But the story illustrates Americans’ paradoxical approach to lies. Certainly most humans hold complicated and deep-seated views on deceit and candor; Americans, however, seem to have an especially bipolar one. At times, they assume a puritanical, absolutist stance on telling falsehoods: It is always bad. Other times, they’re far more lenient: It’s acceptable. This conflict is evident today when we look at how Americans have reacted to the fact that the Bush administration hyped, and perhaps in part fabricated, its case for invading Iraq, and that it grossly distorted who would benefit from its massive tax cuts. Americans put a premium on honesty and forthrightness, but they appear willing to forgive Bush’s exaggerations and hype and the convoluted excuses his administration has offered in the aftermath of war. At one point — in response to those who questioned the administration’s assertions about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction — Bush accused his critics of indulging in “revisionist history.”

It’s ironic that this is the very same populace that a few years ago was glued to its TV sets as Congress impeached then-President Bill Clinton for fibbing about his sexual dalliances with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Clinton was vilified, even though his lie was one many men caught in a similar position wouldn’t have thought twice about committing. (In fact, some of his most vituperative opponents, including Newt Gingrich, hid their own sexual affairs.) Eventually, Americans wearied of the drawn-out impeachment process, and the Senate acquitted Clinton. Still, many Americans thought — and still think — that his lie undermined the integrity of the presidency. A more recent example is Martha Stewart. Many Americans believe Stewart should be punished for allegedly lying about the sale of roughly $240,000 in ImClone stock.

Why is it that Americans have given Bush a pass on his misleading and trumped-up evidence about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, when they pilloried Clinton and Stewart for far less devastating transgressions? The answer may be simple: It’s human nature. We’re hard-wired to forgive some lies — and liars — more than others.

“People don’t focus as much on the sin as on the sinner,” says Robert P. Lawry, a professor of law and the director of the Center for Professional Ethics at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, in Cleveland. “Bush’s popularity explains the shrugging of the shoulders. An awful lot of people seem to have a visceral, negative reaction to Martha Stewart; they don’t like her. They like Bush, so they forgive him. It has nothing to do with the lie. Going to war is much more problematic a lie than one that nets you a small gain, relatively speaking, in the stock market. People are not paying attention to the implications and importance of the lie.”

Lawry surmises people base their likes and dislikes on fairly superficial assessments: They see Martha as an uppity bitch and George W. as a regular guy. Yet, there are deeper, more complicated reasons why Americans are forgiving Bush — and it has nothing to do with his magnetic personality and far more with the times we live in.

We’re scared.

Since 9/11, Americans have been living in a state of fear and anxiety comparable to the Cold War in the ’50s and early ’60s, or to the World War II era. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took more than 3,000 lives, making it the deadliest foreign attack on the U.S. since Pearl Harbor. Experts who study deceit in all of its forms and degrees contend that it therefore makes perfect sense that Americans are willing to accept and forgive, though not necessarily believe, Bush’s statements, even if those were intentionally or otherwise misleading. Humans are more or less genetically programmed to accept falsehoods that comfort them during periods of extreme stress. Call it the fear factor: Being able to rally around a strong leader — and the flag — is reassuring to many Americans.

“An audience is softened up to believe information when they feel threatened or when they are aroused by anger or fear,” says Carolyn Keating, a professor of psychology at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. “Two things happen when we are under threat: We focus on peripheral, superficial clues and we don’t follow complex logic — only what we feel.”

Consider the now famous suggestion made by President Bush in his January State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy “significant quantities” of uranium from an unnamed African country, widely assumed to be Niger, for use in nuclear weapons. In the days before the war started, the documents on which the allegation was based were debunked as forgeries by United Nations weapons inspectors. Top administration officials insisted as recently as last month that they were not aware of the forgeries at the time of Bush’s speech. But then, on Sunday, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV wrote in the New York Times that the CIA sent him to Niger in 2002 to assess the validity of the alleged uranium sale. Wilson wrote that he’d quickly determined the reports were false and that his findings were forwarded to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Finally, on Monday, the White House admitted the president relied on inaccurate, incomplete information for that crucial passage of his State of the Union address.

It is among the clearest evidence to date that the administration ignored critical information that didn’t support its war cause and that it thereby misled the American people. But what Americans feel right now, according to psychologists and other experts, is that they want to support Bush whether he’s right or wrong.

Of course, it remains possible that the administration received bad information from the intelligence agencies. And, too, the belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction or the materials and means to produce them extended far beyond the White House to many Western intelligence agencies and to past and current members of the United Nations weapons inspections team.

Or perhaps Americans were less concerned about WMD than about other justifications for war. Saddam was well known as a megalomaniacal dictator who gassed his own people, assassinated and tortured his political opponents, and waged war against neighboring Iran and Kuwait. Influential Times columnist Thomas Friedman summed up this the-ends-justify-the-means argument in an April piece: “Whether you were for or against this war, whether you preferred that the war be done with the United Nations’ approval or without it, you have to feel good that right has triumphed over wrong. America did the right thing here.”

Friedman’s reasoning might go a long way to explaining why, despite grumblings from a few Democrats, there hasn’t been public outrage over the fact that the United States’ preemptive attack on another country may have been based on errant or manipulated intelligence. In mid-June, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that almost a third of the respondents didn’t expect the United States to find WMD in Iraq. However, a poll in September 2002 showed that a large majority of Americans supported the Iraq war because they believed administration contentions that Saddam’s regime had biological or chemical weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and had harbored terrorists. At the time, Americans thought the war was justified because of Saddam’s threatening weapon arsenal.

More than two months after U.S. Marines took control of Baghdad, no WMD have been located. Sure, a couple of tractor-trailers, stripped bare by looters, have been found, but even the State Department’s intelligence division isn’t sure those are the same mobile bioweapon factories that Secretary of State Colin Powell warned of when he spoke before the United Nations in February. The Iraqi nuclear arsenal? Parts of equipment that could be used to enrich uranium were found buried in a scientist’s garden. The International Atomic Energy Agency says that the few pieces don’t show that Saddam had resumed his nuclear weapons program.

That may be why Americans are willing to overlook Bush’s statements about the WMD and instead accept that the war was necessary to topple a murderous, tyrannical dictator. “There’s an odd sense that maybe they [the Bush administration officials] lied to us, but we still did the right thing, so it doesn’t matter,” says Evelin Sullivan, the author of “The Concise Book of Lying” and a lecturer at Stanford University.

