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If you are one of the many people who have not thrown anything at me recently, let me take this opportunity to thank you for your kindness.

If, however, you are the sullen young man who tried to drop a water balloon on my head in the Haight a few weekends ago, or the guy who hurled a handful of change at my head in Santa Cruz on Sunday, or the person who threw a lit firecracker in my general direction in Sunnyvale tonight, I have a question: Why me? Am I just having a run of bad luck, or am I doing something that causes total strangers to lash out at me?

In an earlier post about the looting of Iraqi museums and libraries, I asserted that the United States military could have stopped the looting. The writer Teresa Nielsen Hayden makes a different and more convincing claim:

We don’t have the manpower [to stop the looting]. Our guys couldn’t protect Baghdad’s hospitals, so 39 out of 40 of those are gone, stripped to the walls. The banks are gone too; and if you think that’s trivial, imagine you’re an elderly Iraqi whose savings were in a bank that’s not only been robbed, but stripped of its computers, filing cabinets, furniture, light fixtures, and plumbing. Mom-and-pop stores are being pillaged. The offices responsible for dull but essential social services are being plundered for their office equipment and furniture. It’s ugly.

And why are our troops stretched so thin? Because when the war was in its planning stages, Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly dismissed and overruled the experienced military planners who told him how much force would be needed to invade Iraq. We have the troops. We have the equipment. Our annual military budget could practically have bought the country. More conventionally, we could have gone in with massive force and done everything in an orderly fashion, the way all our military doctrine says we should do it. But Rumsfeld said no.

America started war with the goal of dismantling Saddam Hussein’s government. The people who planned the war—Rumsfeld and all the rest—ought to have known that once the government was gone, looting would become a problem. Either they did not realize this, which is unlikely, or they did not care, which is horrifying. It makes little difference now. There were not enough troops in Baghdad to maintain order after the government fell, and so the entire city has been plundered.

Of all the senseless and unnecessary consequences of the senseless and unnecessary war in Iraq, the most lasting will be the looting of Iraq’s National Museum and the burning of the National Library and Archives.

As the BBC explains, “The national museum was home to artefacts that dated back 10,000 years, from one of the world’s earliest civilisations. The development of writing, abstract counting, the wheel and agriculture were all charted in its exhibitions.” Up to 170,000 artifacts were stolen from the museum after American troops seized Iraq. The vast majority of those artifacts are gone forever. As for the library, a witness to the blaze found handwritten documents dating to the Ottoman Empire blowing through the streets.

Troops from the United States stood by as Iraqis looted the museum and burned the library, which is bad enough. Worse yet, scholars warned the Pentagon for months that historical sites—especially the museum—would be looted and urged the military to protect them. The military promised to do so. And yet U.S. soldiers did almost nothing.

Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld appeared on Meet the Press and made pathetic excuses. Looting, he said, “isn’t something that someone allows or doesn’t allow. It’s something that happens.” Bullshit. The United States has thousands of troops on the ground, armed with enough materiel to kill everyone in Baghdad. They can allow or not allow almost anything they want. The National Museum was looted because the United States military couldn’t be fucked to do anything about it.

The aforementioned banana muffins turned out rather well–so well, in fact, that I’ll post the recipe here. This is adapted very slightly from a recipe in The Joy of Cooking. You can replace 1/2 cup of the regular flour with whole-wheat flour, should you have any (I didn’t).

Preheat the oven to 375° F. Grease a standard 12-muffin pan or line with paper cups.

Whisk together thoroughly:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Stir in:

• 2/3 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

Whisk together in a large bowl:

• 1 large egg
• 3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
• 3 mashed ripe bananas
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Add the flour mixture and mix together with a few light strokes just until the dry ingredients are moistened. Do not overmix; the batter should not be smooth. Divide the batter among the muffin cups.

Bake until a toothpick inserted in 1 or 2 of the muffins comes out clean, about 18 minutes. Let cool for 2 to 3 minutes before removing from the pan. Serve as soon as possible, preferably the day they are baked.

This has been a lousy day for cooking. I started to make tapenade this afternoon, but the olives I was using were nearly tasteless, and the anchovies were seven different shades of awful. So much for tapenade. Tonight, when I tried a fish recipe that includes a feta cheese sauce of sorts, I discovered that I had inadvertently purchased cow’s milk feta. Who the hell makes feta with cow’s milk? Some dairy cooperative in Wisconsin, that’s who. (Serves me right for buying feta from Wisconsin.) Anyhow, cow’s milk feta is wretched, and it didn’t help matters that I used four times as much yogurt in the sauce as the recipe called for.

I was planning to make banana muffins tomorrow morning, but now I’m not so sure. Apparently I am no longer capable of assembling an entire recipe’s worth of decent ingredients.

If I ever open a furniture store, I’m going to call it “The Ottoman Empire.”