By Lucia Dailey

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false no longer exists.” —Hannah Arendt

Deliberate destruction of Iraqi civilian infrastructure by US bombing in the First Gulf War, along with US-backed economic sanctions, caused hundreds of thousands to die from treatable diseases and malnutrition. Most vulnerable as always were children, women, and the old. A report in March 1991 by UN Under Secretary-General Martii Ahtisaari registered the desolation: “Nothing that we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country. The recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the infrastructure…. Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age.”

Middle class life collapsed, few goods were available in stores, and epidemics of polio and other infectious diseases erupted due to lack of medicine and chlorine for treating water. Before one bomb fell in 2003 a million Iraqis were already dead from the First Gulf War and the sanctions. UN estimates are one half million of the dead were children under the age of five. Iraq had not risen from its knees when the second Bush Administration unleashed the might of the US arsenal in a campaign most obscenely named “Shock and Awe,” in a war based entirely on lies.