Posted 12:04 PM by Floyd

Jim Treacher suggested a new slogan for anti-war protesters: "Save the Statues". How about "Save the Palaces"? Several people have objected to the "looting" of Saddam's palaces by US soldiers.

Here's "Road to Surfdom" blogger Tim Dunlop on the subject:

On the other hand, this sounds a lot like looting (via Soulpacific):
Soldiers used Saddam's toilets (for many the first indoor plumbing they'd seen in four months), rifled through documents, helped themselves to ashtrays, pillows, gold-painted Arab glassware and other souuvenirs.

Strangely, the word is not used.

These were soldiers who had captured the enemy leader's dwelling. How detached from reality do you have to be to complain that they examined documents? Does Dunlop think that the 3ID needs a search warrant?

(I learned from the comments section that it's fun to be a lefty blogger. Cause if anyone criticizes you, you just call them "freepers" and morons, then move on to your next triumph.)

And here's a letter to the editor in today's San Jose Mercury News:

Looting hurts U.S. cause

IT is with alarm that I note news reports that U.S. soldiers have taken ``souvenirs'' from an Iraqi presidential palace.

Operation Iraqi Freedom does not mean that everything in Iraq is free for the taking. Thumb your noses all you want at Saddam Hussen, but looting the property of the Iraqi people is not the way to obtain the respect either of the Iraqi people we are ``liberating'' or of the international community.

Rob Schneyer
Santa Clara

The palaces are not "the property of the Iraqi people". If anyone from the Iraqi government ever said that, it was a lie devised by Saddam to excuse his corruption and greed.

It seems to me that if Schneyer is going to take dictators' word as gospel, then he must also object to the liberation of 100 Iraqi children from a children's prison. After all, the Baathists would also classify that prison as "property of the Iraqi people".