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.
