our cultural destruction

The loss of our cultural history during the looting of Baghdad is appalling, this is were we first wrote, had markets, invented numeracy, time astronomy and many other important discoveries.
I've been in a delimma thinking about the people being killed compared to the books and artefacts burnt or destroyed. One being the destruction of people, the other the destruction of the history of civilization. I've come to the conclusion that, in time, the immediate pain of the thousands of dead will pass and the lasting memory may become the loss of our collective history.
At the weekend I read Robert Fisk in the Independent who wrote powerfully on the loss of our cultural history. On Monday a representative from the British Museum was talking on the Today programme about the need to preserve what remains and pointing out the cleaning up is the worst thing that can happen. The teams of conservators will try to put the broken artifacts back together. Pictures of the damage from the BBC, Baghdad National Library burns and pictures of the looting of the museum.
Jeremy Hedley writes on antipixel about the lack of care that the US have taken over this issue, he links in a variety of sources showing that the US army had been briefed numerous times about this. Good writing, worth reading, the comments below debate the american involvement or lack of it.
To see some of the kinds of things that were lost, have a look at the BBCi History Mesopotamia gallery. Quite a reasonable amount of artefacts from this period are in the British Museum, they have an online Mesopotamia exhibit.
Powell has offered to repair damage, but it is tragic that it happened in the first place. A dozen American tanks would have protected the libraries and the museums, but they rather show off to the world's press outside the Palestine Hotel in a fashion rather after Nero.