Q: Let me turn to the situation, the nonmilitary situation if you
will, in Iraq, and that is the whole issue of looting. This is the
scene with the Museum of Antiquities, which housed treasures dating back
thousands and thousands of years from the beginning of civilization, and it
was ransacked and destroyed -- about 175,000 items. The head of the
museum, "Our heritage is finished." What happened there? How
did we allow that museum to be looted?
Rumsfeld: How did we allow? Now, that's really a wonderful,
amazing statement.
Q: No, how were we --
Rumsfeld: No, let me just say a word here.
Q: Wait, well --
Rumsfeld: Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Q: No, let me be precise, because it's an important point --
Rumsfeld: But we didn't allow it. It happened. And that's
what happens when you go from a dictatorship with repressed order, police
state to something that is going to be different. There's a transition
period, and no one is control. There are periods where -- we're still
fighting in Baghdad. We don't allow bad things to happen. Bad
things do happen in life, and people do loot. We've seen that in the
United States. It's happened in every country. It's a shame when
it happens. I'll bet you anything that if they -- when order is
restored and we have a more permissive environment that there will be
opportunities to ask people to return some of those things that were
taken. We have already found people returning supplies to
hospitals.
Q: What the heads of the museums will say is that they actually ask
for the U.S. to help protect it, and that the U.S. declined. Is that
accurate?
Rumsfeld: Oh, my goodness. Look, I have no idea. We've got
troops on the ground, who do you know who we asked and whether his
assignment at that moment was to guard a hospital instead -- those kinds of
things are so anecdotal, and it always breaks your heart to see destruction
of things. But --
Q: The Red Cross said hospitals were also looted. Does that
surprise you? I mean, it's one thing for the Iraqis to ransack, loot
Saddam's palaces and steal his faucets. It's quite another to loot
their own museum and their own hospitals. Did that surprise
you?
Rumsfeld: Surprise me? I don't -- disorder happens every time
there's a transition. We saw it in Eastern European countries when
they move from the communist system to a free system. We've seen it in
Los Angeles here in our own country. We've seen it in Detroit, we've
seen it in city after city when there was a difficulty. And it always
breaks your heart. You're always sorry to see it, and it isn't
something that someone allows or doesn't allow. It's something that
happens. We know there are people -- there are people who do bad
things. There are people who steal from hospitals in the United
States. So does it surprise me that people went into a hospital and
did something? I guess it doesn't surprise me. It's a shame,
it's too bad, and we're trying to get medical supplies in to those hospitals
that were robbed, and we are doing it, and we are having good success at
it.
