Via MB reader Mario F., you don’t want to miss this war of words between Thieves of Baghdad author Matthew Bogdanos and Washington Post culture critic Philip Kennicott. It started when Kennicott wrote this dopey review of Thieves, which was full of passages like, “Those who question [the Iraq War] – and question war in general – may find Bogdanos a repellent figure, symptomatic of a new hubris in certain military and political circles.” Today, Bogdanos fired back on Page Six:

“Repellent? A new hubris?” the author rages. “If Kennicott ever left his cave, he’d know that nobody in this country hates war more than the people who actually get shot at. You think I wanted to be there? I missed the birth of my fourth child, for crissake.”

But the best is Bogdanos’s closing line:

Bogdanos, who prosecuted Sean “P. Diddy” Combs at his weapons-possession trial in 1999, also said, “In 2 1/2 years, I recovered over 5,000 ancient artifacts from eight countries. What has that man [Kennicott] ever done for ‘culture?’”

Ouch.