More evidence from the NY Times that we have a long process ahead of us. Here's hoping that our govt. demonstrates the kind of cultural understanding that will be needed to mend this broken country.

"This morning, the ashes were still smoldering at the Ministry for Religious Affairs, where a building housing thousands of Korans, many of them illuminated and hand written, several a thousand years old, had been burned to a charred shell. It was another severe blow to Iraq's 10,000 years of cultural history, along with the looting of the National Museum and the burning of the National Library, in which countless priceless artifacts and books were lost."

"'When Baghdad fell to the Mongols in 1258, these books survived,' said Abdel Karim Anwar Obeid, 42, the ministry's general manager for administration. 'And now they didn't survive. You can't put a price on this loss.'"

"'As an educated man, I see that the future will be worse than the past,' he said. 'The British and the United States are here for the oil, and even Israel is getting its cut. They all want to destroy Islam.'"

"'I'm happy that Saddam Hussein is gone,' he said. 'I don't care if the Americans are here or not. But nothing has changed for me. I am out of jail, but I have no job, nowhere to live. These are not good times for me.'"