The Donald is at it again. When he was asked by NBC’s Meet the Press this weekend why the US military allowed the Iraqi Museum in Baghdad to be looted, he put on his irritated face and said:

Rumsfeld: But we didn't allow it. It happened. And that's what happens when you go from a dictatorship with repressed order, police state to something that is going to be different. There's a transition period, and no one is control. There are periods where -- we're still fighting in Baghdad. We don't allow bad things to happen. Bad things do happen in life, and people do loot. We've seen that in the United States. It's happened in every country. It's a shame when it happens. I'll bet you anything that if they -- when order is restored and we have a more permissive environment that there will be opportunities to ask people to return some of those things that were taken. We have already found people returning supplies to hospitals.

Q: What the heads of the museums will say is that they actually askes for the U.S. to help protect it, and that the U.S. declined. Is that accurate?

Rumsfeld: Oh, my goodness. Look, I have no idea. We've got troops on the ground, who do you know who we asked and whether his assignment at that moment was to guard a hospital instead -- those kinds of things are so anecdotal, and it always breaks your heart to see destruction of things.

Even if you accept this explanation, it is more than a little disturbing that the Secretary of Defense does not even seem inclined to ask whether someone dropped the ball here. “Oh, my goodness. Look, I have no idea,” he says, as though it were a ridiculous question. Thousands of priceless international treasures have been stolen or destroyed from a known location, and you expect Mr. Rumsfeld to want to know why? Why, so he can diagnose the problem and prevent it from happening again? Oh, my goodness.

But I don’t accept the explanation in any case, since The Donald's boys seem to have been able to secure the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Oil buildings without much trouble.