It’s not as though Americans don’t take lying seriously. They do. According to a Gallup poll conducted in early June and released on June 24, a majority didn’t think the federal government unfairly targeted Martha Stewart for allegedly selling ImClone stock on an inside tip. Her crime? Fibbing. Federal prosecutors charged Stewart with lying about her actions to federal investigators and her shareholders — not insider trading. Only 35 percent of Americans believe Stewart is being unfairly singled out because she is a successful woman. Most didn’t buy Stewart’s lawyers’ arguments — presented on her Web site — that the Department of Justice is attempting to divert attention away from Enron and WorldCom.

For those who may not be up on the Enron saga, Ken Lay, the former CEO of the energy company and a Bush political supporter, hasn’t been indicted for his role in the financial scandal even though he publicly assured investors, employees and the press that his company was healthy only months before it was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 2001.

And Americans’ contradictory views on deceit have nothing to with the implications or relevance of the false statements in question. Hundreds of American and British soldiers have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom, along with several thousand Iraqi civilians and soldiers. More are being killed each week. An untold number have been either injured or maimed. And U.S. involvement in that country is not over. Establishing order and rebuilding the infrastructure during the occupation will cost billions of dollars and more American lives. The consequences of Stewart’s mendacity, in comparison, seem, inconsequential.

Why, then, does Bush get a pass? The answer is that humans are hard-wired to believe their leaders, especially during times of anxiety and fear. Psychological studies show people are apt to identify with those who make them feel more powerful, says Keating, who studies charisma and leadership. In that sense, we’re less likely to criticize a leader if it would make us feel worse about ourselves at a time when we already feel vulnerable. If you doubt Americans feel insecure, consider the duct tape fiasco earlier this year, when the new Department of Homeland Security advised citizens to stock tape and plastic sheeting to seal their homes in case of biological or chemical attacks.

In her studies, Keating found that people tended to describe themselves in positive terms after seeing images of Bush. Shortly after he took office in 2001, she showed participants in an experiment computer screens that flashed subliminal pictures of him. Later, she showed them screens that flashed subliminal pictures of an anonymous New Jersey pig farmer. Even though the participants weren’t conscious of seeing either portrait, they were more apt to describe themselves in positive terms — powerful, compassionate, and strong –after seeing Bush’s face. This was even truer a couple of months after the al-Qaida attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

After the September strikes, Bush took an aggressive stance against terrorists. At one point, he even invoked a line reminiscent of the Old West, saying the United States wanted Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.” Bush also said that the largely Christian U.S. would wage a “crusade” against the Muslim terrorists. After the attacks, numerous news articles and TV commentaries extolled Bush’s newfound leadership abilities. So it wasn’t surprising to Keating that test participants thought of themselves in more positive terms after 9/11. Bush was being presented as a virile leader. “In the face of a threat,” she says, “we are particularly susceptible to falling under the influence of powerful leaders.”

When we’re stressed, we also block out more complex thoughts and instead focus on easily assimilated information. It’s as though our cognitive reasoning abilities fall asleep and our emotions take over. “Studies show that during those times they are more likely to process information that they have received on a very superficial level,” Keating says. Not only are we more apt to support our leaders, then, but we’re also not really discerning what we’re being told.

The best evidence that the public doesn’t make rational judgments during troubled periods is its acceptance of the administration’s implication of a link between al-Qaida and Saddam. Though Bush administration officials never provided concrete evidence Saddam was behind the 9/11, they mentioned the two in the same breath often enough for most Americans to believe that there was a legitimate connection. It’s almost as though it was a subliminal message — and if it was, it worked. In a February CNN-Time poll, 76 percent of those surveyed felt Saddam provided aid to al-Qaida and 72 percent thought he was “personally involved” in the September attacks. This misconception served to bolster Bush’s contention that Saddam was an immediate threat to the United States. At the end of June, a U.N. group charged with monitoring al-Qaida reported that so far it hadn’t found evidence connecting the terrorist group to Saddam’s regime.

The tactic of creating a menace to rally the populace around a cause isn’t new. “This is the oldest trick in the book for politicians,” Keating says, “even if they don’t know how it works.”

When Gustave Gilbert, a psychologist who interviewed the Nuremberg prisoners, talked to Hermann Goering, the former leader of the Third Reich’s Luftwaffe, Goering volunteered that it was relatively easy to persuade a populace to go to war. As quoted in Gilbert’s book “Nuremberg Diary,” Goering said: “It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.”

Gilbert disagreed with Goering’s analysis. “There is one difference,” he answered. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.” But Goering held his ground: “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Which may explain why Americans overwhelmingly supported the Iraq war, even though most of the rest of the world was willing to let the U.N. inspectors ferret out any weapons of mass destruction. But now that the war is over and our fear is, presumably, eased, why do we still believe Bush? Once again, it’s our human nature.

Homo sapiens are built to obstinately hold on to their beliefs, even in the face of conflicting evidence. Which means Americans who believed Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks and posed a threat to the world with his WMD will sift through all the information being presented to them and choose to heed only that which confirms their preexisting point of view. They will chose to believe administration speculations that Saddam may have moved his deadly arsenal to Syria before the war or perhaps hid it in obscure places around the country. (That may indeed be the case, but, so far, there’s no evidence to support those theories.) This is consistent with dissonance theory, says Douglas Raybeck, a professor of anthropology at Hamilton College in upstate New York.

“If we supported the war initially, then we are invested in that decision,” Raybeck says. “If you encounter information showing that the reasons for the war were not well founded, or were exaggerated, you have two choices: the war was indeed worthwhile, or we were took. We either acted wisely or were damned fools.” And few, understandably, want to think of themselves as fools.

A similar, if less glaring, example of denial took place over the Vietnam War. Americans were loath to condemn the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, even after it become known that President Lyndon Johnson had trumped up the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. As it turned out, the “unprovoked attack” on a U.S. destroyer on a “routine patrol” was a lie the Johnson administration used to ramp up military involvement in that Southeast Asian conflict. The war didn’t end until almost a decade and 50,000 American deaths later. Of course, the administration advanced many other Cold War arguments for the war, but nonetheless the episode shows that facts cannot always dissuade people from their original beliefs.

