It's not until you reach the end of your first draft that you can begin to see how the pieces of your story really fit—or don't fit. That's why they say writing is actually rewriting. God is in the details.
Thieves of Baghdad ~Matthew Bogdanos

I found this book completely fascinating. Col. Matthew Bogdanos holds nothing back as he tells his account of the recovery efforts of thousands of antiquities after the fall of Baghdad from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. ( )

I started reading this book because I thought it would be mostly about the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and I wanted to learn more about that incident. This book is not that kind of book. It was a memoir of the life of Bogdanos. As such it was a whole lot of braggadocio and less about what I was looking for. Even so I found the book interesting and compelling as Bogdanos is a very curious mixture of testosterone overload, learned classics scholar, and lawyer - not a polymath, just something else. I am glad I read this book as I do have a much better understanding of what exactly happened at the Iraq museum and why it happened. My conclusion is that there is nothing to be done about looting as it is a old as civilization, but that the root cause of this incident was greed and corruption at the highest levels previous to the war itself. Most of the oldest works on display in the museum were already replicas in 2003 because the real item had been stolen years before 1993 or 2003. All of the people who worked at the Iraq museum before 2003 should have been fired and told not to come back to work because they were part and parcel with the scam to skim these works and use them as a cash reservoir from which the high government officials could draw at will. According to Bogdanos, the museum employees were no help in finding the looted items and in several cases didn't have the knowledge they needed to run a museum of that size and scope anyway. They had received their appointments as favors and reciprocity agreements with those in power in the government. Add to that the problem that the real looting had been done in the 30 years that Saddam Hussein was in power, and was probably done with his knowledge and consent by his sons and other party apparatchiks years before the actual First Gulf War, let alone the second. The end result is that the most valuable pieces that are gone are probably gone for good. They have disappeared into the black hole of rich collectors and will only reappear sometime in the future when that person or their heirs needs cash, or simply doesn't care about the pieces.

The most interesting part of the book is the last two chapters where Bogdanos discusses the problem of looting and what can be done about it. He fingers several groups of people for causing the problem. These are academe, art and history experts, international art dealers, and museum administrators. Most of these groups yammer on about provenance and then turn a blind eye to providing it. Bogdanos fingers the large international auction houses and art dealers as one source of this kind of problem. They simply make too much money from these transactions to stop doing it. They also do all they can to block legislation that would put road blocks up. Academe comes in for fire as well, because often the purchasers of the art call in academics to verify authenticity. The academics in turn get exclusive rights to study the object and write about it. This makes them unwilling to turn in art dealers or buyers when the academics have a reasonable suspicion that the object is stolen.

If you like memoirs, this was reasonably well written (by a collaborating author) and as a blow-by-blow account of the early days of the Second Gulf War it provides a decent picture of what the U. S. military was trying to do and what resources they had on hand. All-in-all, this was a book worth reading but be forewarned that it is NOT about the looting of the Iraq Museum in the Second Gulf War. It is about Bogdanos. ( )

After 9/11, NYC assistant DA Bogdanos was called up in his capacity as a Marine reservist. He went first to Afghanistan where he helped to establish border security. In the spring of 2003 he went to Iraq. A chance encounter with an angry journalist changed his team’s mission to that of investigating the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Bogdanos and his team used their law enforcement and investigative skills to determine what happened in the museum, create a list of items missing from the museum, identify the individuals or groups most likely responsible for the looting, and recover a good number of the missing artifacts. Bogdanos had a few short months to lead this team before being reassigned to more urgent duties, and he was deeply disappointed that he was unable to recover all of the missing items from the Iraq Museum.

In the author’s note, Bogdanos claims that he “doesn’t like people who go to war and write books about themselves,” and that “this book is not about me.” However, it mostly is about him, or at least about his interests. Bogdanos had a classical education in addition to his law studies and military service, so news of looted antiquities hit him in a sensitive spot. Few people outside of archaeological circles would be as passionate as he is about these antiquities, and this book seems to be an attempt to persuade his audience of the importance of continuing the effort to recover the stolen antiquities and of providing adequate human resources and funding to complete the task. It will be a hard sell since it’s higher up Maslow’s pyramid than food, shelter, health, security, economic stability, and education. ( )

Written by the equivalent of a very well-read eagle Scout, giving a half-time football speech, on acid. Sometimes trite, sometimes over-the-top. The narrative covers a very short segment of the story. I would have liked to have heard more of this remarkable story, ie, about recovery of these treasures. An extra half star for an amazing subject. ( )

BBC Programme with horrible destruction by ISIS of archaeological treasures in Iraq