The National Museum Of Iraq is no more. Looters carrying knives, guns and pieces of jagged metal stormed through it, carting off thousands of precious antiquities, many of them thousands of years old. Statues, carvings, and various other artifacts were taken away, some in the pockets of children. The museum had been closed for some time, and now, for all practical purposes, it does not exist.

This is a terrible loss for the art world, for historians, and for the Arab world in general. It is a tragedy all on its own. But looting in Iraq has been treated as an expectation, not a crisis, and now the premier collection of the Middle East is gone forever.