As the world becomes more complex and frightening, cognitive dissonance becomes even more prevalent, Raybeck says. People filter out more and more information in order to hold on to their beliefs. “Dissonance theory appears part of general human psychology,” he says, “but cultures, such as our own, that place a premium on individuality, are particularly subject to its influence.”

This trend in the United States toward less thoughtful and less objective reasoning will be hard to reverse — with ominous consequences for our democracy. Human behavior reinforces habits. Once people adjust their behavior to accommodate subtle deception or blatant lying from their leaders, it will be difficult for them to become more discerning or skeptical in the future, Raybeck says. It’s similar to when someone’s finger hurts when he bends it. If he avoids moving his finger, eventually the muscle will atrophy and he may lose all movement. Just as the body makes adjustments, so does the mind. Which may also explain why Americans didn’t seem to care that the Bush administration lied, or at the very least egregiously distorted the truth, when it declared that the new $350 billion tax cuts would benefit all.

“To the extent that American people abandon a critical and observant stance toward those in power,” Raybeck says, “it is more difficult to reverse this trend, especially since those in power will, or can, use their leverage to inhibit a change. One can anticipate more sound bites and 30-second political ads designed to associate the power holder with important symbols, but not a substantive treatment of issues.”

Sullivan, author of “The Concise Book of Lying,” believes the media may play a large role in determining which lies Americans care about and which ones they don’t. Perhaps, she surmises, we’re more concerned with Stewart’s coverup because that is the story presented to us day after day in newspapers, magazines and TV shows. Conversely, she says, we may not be as concerned about Bush’s prevarication, because the media hasn’t played it up. “I find that alarming,” Sullivan says. “If you package something right, you can get away with anything … If this administration has figured that out, then they can do anything. That strikes me as sinister.”

The British press, in fact, is giving Prime Minister Tony Blair a much harder time about the coalition’s assertion that Saddam had WMD.

Michael Wolff, in his column in the June 30 issue of New York magazine, theorizes that the media may even have aided the administration in its packaging of the war. When coalition forces were in Iraq, U.S. media giants were gunning for relaxed FCC rules, so they had an incentive to give the Bush administration glowing, heroic coverage of the Iraq war.

Maybe the bigger question for American democracy is: Did the Bush administration intentionally use our evolutionary weakness against us? Did it use orange alerts, duct tape and scary tales of WMDs to create an atmosphere in which Americans would be so frightened and feel so vulnerable that they would believe almost anything they were told and ignore all conflicting evidence?

Perhaps, though, our inbred desire for truth and honesty will eventually prevail. If history is any indication, our denial may weaken as evidence and more evidence surfaces that the Bush administration may not have been as truthful with us as we once thought. It took the White House tapes to bring down Nixon after Watergate. Unfortunately, it took thousands and thousands of Americans lives before the United States left Vietnam.

A Fox News opinion poll conducted on June 30 and July 1 shows that 60 percent of the respondents approved of how Bush is handling Iraq, and 30 percent disapproved. That’s a sharp decline from the time of Baghdad’s fall, when 75 percent approved and 19 percent disapproved.

But Americans, like all other humans, are susceptible to fooling themselves. “We are highly self-deceptive as a species,” Keating says. “Self-deception allows you to get behind the wheel of a car after an accident, or live at the foot of an active volcano. That’s how human beings deal with stress that they can’t control.”

It’s a complex exhibit and one that does not gloss over the existence of slavery. But its underlying narrative on that disgraced institution is simple: Yes, many slaves opposed slavery and fled North at the first chance, but other slaves, whose voices have been lost to history, did not. They included “some black Confederates, and not just slave laborers, but men who actually through their own free will supported the Confederate cause,” says John Coski, the museum’s historian.

It is the kind of observation certain to leave many people incredulous. Among them is former Gov. Doug Wilder, a Democrat who at 71 is old enough to be the grandson of slaves. When Wilder hears such sentiments — and they are not entirely rare in modern Richmond, the capital of the Old South — it reinforces his conviction that Virginia, and the entire nation, need a museum of American slavery to fully comprehend the institution’s complexities.

“Let me tell you something,” he says in a low, steady voice. “When Grant was coming toward Richmond, they [the slaves] were told that the Northerners were going to kill them all — masters and everyone else. My grandfather became so frightened that he hid in a silo and almost suffocated to death. He was rescued by Northern troops. My point is that for them to put that on display now is counterproductive and it will hurt any reconciliation … That’s why it’s so necessary for the slavery museum to exist. To tell it as it is, unbiased.”

Wilder’s idea, somewhere between a dream and a firm plan at this point, is to help resolve the still open wounds of slavery by confronting them head-on and at a $200 million National Slavery Museum on the banks of the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg, Va. Sitting in his office at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he’s a professor of public policy, Wilder talks about how he believes such a museum will do more than preserve the artifacts of the slave trade. It will show the grim facts of how slavery shaped the nation — and how it haunts the American dream.

“The slavery museum, in brief, should be able to cause people to reassess their attitudes about human beings, particularly about human beings of color,” Wilder says. “If it does not, then perhaps nothing will.”

One hundred and 40 years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the United States, and the South in particular, still struggle with slavery’s vestiges. Late last year, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott was forced to step down from his post as Senate majority leader after making remarks perceived as wistful for the days of racial segregation. Georgia’s new governor, Republican Sonny Perdue, was tripped up this spring by his 2002 campaign promise to bring back the state’s former flag, which from 1956 until 2001 incorporated the Confederate battle emblem. In the end, Perdue reached a compromise with state legislators and agreed to let voters decide next year whether to keep the current flag or adopt a new one based on the Confederate “Stars and Bars” with the added motto In God We Trust. And last month, there were heated protests in Richmond over placing a statue of Lincoln and Lincoln’s son Tad at Richmond’s historic Tredegar Iron Works, where cannons for the Confederate Army were forged.

All these incidents tell a part of the same troubling story: The Civil War has long been over, but even now slavery remains a ghost that time alone has not banished from the American conscience.

Wilder recognizes some Americans may not want to unearth slavery’s past. The sad truth is that the United States, to a large extent, was built by slave labor and its history as a nation was shaped by slavery. A convincing case can be made that, if not for slavery, the U.S. might not be the world power it is today. In that sense, slavery has indisputably shaped and influenced every American’s life. Yet, because it affronts our sense of our country’s idealistic precepts that “all men are created equal,” and because it creates in both blacks and whites a deep sense of shame, we’re reluctant to talk about it, let alone build a museum that commemorates the enslavement of other human beings.

