The next time I hear some half-wit complain that not enough American soldiers are dying to protect the cultural treasures of Baghdad, or that naughty imperialists ran off with too many third-world musueum pieces a century ago, I’m going to remember something I read yesterday. It’s a paragraph from a forthcoming book called Antiquity, by NYU professor Norman Cantor: “Modern governments in Iraq show little interest in antiquities. The Tigris-Euphrates valley was the locus of successive destructive invasions and wars in ancient times. The best-preserved Iraqi artwork is that of the Assyrians, simply because a British consul in Baghdad early in the twentieth century bought up these oversized monuments, which were eventually given to the Metropolitan Museum in New York by an American philanthropist. If you want to see the grandeur of ancient Iraq, make your way to Manhattan, not Baghdad. There, all you can see is germ-warfare supplies, if the government allows.”