "If they had just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened," she said. "I hold the American troops responsible for what happened to this museum."