Wilder envisions his National Slavery Museum examining, as he puts it, “the roots and fruits” of the slave culture, from its beginnings in the late 15th century off the African coast through modern times. It will show the history of the African slave trade, where tribes sold other tribes to European traders, but also educate visitors about the slaves’ lives: their origins, their languages, their religions, their customs, as well as their contributions to American life. Wilder sees the museum as an educational center, complete with an auditorium, lecture halls, research offices, a library, exhibition space, a repository for artifacts and documents, a full-scale reproduction of a slave ship, and a bookstore. He envisions millions of tourists to Virginia and Washington making the detour to Fredericksburg.

However harmless Wilder’s effort seems in the early 21st century, it is sure to provoke renewed controversy over the Civil War — and slavery’s legacy — in a place where the dominant culture views the past through a lens of romance and denial. There’s no dispute that slavery is a part of the history of the North and the South. But slavery cannot be discussed without delving into the antebellum South’s role in perpetuating and expanding it westward, and the Confederacy’s stalwart defense of it.

For some Southerners, especially the Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose modest membership of 35,000 belies its formidable political clout, that’s simply not acceptable.

“If Douglas Wilder plans on telling the whole story of slavery, then it’ll be good,” says Bragdon “Brag” Bowling, commander of the Virginia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “If not, it’ll be more of the same: trying to demonize Southerners and leaving out Northern shipping merchants and the blacks who turned over other tribes to the Dutch and the English slaver traders. I’m concerned that the Southerner will be the bad guy in this and it was a whole lot more than that.”

In some respects, it is remarkable that the United States doesn’t have a museum dedicated to slavery, an institution that endured close to 250 years in this country. The first African slaves arrived in Jamestown, Va., in 1619, a year before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth. By the time of the Civil War in 1861, there were roughly 31.4 million Americans and 4.4 million of them, or 14 percent, were African-Americans. Of those, 4 million were slaves in the South. Almost one-third of all Southern families owned slaves.

The first national African-American memorial was proposed in 1915, 52 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves. A group of aging black Civil War veterans pushed for a “Negro Memorial” to commemorate African-American contributions. In 1929, Congress authorized a museum to be built in the capital. Intended to be a neo-classical edifice, similar to the U.S. Supreme Court, the memorial was never to be. That same year the stock market crashed, ushering in the Great Depression, so plans were scuttled. By the time World War II ended, the museum had been forgotten, and more than half a century would pass before Congress seriously considered it again.

In January, Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., reintroduced a bill to build a slavery memorial in Washington. It has since been referred to the House Committee on Resources. Slavery, says Wilder, is “the untold history of America.” But while he waits to build his museum, slavery’s story in the United States is already being told — in a way that he and many other Americans would hardly recognize.

The Museum of the Confederacy was founded in 1890 by a group of Richmond society ladies who wanted to preserve Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ house as well as enshrine Confederate artifacts and records. The Sons of Confederate Veterans group was founded six years later, and today sees as its mission “the vindication of the Cause for which we fought.” The group’s Web site proclaims Confederate soldiers fought for “the preservation of liberty and freedom” and “personified the best qualities of America.”

When Col. J.A. Barton Campbell, a retired Army Reserve colonel and a member of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, became the museum’s director in February 2002, one of his first acts was to place the Confederate battle emblem alongside the other flags in front of the museum. He also cut the staff by 20 percent, and soon afterward former museum employees were quoted anonymously in the Richmond Times-Dispatch saying they feared flying the rebel flag was a sign that the museum would begin to embrace a more pro-Southern stance on the War Between the States.

If true, it will mark a dramatic change. Over the last four decades, the Museum of the Confederacy has tried to transform itself from a memorial to the Confederacy to a more mainstream museum of Confederate history. It hasn’t been an easy, or entirely successful, evolution. Even in the late 1980s, at the same time Wilder was running for governor, the museum still told the story of slavery from a distinctly Confederate point of view. At the entrance of the main exhibit, a plaque explained that some Southerners referred to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression, a conflict between the Jeffersonian, agrarian ideals of the South and the industrial interests of the North. What scant discussion there was of slavery and its role in Southern life was presented in the best possible light.

One display showed a worn cat-o’-nine-tails with the explanation that although some slave owners whipped their slaves with such devices, most were kind. Displaying that one slave whip outraged unreconstructed Southerners and, of course, the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The rest of the world may be anti-Confederate, they contend, but their museum should provide an untarnished image of the proud and honorable Confederacy. And slavery, especially when slaves are being beaten, ruins that portrayal.

The Sons of the Confederate Veterans were up in arms again a few years later, in 1991, when the museum, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, presented a vast show on slavery, “Before Freedom Came,” with artifacts and documents from roughly 90 private and public collections. By examining slavery, critics thought the museum had — once again — betrayed its Confederate heritage. That’s why they welcomed Campbell’s decision to fly the Confederate battle flag: Maybe the museum was finally getting back to its roots.

“If the museum can’t present a good presentation of the Confederate States of the America, who can?” Bowling asks. “That’s what they’re there for.”

On a bright day earlier this year, posters for the upcoming Civil War movie, “Gods and Generals” hung near the museum’s entrance. The movie, starring Robert Duvall as Gen. Robert E. Lee and featuring a cameo appearance by Ted Turner as a rebel soldier, depicts the early years of the Civil War — from the Southern perspective. Indeed, “Gods and Generals” used 7,500 Civil War re-enactors, who supplied their own period uniforms and weapons, for the battle scenes. In a review, the New York Times said the three-and-a-half-hour movie “goes out of its way to follow the example of ‘Gone With the Wind’ in sanitizing the South’s treatment of African Americans. Its one-sided vision shows freed and about-to-be-freed slaves cleaving to their benign white masters and loyally serving the Confederate Army.”

With such a wistful vision of the Civil War and slavery, “Gods and Generals” could fit unobtrusively into the museum’s current presentations. The museum’s main exhibit is called “The Confederate Years: The Southern Military in the Civil War,” and it doesn’t shirk from discussing slavery’s role in the South’s war effort. But the perspective is decidedly Confederate: Even the brief overview of the reasons for the South’s secession from the Union, at the beginning exhibit, presents the Civil War as more of a disagreement over states’ rights than as an ideological difference over the institution of owning human beings.

