U.S. forces targeted Iraqi water and sewage infrastructure

Specifically, the little known fact that U.S. forces targeted Iraqi water and sewage infrastructure during the first Gulf War, which led to massive lethal outbreaks of normally preventable or treatable diseases, such as cholera, typhoid and dysentery.

Often forgotten is the fact that sanctions were imposed before the war-in August of 1990-in direct response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. After the liberation of Kuwait, sanctions were maintained, their focus shifted to disarmament. In 1991, a few months after the end of the war, the U.N. secretary general's envoy reported that Iraq was facing a crisis in the areas of food, water, sanitation, and health, as well as elsewhere in its entire infrastructure, and predicted an “imminent catastrophe, which could include epidemics and famine, if massive life-supporting needs are not rapidly met.” U.S. intelligence assessments took the same view. A Defense Department evaluation noted that “Degraded medical conditions in Iraq are primarily attributable to the breakdown of public services (water purification and distribution, preventive medicine, water disposal, health-care services, electricity, and transportation). . . . Hospital care is degraded by lack of running water and electricity.”

Yet rather than act to prevent this catastrophe, it’s precisely what the U.S. government had in mind.