Commentary: The 'Monuments Men' of WWII understood why we should not harm Iran's cultural sites; Trump should too
When the U.S. Army invaded Sicily in 1943, Lt. Col. Mason Hammond raced around the island in a beat-up Jeep, intent on preventing its cultural heritage from becoming a casualty of war. Discovering that the National Library in Palermo was damaged by Allied bombing, exposing its collection of rare books to looters, he had American troops assigned to guard them. Other GIs were set to stringing barbed wire around Sicily's ancient temples.
Before World War II, Hammond was a professor of classics at