“Lincoln’s Republican Party,” it says, “opposed the expansion of slavery and the enforcement of the Constitutional requirement to return slaves to their owners.” And that, it goes on to say, was “an act hostile to the South’s interests.”

Step around the corner and the exhibit goes on to give a fairly rousing justification for why Southerners eagerly donned gray uniforms, drawing parallels with the revolutionary American colonists taking up arms against the British. “Confederate soldiers were fighting a ‘Second American Revolution’ for the rights and liberties that their forefathers had won in the first American Revolution,” says one placard. “Among these rights was the right to own slaves, a right sanctioned by the Constitution and by custom — even though the vast majority of the Confederate soldiers did not own slaves.”

The exhibit also talks about how the Confederate military enlisted African-Americans to build fortifications and serve the army. While it mentions that many Southern states and the Confederate government forced blacks — slave and free — into the military, it also highlights African-Americans who were loyal to the Confederacy. It talks about free blacks in the South forming militias to aid the Confederate cause. (Their offer was refused.) And it looks at slaves who stood by their masters. One such faithful slave was Marlboro Jones, owned by Capt. Randal F. Jones. Under his portrait, a description tells how Jones brought his master home to Savannah after he was mortally wounded on the battlefield. A visitor is left with the impression that African-Americans weren’t all that dissatisfied with slavery. The museum’s newest exhibit, “The Confederate Nation,” will probably not discourage that perception.

Coski, the museum’s historian, is proud that the new show does not depict slavery in stereotypical terms. “African-Americans would be loath to admit that any slave would be loyal to the Confederates,” he says. “And the Sons of the Confederate Veterans and activists would swear up and down that the absence of any slave rebellion shows that slaves were fundamentally loyal to the South.”

The truth, Coski says, lies somewhere in the middle. Though there were no slave uprisings in the South during the Civil War, he points out that about 500,000 African-Americans out of a total of 4 million fled north of the Mason-Dixon line, representing the largest migration in U.S. history. Obviously, he says, that debunks the Confederate myth that content slaves supported the Confederacy. “Hundreds of thousands didn’t act as loyal to the homeland,” Coski says. “They took the first opportunity to go to the North.”

On the other hand, the exhibit will display artifacts and documents showing some African-Americans, slaves and freemen, did indeed back the Confederacy. “It would be illogical and downright patronizing to think that 4 million African-Americans all reacted and behaved in the same way to something like the Civil War,” Coski says. “We will also have artifacts that speak to the stereotypical slaves that buried the silver or protected the master and mistress from the Union Army.”

Wilder himself wouldn’t recognize the need for a slavery museum until 1992, when, as Virginia’s governor — and the first elected black governor in U.S. history — he led a state trade mission to Africa and visited Goree Island, off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Goree was a central trading post for the early slave trade. Untold millions of Africans passed through island’s so-called Door of No Return. While no hard numbers exist, it’s estimated that traders shipped between 10 million and 28 million Africans overseas. Packed tight in ships with little food and water, more than 2 million of them are thought to have died during the crossing known as the Middle Passage on their way to the Americas and the Caribbean. Wilder’s trip to Goree carried great symbolic significance and a deep personal resonance. After leaving the dark, oppressive museum angry and dejected, he was determined to have America confront its own slave past.

Today, the benign depictions of slavery and “happy slaves” like the one at the Museum of the Confederacy reaffirm his belief that a museum solely devoted to slavery must be built in this country. True, slavery has been abolished in the United States for almost 138 years (slaves in Texas finally heard they were free on June 19, 1865), but it had flourished for nearly 250 years before that. It fueled the U.S. economy and shaped its political discourse. It was the single greatest affront to the ideals articulated at the nation’s founding, and it remains a source of profound conflict and alienation in a racially mixed society. Few people, he insists, understand the degree to which slavery and its aftermath still cast a shadow over American culture.

And yet, where African nations such as Senegal and Ghana, and even the small Caribbean island, Curaçao, have slave museums, the United States does not. This country has a national museum on the Washington Mall to commemorate the Holocaust, a profound global tragedy, but one that occurred in Europe.

To Wilder, it’s striking that it seems easier for Americans to confront the shameful history of Nazi-sponsored genocide. “None of it ever happened here, none of it,” he says. “To the extent that Jews were persecuted here, they were persecuted along with African-Americans. There was anti-Semitism, anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-anything in terms of people who weren’t the true bloods. I want to show that there aren’t any true bloods in America. I don’t want to talk about what was good and what was bad and who was right and who was wrong. I want to lay out the facts, so you can tell the story for yourself.”

Wilder hasn’t been the only one to contemplate a museum devoted to slavery themes. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, set to open in 2004, will tell the story of roughly 100,000 slaves who escaped from the South in the 1800s, aided by abolitionists who spirited them from one safe house to another, until they were in the North.

And for almost a year, a presidential commission has been looking into building a National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. President George W. Bush signed legislation in December 2001 to appropriate $2 million for a commission to study the idea. After a series of town meetings around the country, the panel delivered a 122-page report to Congress on April 1, calling for a museum to be built next to the reflecting pool in front of the Capitol. Inevitably, slavery would be a major theme for that museum, says George McDonald, the commission’s director and its liaison with Department of the Interior’s National Parks Service.

“Slavery was the American Holocaust,” McDonald says. “That’s just my own opinion and it needs to be shown in that light. It will show the comprehensive human tragedy. From the Middle Passage where Africans were brought over here on top of each other to when they came here to be branded. We will deal with the whole. But we will deal with slavery in the true form. It won’t be sugarcoated.”

McDonald would like to get initial funding of $45 million for the museum in the 2004 federal budget. The total cost is expected to reach $400 million. With half that amount expected to come from a federal government already contending with the unknown costs of rebuilding Iraq as well as with soaring budget deficits, the project faces long odds in the near term. Yet, Claudine Brown, co-chair of the commission, insists that budget constraints shouldn’t deter federal officials. Congress “has exercised its will to create several other museums in the nation’s capital, whether there were wars, or pestilence, or seven-year locusts,” she says. “There is no viable reason why this museum should not be authorized. I think we have waited much too long.”

Wilder, meanwhile, staunchly believes that the country needs a museum dedicated to slavery — and only slavery. “Slavery is just so big,” Wilder says. “It’s too big to be compartmentalized. It’s the untold story of America: slavery. If you know where it’s been told, tell me.”

