Time’s Cartoons of the Year 2003 are pretty good. But I have to wonder about the choice of including one of these.
The “Looting of the Baghdad Museum’s Art Treasures” is one of the big non-stories of the year. During the second week of the Iraq War (i.e. after it was over), it was first claimed that 43,000 antiquities from this museum that contained the history of the dawn of man had been looted because Americans had stupidly not guarded this important site. After weeks of overblown hullabaloo, when someone finally got in there to make a real appraisal, it turned out to be more like 37 items, most likely taken by insiders, and some of them are being reclaimed even now.
So why, in the 2003 summary of the year’s best cartoons, is this included? It’s a funny cartoon, yes, but it’s a funny cartoon about something that in the end never actually happened. With dozens if not thousands of hilarious political cartoons to choose from (I qualify it because I don’t know if the candidates had to be toons that ran in Time earlier in the year), I should think the non-truthfulness of this one would have been enough to warrant its removal from consideration.