Why, I’m shocked, just shocked! The warbots are making a lot of hay over the oil-for-food scam in which UN officials and Saddam Hussein skimmed billions from the program, but I still have to ask: Why did the humanitarian disaster happen? As I pointed out in an article on sanctions back in September, the excess deaths during the sanctions period were measured against the 1980s–when Saddam Hussein was in power, waging war against Iran, stealing from the commonweal, and generally being an a**hole. What changed in the 1990s? A massive invasion, continual bombing, and sanctions.
As I have also pointed out before, Saddam and his sons were living it up as the citizenry starved, but the citizens weren’t starving before the invasion, bombing, and sanctions. Imagine that some foreign power devastated the productive capacity of the U.S., blockaded our ports, and only allowed in what they deemed to be subsistence levels of food and medicine. Now, if Dubya, Cheney, and co. skimmed half the goodies to continue living in the style to which they are accustomed, we would all call them “a**holes.” But the primary blame for the ensuing catastrophe would fall on the invading, bombing, and blockading power for so reducing the availability of necessities as to put the citizenry in such a position in the first place.