For a change of pace

We keep hearing about people demanding to hear the "good news" from Iraq. Well, here's something I think is good news. It won't satisfy the hawks because it has to do with undoing damage caused by the war, damage which would not have occurred but for the war, but still, it is good news.

The Christian Science Monitor reported last Thursday that

[i]t's taken months of removing soot, tackling water damage, and reorganizing, but readers and researchers are back at Iraq's National Library.

Nearly a year and a half after one of Iraq's chief repositories of historical record was looted and burned, surviving archives and manuscripts are being cleaned and catalogued - while the director ventures out occasionally to scour book markets for lost treasures. ...

After suffering disheartening losses, Iraq's cultural heritage is coming back. Although some valuable museum pieces and whole periods of archives are lost forever, thousands of artifacts have been recovered, while books and manuscripts are being restored. ...

About 60 percent of the records and documents of modern Iraq were lost, along with virtually all historical maps and photos, and perhaps 95 percent of rare books, [National Library Director Saad] Eskander says. Almost all equipment was destroyed or carried away as well. ...

The picture is less mixed at the national museum, in part because the museum safeguarded most of its best pieces - and because the museum's funding picture is brighter than the library's. ...

[Board of Antiquities and Heritage Abdul Aziz] Hameed's cheeriness derives in part from the fact that losses here were much less than they might have been. "We anticipated things would not go well in the war, so we moved almost everything out," he says. As a result, only 39 pieces of "great value" were stolen - and half of those have been recovered.

In all, about 15,000 objects (from small jewelry pieces to ancient seals) were stolen, but about 4,000 of those were recovered, Hameed says, while another 4,000 are "on their way back" - from places like Amman and Paris and New York's Kennedy Airport, where officials have confiscated more than 600 pieces.

A lot of that recovery was due to international cooperation, including by (let it be said) US forces in Iraq - cooperation and assistance which is also being seen in the reconstruction of the library and museum.

One of the rarely-noted tragedies of the war was the loss of major parts of the cultural heritage of the world's oldest civilization. Some of that loss is irreplaceable. But that some of it being undone is worthy of note and gladness.