How To Make Friends and Influence People

This from the Belfast Telegraph:

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
17 April 2006

...for more than a millennium, Babylon was one of the great cities of antiquity. It reached its greatest glory in the early 6th century BC, as the capital of Nebuchadnezzar II, builder of the celebrated Hanging Gardens.

Babylon declined and fell into ruin after it was conquered by the Persians under Cyrus the Great in around 538BC. But no devastation seems to have matched that inflicted by US troops and their Polish allies after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

...after entering Babylon in April 2003, coalition forces turned the site into a base camp, flattening and compressing tracts of ruins as they built a helicopter pad and fuel stations. The soldiers filled sandbags with archeological fragments and dug trenches through unexcavated areas, while tanks crushed slabs of original 2,600-year-old paving.

Yessir. Giving Iraqi kids Hershey bars will certainly overcome any ill will caused by the United States Marine Expeditionary forces and their intentional destruction of Iraq's irreplaceable historical artifacts and sites.

Don't blame our soldiers, they were only "following orders". But it would be most interesting to find out who -- and why -- someone would order such an act, to build a base directly on historical ruins, instead of anywhere else in a vast sea of sand and rock.