Granted. Though there’s an argument on what preserving the antiquities is for in the first place.

If we think there is a value provided to visitors seeing them in person, then preserving them far away deprives the Iraqi from these benefits making the preservation neutral at best in the short/middle term (long term? will it ever come back ?). It might feel like having your pet living abroad in a shelter, on one side it gets to live, on the other it doesn’t help you much to cope with your life.

Aside from a couple brief but extremely violent periods this past century, sure. The city I live by had its old town reduced to rubble in 1944-45 and is still rebuilding, despite being in one of the most prosperous regions of a rich, powerful country. The Germanisches National Museum wasn't spared, and they still lost stuff, despite preparing for bombardment. Countless works of art were destroyed throughout the city, despite the citizenry's pride in their cultural heritage.

Or maybe because of an excess of pride in that cultural heritage, if you look at the big picture...

I'm talking about Nuremberg/Nürnberg, of course. I love living here now, but oh boy was the evil of an evil time concentrated here. It's hard to reconcile the lovely place I live now with what I grew up learning about it, to the extent that I think of it as Nürnberg today, but Nuremberg when considering the horrors of the 30s and 40s.

Big Western countries don't have constant, low-level instability like our former colonies - we have rare but all-encompassing blowouts. We've just been lucky in the US and Canada that geography protected us for so long (aside from the evil various European powers visited upon people we encountered or forcibly brought there).

More historically, think about spasmodic but intense episodes in the West, like the iconoclastism during the Protestant Reformation. Good luck to any ancient religious art that happened to be in Switzerland at the time... and think about the various flavors of religious nuttery in the US, now being concentrated and inflamed with social media. The Hobby Lobby founders fortunately wanted these artifacts as evidence for their flavor of religious nuttery, but what would have stopped them from acquiring artifacts that they felt needed to be destroyed?

That's the argument that the British Museum uses to justify its collection (much of which was obtained through colonialism). Many countries (even Western ones like Greece) would like their stuff back.