Skimming through your posts so far on the looting issue, I wonder if you might say whether you more or less agree with Francis Deblauwe's estimates of missing/damaged items at the Iraqi National Museum? He has a sidebar item with his best guesses:

• 300 artifacts in public galleries: 28% missing, 18% damaged
• 468,340 artifacts in storage inside Museum: 8% missing, 12% damaged
• 7,360 artifacts in storage in Central Bank: 3% missing, 10% damaged
• 25,000 artifacts in storage elsewhere outside the Museum: 5% missing, 5% damaged
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501,000 artifacts in total, of which 8% (38,390) missing and 11% (57,292) damaged

Which is still very bad, but not the complete and utter catastrophe it seemed like early on. That still leaves plenty of archaeological sites and other museums at risk, of course.

I guess I'm hoping for some kind of "summing up, the story thus far" post sometime. Judging from your posts like this one, Mr. (Dr?) Donny George seems to be a real piece of work.

Great blog!

Given how little hard evidence we have to work with, I would not even attempt to estimate actual museum losses. Even guesses have a way of establishing themselves -- sometimes it's better staying away from fixed figures, however tentatively expressed. If anything, one might want to posit a possible range for total losses, a range which in this case would be extremely wide.

More summaries to come, but again, this is a story in progress.