AMERICAN LEGACY IN IRAQ

THE AMERICAN LEGACY IN IRAQ

The effect of the sanction was magnified by the wide-scale destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure power plants, sewage treatment facilities, telephone exchanges, irrigation system wrought by the American air and rocket attacks preceding the first Gulf War. That infrastructure  has still to be completely rebuilt. Iraq’s contaminated waters became a biological killer as lethal as anything Saddam had attempted to produce. There were massive outbreaks of severe child and infant dysentery. Typhoid and cholera, which had been virtually eradicated in Iraq, also packed  the hospital wards.

Thought Saddam’s tyranny ruthless, over the years the country’s disparate people had begun living together as Iraqis, in the same towns and neighbourhoods, attending the same schools, intermarrying slowly developing a sense of nationhood. That process was shattered by the American proconsuls who took charge after the  invasion. They oversaw a massive political purge, a witch hunt, that led to the gutting of key ministries the collapse of the police and military and other key government institutions, without creating any viable new structures in their p lace.

Indeed from the beginning the  intent of US officials was to create such a catastrophic situation that the people of Iraq civilians, but particularly the military would be forced to react. The military onslaught and the American rule that immediately followed destroyed not just the people and infrastructure of Iraq, but the very fiber of the nation.

Even after the sanctions were modified in the “Oil for Food Programme” in 1996, the resources freed u p were never enough to cover Iraq’s basic needs.