Quoting Michael Parenti’s Against Empire, pages 102–3:

There were a number of compelling considerations for war against Iraq that the Bush administration preferred to leave unmentioned. First, Saddam Hussein was trying to stop the Kuwaiti slant drilling into his oil reserves and was trying to bolster the oil price he could get. His temerity in putting considerations about his own country’s economy ahead of the interests of the international oil cartel suddenly made him an unpopular personage in Washington.

Second, thanks to the major networks, the Gulf War served as a video promotional event for the military‐industrial complex, a rescue operation for a bloated defense budget. In July 1990, for the first time in years, the Democratic leadership in Congress was talking about real cuts in military spending. The Gulf War hoopla brought Congress meekly back into line.

Third, the quick and easy victory was a promotional event for interventionism itself, a cure for the “Vietnam syndrome” (that is, the public’s unwillingness to commit U.S. forces to violent conflicts abroad). The Gulf War seemed to solve a problem U.S. interventionists long have faced: how to engage in military action without a serious loss of American lives. (Their concern was more political than humanitarian. Heavy losses make the intervention unpopular with the U.S. public.) The way to economize on American lives was to apply an air, land, and sea firepower of such superior magnitude that it could destroy the opponent’s military capacity, infrastructure, and life support systems without any great commitment of U.S. troops.

It is not true, as was claimed by antiwar activists, that Iraq was bombed back into the nineteenth century. Iraq in the nineteenth century had a productive base roughly commensurate with the population needs of that time. The destruction created a far greater crisis than that. In March 1991, a United Nations mission to Iraq reported that the conflict “has wrought near‐apocalyptic results” by destroying “most means of modem life support,” relegating Iraq “to a preindustrial age, but with all the disabilities of post‐industrial dependency on intensive use of energy and technology.”

Not without cause did U.S. militarists boast that the attacks were “surgical.” True, most of the bombs were free‐falling and killed people wantonly. But the thousands of air strikes did surgically remove most of Iraq’s electrical systems and seriously damaged the agricultural system. Without electricity, water could not be purified, sewage could not be treated. Hunger, cholera, and other diseases flourished.

The Gulf War was followed by a vindictive United Nations embargo that several years later still denied Iraq the technological resources to rebuild its food production, medical services, and sanitation facilities. As late as 1993, CNN reported that nearly 300,000 Iraqi children were suffering from malnutrition. Deaths exceeded the normal rate by 125,000 a year, mostly affecting “the poor, their infants, children, chronically ill, and elderly” (Los Angeles Times, February 22, 1994). Iraqi citizens, who previously had enjoyed a decent living standard, were reduced to destitution. So was realized one of the perennial goals of [neo]imperialism: to reduce to impotence and poverty all potential adversaries and upstarts.

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