Victims of an imperial dream

With the demise of the Soviet Union having removed the last constraints of the Cold War era, the U.S.' high-tech war machine moved into the oil-bearing deserts of West Asia with the aim of telling its Western friends and Third World insubordinates who the global hegemon was. The immediate victim was the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. Sanctions and two savage Bush wars left millions of innocent Iraqis dead or living without limbs and Saddam Hussein, "our dictator" until the late 1980s, went down fighting with the noose tightening around his neck. And his weapons of mass destruction are still waiting to be discovered.