It’s been more than a decade since Wilder first proposed building a museum and it’ll be another four years before he expects to have it completed in 2007. One reason it has taken him so long to get his museum off the ground is that he’s been extremely careful in choosing the site. It had to be in Virginia. This is where slavery began in 1619, in Jamestown; it’s where Thomas Jefferson lived, he who owned slaves and yet penned the words “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence; where Wilder’s ancestors were kept as slaves; where major, and bloody, battles of the Civil War were fought; where capital of the Confederacy was located; and where Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Virginia marks slavery’s beginning in this country and its end.

After returning from his Africa trip in 1992, Wilder spent the next 10 years searching for a suitable location here. Before he started raising money from corporations and individuals, recruiting curators and museum experts, and collecting artifacts and records from private owners and other institutions, Wilder wanted land. As a seasoned politician who never lost an election in almost a quarter of a century, he saw securing the property as a way to retain control over the museum’s creation and therefore, a way to ensure its eventual success. Worried that internal squabbling would derail the project, Wilder wanted to limit the number of people involved early on.

“One of the things I’ve tried to do is keep things tight, so we don’t have political infighting,” he explains. “That comes, trust me, that comes with growth of anything … You have to understand the infighting. There’s so much of it. God have mercy. Who’s going to run this? Why should they run that?”

Jamestown was Wilder’s first choice. But after five years negotiating with the land’s owners, a fundamentalist Christian Pentecostal church, he gave up. (Church leaders were dead set against any tobacco or alcohol on the property, even at receptions and parties.) After his search in Richmond led down a few other dead ends, Larry Silver, a commercial developer and a longtime friend, offered him land in Fredericksburg, about 50 miles from Washington and 50 miles from Richmond. As soon as Wilder saw Silver’s parcel, he knew it was the right spot.

Almost 39 acres, the undeveloped wooded site is on a bluff overlooking the Rappahannock River near I-95. Last year, Silver deeded the landwith an estimated value of $20 million to $30 million — to the National Slavery Museum. When completed, the museum will be part of Silver’s larger 2,400-acre development, Celebrate Virginia, which will encompass stores, corporate offices and three golf courses.

Some local critics have questioned the propriety of placing a museum so near commercial property, but Wilder dismisses those concerns. There is enough land to separate it from the stores and offices, he says. Now, with the land secured, Wilder is turning his attention to planning and building the museum. He estimates it will cost $200 million to complete, but he expects it to be built in stages, as funds are available. So far, the National Slavery Museum has $1 million from Fredericksburg and another $1 million from the state. By year’s end, Wilder wants the board to have a plan in place to raise funds from corporate and individual donors.

That campaign may be a challenge, especially in the current economy. But he and others are optimistic. From planning to its opening in 1993, it took 15 years for the Holocaust Museum to be built. Congress authorized the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum for the American Indian in 1989. That museum’s new building on the Capitol Mall won’t open until September 2004 — again, 15 years later.

In Cincinnati, the Underground Railroad Freedom Center formed in 1994 and began fundraising in the fall of 1999. It has received $91 million in pledges toward its $110 million goal, and expects to open in 2004. Sixty percent of the funds came from individual and corporate donors. Given that the center was able to raise its funding in a relatively small amount of time, Ernest Britton, the center’s spokesman, says Wilder may be able to raise the funds necessary to open a portion of his slavery museum within four years.

“Absolutely, it’s possible,” Britton says. “It’s going to be based on the contacts and the relationships that they are able to establish with donors around the country and how concrete their plans are. People want to see something concrete. We didn’t have artifacts, but we had a schematic and conceptual plan.”

Though he doesn’t have much capital, Wilder has already attracted a distinguished architect for the project: Chien Chung Pei, founder of Pei Partnership Architects in New York City and son of the legendary architect I.M. Pei. At his father’s firm, the younger Pei was the designer in charge of the glass pyramid entrance at the Louvre in Paris and the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington. He has already shown Wilder preliminary renderings for a slavery museum: a modern structure with a glass gallery at the center with rectangular buildings on the sides and elongated terraces. (Wilder rejected another architect’s design that would have had two glass towers — one with gray panes and the other with dark blue — linked together with large symbolic chains.)

“The [slavery] museum is important for this country,” says Pei, who contacted Wilder after reading about his project. “Slavery is a story which should be told, but it’s important that it be told in the right way, told in a way that helps unite our country more so than to divide it. When you hear statements coming out of people like Trent Lott, you realize some people aren’t living in the 20th century, let alone the 21st. There is a deep-seated misunderstanding about a lot of things having to do with race. I think this museum, by educating people, can overcome a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of ignorance. Maybe I’m being too generous, but I think that ignorance plays a big role in that. But I’m just an architect.”

Wilder isn’t discouraged that after 10 years of his quest to build a slavery museum, he has neither committed donors nor a trove of slave artifacts, records and documents. With a scant $2 million and 4o acres of land in hand, he is confident that some portion of the National Slavery Museum will open to the public in four years — in time for the 400-year anniversary of the settlement of Virginia.

“We’re going to build the museum,” he says matter-of-factly. “Nothing is going to stop us.” Wilder firmly believes that if the United States doesn’t confront its history, in its entirety, then it will never live up to its potential. “This is what [Martin Luther] King was saying: America should live up to its precepts,” he says. “The more we learn about slavery, the more we learn that we haven’t lived up to our creed, the more we learn that we fostered a situation that divides and separates, that we have sanctioned a system that discriminates against human beings, that declassifies human beings … The story here is that America was founded on precepts which were never fulfilled. Opportunity, or recognition of these precepts, is ours if we take advantage of it. If we don’t, something obviously will happen to the fabric of our society. Rather than become closer, it’ll unravel. And no one wants that.”

Gibson recalls he talked to the group about the importance of safeguarding the museum from bomb damage — and from looting after the military conflict ended. “I pointed to the museum’s location on a map of Baghdad and said: ‘It’s right here,’” he recalled in an interview. “I asked them to make assurances that they’d make efforts to prevent looting and they said they would. I thought we had assurances, but they didn’t pan out.”

On April 10, a day after Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed and Baghdad was in the hands of U.S. military forces, the National Museum of Iraq was ransacked. In a matter of hours, thousands of Iraqis, some thought to be working for art dealers, clambered into the museum that had been closed to the public for years. After two days of looting, almost all of the museum’s 170,000 artifacts were either stolen or damaged. Ancient vases were smashed. Statues were beheaded. In the museum’s collection were items from Ur and Uruk, the first city-states, settled around 4000 B.C., including art, jewelry and clay tablets containing cuneiform, considered to be the first examples of writing. The museum also housed giant alabaster and limestone carvings taken from palaces of ancient kings.

