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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NickSE who wrote (101546)	6/14/2003 10:10:08 AM
From: NickSE	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Iraq Museum Regains A Famed Treasure Missing Since April, Ancient Vase Returned By Unknown 'Ali Babas' washingtonpost.com BAGHDAD, June 13 -- This is how it happens in Iraq today. A shiny red Toyota, or maybe it's a Nissan, pulls up in front of the National Museum, along a busy roundabout on the Tigris River. Three men in their twenties step out cradling an object wrapped in a blanket and, eschewing the usual social niceties, hand it to museum officials. The officials say thank you. The men drive away. Thus was recovered one of the greatest treasures of Mesopotamian antiquity, a three-foot-high, 5,000-year-old ritual vase carved with intricate images of men, a goddess and nature. It is the Warka vase, a priceless artifact gone missing during the looting of the Baghdad museum after the fall of the city in April.....

To: NickSE who wrote (101546)	6/14/2003 12:52:07 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

That's a very nice story, but you know what it made me think of? That's the way a certain segment of Americans go about things, every day, in their own neighborhoods, and there are neighborhoods where nobody cares. And the difference is so stark. When I was a kid, I spent a few years of my childhood living in the St. Thomas Project, and then my dad graduated and we bought a house and moved on. When I was a kid, the projects were like a run-down housing complex, sort of like government subsidized housing is in Fairfax now. Not the best, not the worst. When I was in law school, I rode a beat with some cops who drove past the St. Thomas Project to show me what it had become. Too dangerous for anyone to live there, but they still do. The tax base in New Orleans has moved out to the suburbs and the city services suffer for it. It's not the bricks and the mortar and the dirt that matter, it's the people and their attitudes towards their surroundings. Probably the two most useful things the Clinton administration did was set up programs to help low income people buy houses, and cut the capital gains tax on home sales, both of which have had the salutary effect of encouraging home ownership in cities. I don't know anything about Iraq, but I do know that people take care of what they own. According to Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist who specializes in Third World economics, the single most useful service a government can perform anywhere is a reliable system of property registry so that people who buy property can be confident that it will remain theirs. Hopefully, what the Americans are doing is priming the pump, getting the system started so it can go on its own, operated by the Iraqi people.

To: NickSE who wrote (101546)	6/15/2003 1:47:35 AM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

That was an absolutely spectacular article. It's exactly the kind of action that needs to be taken. Great work, Army. Derek