NEW YORK -- It's not just about art. It's also about passion, politics, power.

When a beloved art object is stolen, the loss often pushes human "hot buttons" linked to the collective identity of a nation, culture and history.

Art and politics collided at the start of the war in Iraq. As U.S. troops moved into Baghdad, the 12 buildings of Iraq's National Museum were left unprotected, resulting in the pilfering of thousands of objects. TV newscasts showed scenes of weeping museum workers talking about the desecration of a 7,000-year-old civilization, as they picked through shards of ancient pottery and sculpture.

In a series of raids in Iraq, Marines arrested a group of suspected terrorists in underground bunkers where they found weapons, ammunition and uniforms alongside vases, cylinder seals and statuettes that had been stolen from the National Museum.

Art experts and military officials are still grappling with the question: Was it the duty of the American military to protect ancient artworks? The answer remains murky.

The Geneva Conventions require an occupying force to safeguard cultural facilities such as museums from damage. However, the Conventions also ban fighting from those buildings.

When asked why the U.S. military did not try to guard the museum, Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz of the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division said he couldn't protect it because his soldiers were taking fire from the building compound.

Later, Marine Reserve Col. Matthew Bogdanos, a New York prosecutor, led a probe into the looting of a museum that housed what he called "the finest collection of antiquities the world has ever seen." Bogdanos confirmed that the museum was plundered during combat on its grounds between U.S. forces and Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard.

This year, another cultural loss was reported in Zimbabwe, where six pieces were stolen in June from the National Art Gallery in Harare -- four traditional, wooden headdresses known as Mutsago and two masks from Mozambique.

"The pieces define the Zimbabwean traditional way of life and some of them are used as symbols of the gallery and are very important in the history of the country," Doreen Sibanda, the gallery director, said. "The pieces are also used by traditional researchers from around the world because they contain the country's exclusive and original handiwork."

The looting raised fears that a cartel is on the prowl for African treasures that can fetch high prices on the international market, since more than 1,500 archaeological objects also are missing from Harare's Museum of Human Sciences, whose collection ranges from ancient rock art and skull fragments to tribal ornaments used as communication devices.

Meanwhile, it took three decades for the Italian government and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to resolve the issue of "the hot pot" -- as one-time Met director Thomas Hoving described a 2,500-year-old Greek vase on view at the museum. It is one of 21 objects the museum recently agreed to return to Italy.

In the process, the elegant lingo of art curators fell by the wayside in a high-stakes tit-for-tat that stretched across the ocean. Just before the deal was signed in Rome, a headline in one Italian newspaper screamed that the Met's current director, Philippe de Montebello, had called Italy's culture minister "anti-American."

What's been lost in the flurry of accusations, said de Montebello, is the appreciation of each artwork "as a beautiful object that needs to be seen and studied."