“It’s catastrophic,” says Gibson, who is also head of the American Association for Research in Baghdad, a consortium of about 30 U.S. museums and universities. “It’s a lot like a lobotomy. The deep memory of an entire culture, a culture that has continued for thousands of years, has been removed. There was 5,000 years of written records, even Egyptian records don’t go back that far. It’s an incredible crime.”

In the aftermath of a looting spree that stripped museums in Baghdad and Mosul, left the National Library a smoldering ruin and turned thousands of ancient Qurans at the Ministry for Religious Affairs to ashes, archaeologists and museum curators from around the world are racing today to assess the damage and, where possible, to recover what has not been destroyed. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has called an emergency meeting Thursday in Paris to review the disaster. Even the U.S. government has pledged an aggressive effort to help recover Iraq’s stolen historical treasures.

Gibson, who will attend the UNESCO meeting, and other experts in archaeology and ancient art are hardly mollified by that pledge. In a series of interviews with Salon, they offered a detailed account of warnings given to U.S. war planners beginning last fall, and continuing up to the days before the war — warnings which were all but ignored.

“It’s extraordinary,” says Joan Aruz, curator in charge of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It’s of the utmost significance, not only for the cultural heritage of Iraq, but also for the rest of the world. The museum contained the greatest work of art created in the first cities. The loss is just outstanding. I haven’t gotten over the shock.”

Aruz, who’s in charge of the Met’s upcoming exhibition about ancient Iraq, says one of her favorite pieces in the museum’s collection is a figure of a man with a beard referred to as “The Priest King.” Another is a carved face of a sensitive-looking young woman. The combined value of the artifacts could be in the billions of dollars.

Some archaeological and art experts think that the sack of Baghdad may be a result of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s decision not commit more ground forces. Instead, he opted for a “rolling start” invasion where troops would be deployed to Iraq as needed. Other generals, including Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army’s chief of staff, criticized Rumsfeld’s decision. One unnamed general even called it a “war on the cheap.”

The U.S. and Britain deployed almost 300,000 troops to the Persian Gulf region. In contrast, during the Operation Desert Storm in 1991, allied forces numbered closer to 500,000. “Now, we’re seeing the consequences of that decision,” says Scott Silliman, who was the senior attorney for the U.S. Air Force’s Tactical Air Command during the first Gulf War. Silliman worked with archaeologists at that time to make sure the Air Force took precautions not to destroy or harm Iraq’s cultural and ancient sites.

Coalition forces are trying to restore civil order in Baghdad, a city of 4.5 million, and the looting has almost ended. However, the pandemonium and destruction that occurred have cost the Bush administration credibility and trust in Iraq and across the Arab world. Silliman, who’s now a law professor at Duke University and executive director of the Center for Law, Ethics and National Security, says the coalition forces may have violated the Fourth Geneva Convention, which calls for an occupying force to protect cultural property. Even if the coalition forces didn’t intentionally breach the Geneva Conventions, he says, “the effect [of the looting] will be more in world opinion, than in legal sanctions.”

After the first reports of looting at Iraq’s museums — and the first questions were raised about the failure of U.S. forces to intervene — Rumsfeld’s initial comments signaled that the U.S. didn’t think that protection of antiquities and art was a priority. At a news conference last Friday, he blamed press coverage for inflating the problem. “The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over,” he said, “and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, ‘My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?’”

That outraged archaeologists, historians and others around the world. The Archaeological Institute of America, a Boston-based group with 9,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, had contacted government agencies as far as back as January about the danger of looting of Iraqs cultural sites. Institute President Jane Waldbaum said she was outraged first by the unchecked looting, and then by Rumsfeld’s response. “Donald Rumsfeld in his speech basically shrugged and said, ‘Boys will be boys. What’s a little looting?’” she said. “Freedom is messy, but freedom doesn’t mean you have the freedom to commit crimes. This loss is almost immeasurable.”

In the past few days, the U.S. Central Command in Qatar has tried softening Rumsfeld’s off-the-cuff remarks. “I don’t think anyone anticipated the riches of Iraq would be looted by the Iraqi people,” Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said Tuesday. In fact, however, the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House had been warned repeatedly, for months.

On Oct. 15, Ashton Hawkins, president of the American Council for Cultural Policy, a not-for-profit group formed to promote issues relating to art collecting, sent a letter to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice asking what steps the government and the military were taking to secure Iraq’s antiquities. Copies of the letter were also sent to various officials in the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies.

Hawkins, a former general counsel at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, received no response.

Then in November, Hawkins and Maxwell L. Anderson, president of the American Association of Museum Art Directors and director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, wrote an Op-Ed for the Washington Post. In the piece published Nov. 29, they reiterated the points made in the earlier letter and said that the U.S. government and the military should prepare plans to protect Iraq’s cultural and archaeological sites.

“In the event of hostilities,” they wrote, “we urge that steps be taken to protect Iraq’s heritage, in which we have a shared interest. Our military and civilian leaderships should be aware of the location of Iraq’s most significant cultural and religious sites and monuments. To this end, we urge the administration to consider the creation now (and not later) of a planning mechanism specifically charged with ensuring that Iraq’s material culture is protected.

“At the conclusion of hostilities, should they occur, the United States and its coalition partners will become heirs to responsibilities that include, in addition to the welfare of Iraq’s people, the task of protecting Iraq’s holy cities and ancient sites. Measures should be taken to ensure absolute respect for the integrity of Iraq’s sites and monuments, and to prevent looting of any kind. In addition the coalition should encourage a new Iraqi civil administration to move quickly to establish security for its own monuments, sites and museums and support the reconstitution of Iraq’s antiquities service.

“We should not allow our primary objectives in this region to overshadow our cultural responsibilities. Ultimately we may well be judged by how we behave toward Iraq’s patrimony in the course of any military action and occupation we may undertake.”

Again, no response from the White House, the Pentagon or the State Department. Finally, Collins, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations/low intensity conflict, contacted Hawkins in the first week of January and said he’d like to meet with him and whoever else he thought would be helpful in coming up with a plan to protect Iraq’s archaeological heritage. Originally scheduled for mid-January, the meeting was postponed until Jan. 24. Those present at the meeting included Hawkins, Anderson, Gibson, Arthur Houghton, vice president of the American Council for Cultural Policy and a former curator at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and, on the government’s side, Collins and four other Pentagon officials.

