Left Turn on Bird Street

Let's make a movie

Life already wrote the script for it.

Looters, mostly American, but also some Italian and Polish, have ripped off hundreds of millions of dollars of art and thousands of years of Iraqi and Babylonian history, furious art experts report.

Think: Three Kings. with more locations.

All we need is $5-$80 million (i.e., few to many special effects).

IPS: What impact has there been on the United States?

IPS: One of its reactions was to rejoin UNESCO, which the US had withdrawn from during the era of [Ronald] Reagan [1981-1989] on the pretext that the UN agency served as "a communist front". Experts at the US State and Defense departments are trying to mitigate the damages. US military police helped Iraqi police track down the Lady of Warka, dubbed the "Mona Lisa of Mesopotamia", (pictured at right) a 5,200-year-old marble sculpture that is one of the earliest known representations of the human face in the history of art.

IPS: How significant are the losses?

IPS: The Lady of Warka may be worth $100 or $150 million. A Sumerian cuneiform tablet or an Assyrian stela can fetch $57,000 at the border. Some Iraqis have been purchasing books at used-book markets in Baghdad to return them to the libraries. But the damage is incalculable. In the Baghdad National Library, around one million books were burnt, including early editions of Arabian Nights, mathematical treatises by Omar Khayyam, and tracts by philosophers Avicena and Averroes. IPS

PS: I'm open to casting suggestions, including DUSTIN Hoffman as the greasy go-between art buyers and Benito del Toro (sp?) as the pissed-off US Army Reserve sargent on extended tour who rounds up the team to pull off the Lady Warka rip-off.

I see a weak-chinned actor playing the computer geek lieutenant in the US forces ech section who willingly subordinates himself to the lesser-ranked sarget, but infinitely craftier, sargent who is only trying to get back at the army and make the whole pain in the butt and dangerous impressment of labor pay off for him, richly.

It would also be nice to have Jeremy Whatshisman doing a turn as a British officer in cahoots with the American gang. He'd give the expert advice on what to steal and where to find it and what the hell a stela is.

He'd be the voice-over narrator uttering the observations and lessons of exactly what history is being destroyed, lost, stolen or strayed in the process, and what it was worth in terms of mankind's cultural patrimony and, more importantly, in cold hard cash.

You know, so the typicalAmerican audience of pathetically uneducated philistines can get the point. Possibly. -- Tom Nadeau