Archaeologists fear that George Bush’s war on Iraq and its aftermath could “obliterate much of humanity’s earliest heritage. Heavily looted in the last 10 years, Iraq’s archaeological treasure remains as precarious as the rest of the country’s post-war future. ‘What’s really at stake here is our past. What happened here was the establishment of civilization as we know it – codified religion, bureaucracy, cities, writing. What developed there was modern life – urban existence.”