The meeting was informal. Collins did not return calls seeking comment, but others who attended remember him saying that the Pentagon wanted to expand its list of archaeological sites. The Defense Department had a list of 150 sites compiled during the 1991 Gulf War. Gibson said he could provide the Pentagon with thousands and thousands of other sites worth protecting. The question was raised about what would be done to make sure that coalition forces protect and safeguard property. Collins reassured the group that he would issue an order making sure that the troops knew how to behave.

Everyone left the meeting satisfied that the Pentagon recognized the importance of safeguarding and protecting Iraq’s sites. In subsequent communications with the Pentagon, Gibson stressed that after Saddam’s regime collapsed, the coalition would have to quickly deploy Special Forces troops to secure cultural and archaeological sites to prevent them from being ransacked and damaged by looters. “I really hoped that the U.S. military would take the National Museum of Iraq and protect it,” he says. “I was naive. I guess we were talking too far down the line of command.”

Waldbaum, with the Archaeological Institute of America, says her group hadnt been invited to attend the meeting. But in January, she said, her group sent letters to officials at the State Department, the Defense Department, the White House and the Pentagon. They received no response.

In mid-March, just days before Anglo-American forces entered Baghdad, an expanded group met with Ryan Crocker, deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Bonnie Burnham, president of the World Monuments Fund, a private, nonprofit architectural and art preservation organization in New York joined this meeting, according to others who attended. The fund designated two sites in Iraq for protection: the Nineveh and Nimrud Palaces near Mosul, portions of which are more than 2,700 years old, and the Arbil Citadel, built 8,000 years ago.

Crocker did not return calls seeking comment, but according to others at the meeting, he pledged that the State Department would set up a working group to focus on protecting Iraq’s cultural and archaeological sites. He asked the people at the meeting to provide names of Iraqis who could participate in the working group once the coalition forces had secured Iraq.

On March 21, after Anglo-American forces were in southern Iraq, Waldbaum’s institute was joined by other archaeologists and organizations worldwide in signing a letter to the Defense Department urging all governments involved in the war to protect Iraqs monuments, museums and archaeological sites. Again, no response.

On April 9, as coalition forces were entering Baghdad, the institute sent another letter, this time either by fax, e-mail or FedEx, to dozens of government officials, including Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice, President George W. Bush and even British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The next day, Waldbaum said, she received an e-mail from Maj. Christopher Varhola, stationed in Kuwait with the Armys cultural affairs office. The reply was sent in the early hours of April 10, the day the ransacking of the museum and other institutions began:

“We are very concerned with looting and pilfering,” Varhola wrote. “This is of course complicated by the economic situation in Iraq over the past ten years and the presence of sophisticated smuggling operations and organizations. I have worked to stress the importance of this to the ground commanders. Based on the recent episode in Najaf, I am cautiously optimistic that this has sunk in….

“We have Civil Affairs teams on the ground in Baghdad and are awaiting their initial assessments. The general intent is that we secure the sites initially and then transition to civil control under the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs (ORHA). I have forwarded your message to Ambassador John Limbert in ORHA. He is the designate to assist the Iraqi Ministry of Culture in the preservation of sites and artifacts. We had a lengthy meeting yesterday and he shares your concerns. He is working closely with the U.S. Army to implement protection measures.”

The Army’s intentions and concerns, as articulated by Varhola, came to nothing. Chaos ruled the day.

Archaeologists and art curators think that some of the looting was organized by a conspiracy of antiquity dealers and smugglers. Proof of that is that the heavy metal doors on the storage room at the National Museum of Iraq weren’t broken down, indicating that it was opened with a key. Also, the card catalog listing the thousands and thousands of items in the museum was destroyed. There is a duplicate somewhere, but the destruction of the one of the catalogs shows that there was an effort to cover up what was going on. In fact, there have been reports that artifacts that were in the museum have already shown up in antiquity markets in Teheran and Paris.

“In warfare, there are priorities,” Gibson says. “There are not enough troops necessary to do everything that needed to be done. But we have a responsibility under various rules in warfare to preserve the cultural patrimony of a country.”

As worldwide outrage grew over the plundering of Iraq’s great cultural and archaeological sites, the U.S. responded. On Monday, Powell made a statement that anyone caught dealing or possessing stolen antiquities may be prosecuted under Iraqi law and the United States National Stolen Property Act. He also said that Central Command issued orders to all troops in Iraq to protect museums and antiquities throughout the country.

Powell said U.S. radio broadcasts are encouraging Iraqis to return any items taken. The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs will help Iraqis and international experts in their efforts to restore artifacts and the catalogs of antiquities that were damaged by looters. Powell also said the U.S. is working through Interpol to help locate stolen items and return them to Iraq before they make it into international crime channels. And he said the U.S. has been in touch with the UNESCO to form a plan to safeguard Iraq’s antiquities.

Some of the antiquities stolen will probably be stashed away in private collections for years and years. And many of the pieces that were damaged are beyond repair. Archaeological groups and art curators want to prevent the stolen artifacts from leaving the country. Once they’re in other countries, it will be that much harder to retrieve them. To encourage Iraqis to return stolen art and artifacts, they are pushing for the U.S. government to set up an amnesty program and a reward system.

That’s the model favored by Stuart E. Eizenstat, former deputy treasury secretary and a member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States. “The money would be well spent in winning the goodwill of the Iraqi people,” he said in an interview. It’s important that as much of the art and antiquities be recovered before they are transported out of Iraq. “Once it’s out of the country, it would pass through multiple hands. What I found out [when working to recover art stolen by the Nazis] was that the art world is a secretive world. As a dealer, you rely on information from your immediate sellers and you don’t ask questions.”

Waldbaum, with the Archaeological Institute of America, says she’s talking to different groups and individuals about setting up a Web site that could be a repository for images and descriptions of all the artifacts that were in the museum. That way if they make it to the market, dealers and museum curators will be better able to determine if they were stolen from the Iraqi National Museum. But this will take much time.

Meanwhile, some of the looted artifacts inevitably will find their way through discreet channels to buyers. Among those, experts fear, many will never be recovered.

This story has been corrected since it was first published.