It was back in the spring of 2001 that the fundamentalist Muslims who ran Afghanistan appeared on my radar as a clear and present danger. That was when they merrily destroyed the ancient, irreplaceable statues of Buddha near the town of Bamiyan.

Then came 9/11, and our rout of the Taliban.

And now has come the war in Iraq, and our rout of Saddam Hussein's regime.

And what has been the first huge, terrible misstep of this American war intended to begin the restoration of civilized values in Iraq?

Our failure to protect the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. We all know what happened: looters stole thousands of precious and irreplaceable statuary and vases and cups and architectural fragments from the ancient Mesopotamian and Sumerian and Assyrian cultures.

That is, we failed to safeguard some of the most precious artifacts of civilization itself.

It would be hard to dream up an irony more tragic than this.

And here's some timely filigree on the awful irony: we are, in this country, in the midst of a pop cultural craze for the heroes and literature and history of antiquity.

Particularly - irony atop irony -- the wars of antiquity.

On the USA Network we've just had the miniseries Helen of Troy, about the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans.

And that was just the beginning. Last week, production started on a huge Hollywood feature film retelling the same story. Troy stars Brad Pitt, Julie Christie and Peter O'Toole.

The film director Baz Luhrman's next picture, on which he'll spend $160 million, is the story Alexander the Great. The movie is to star Leonardo di Caprio. Which means that this time, di Caprio could deliver his famous line from Titanic -- "I'm the king of the world!" - and mean it literally.

Hollywood being Hollywood, there's a second Alexander the Great biopic in preproduction, this one directed by Oliver Stone and starring Colin Farrell.

And if the Alexander biopics end with his death, at age 32, then we'll see simulations of ancient Babylonia -- that is, Iraq.

In fact, one big reason we know so much about the glories of those days is that the rulers of what is now Iraq had their Islamic scholars transcribe the important ideas of the cultures with which they collided.

In the theater, what was the most powerful, revelatory Broadway drama this season? I'd vote for Euripides Medea, 2400 years old, staged by Deborah Warner and starring Fiona Shaw.

Or, in a very different way, the amazing new production of Oscar Wilde's Salome, which I saw last week. It's set 2000 years ago and stars Al Pacino as King Herod.

It really is everywhere I've looked lately: I just happened to read a forthcoming novel called Girls, by Nic Kelman, which is a very contemporary story of dark sexual obsession…. interwoven with passages from the Iliad and the Odyssey.

In other words, every stratum of the America culture seems ablaze with regard for and wonder at the treasures of antiquity…with the hideous exception, alas, of those inexcusable first two days of liberation in Baghdad.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.

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