Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | The US could have saved Iraq's cultural heritage

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | The US could have saved Iraq's cultural heritage: "It is simply inconceivable that, during the planning of military action in 2002-3, the Pentagon did not turn up the detailed heritage-protection rules and maps applied so relatively successfully in the first Gulf war. Almost the first move of military planners in preparing for a possible conflict is to dust down records and maps, perhaps many decades old, and build on these. In this case, many of those responsible for developing and implementing the Desert Storm policy were still in the Pentagon. Someone or some group must have taken a positive decision to scrap the US's established protection policies and ignore the January 1993 assurance to Congress given by the defence department, still under Dick Cheney at the time.

Who made that fatal decision? Who back in Washington refused to allow the Baghdad commander to move a tank 200 yards to protect the National Museum from looting - despite pleading by the museum and international experts - and who authorised the building of a gigantic military base in the middle of Babylon's archaeological zone and allocated an adjacent area of the site to the Kellogg, Brown, Root subsidiary of Halliburton, Vice-President Cheney's old firm?"