A November 2004 Atlantic article shows that Frank Rich still can't get his facts right. Money quote:
Everyone knows about the looting of Iraq's museums during last year's war. What almost no one knows is that most of the museums' holdings had been stolen and sold years before — and not by mobs of Iraqis off the street.
For the record, I tracked down my initial comments on the looting of the Iraq museum. Frank Rich claimed the following:
Sullivan damned Mr. Rumsfeld's critics as fatuous aesthetes exploiting a passing incident to denigrate the liberation of Iraq.
My post of April 22, 2003, says:
I remain an optimist about the Iraqi future - and America's critical role in it. Yes, there have been some obvious screw-ups - the failure to protect Baghdad's museums strikes me as damn-near indefensible. But the direction is clear.
It seems to me that a blogger who wrote about the looting of the museum as "damn-near indefensible," does not deserve the moniker "cheerleader" of Rumsfeld's acquiescence to looting. I got a lot of things wrong. But it's not fair to blame me for saying something I didn't.