At first glance the contrast could hardly be greater. In Germany, the main political parties, the Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party, have agreed to share power, after expressing (polite) differences before the voters. In France, the right and the left abuse each other to the point that one might imagine they differ about almost everything — levels of taxation, social security and immigration policy. Nevertheless, with a distinct prospect of a rematch for the Elysée with the same leading contenders as in 2012, and the media already setting the scene, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande might do well to follow the example of Angela Merkel and Sigmar Gabriel, and join forces to form a government that would more or less continue to follow the direction of the past 30 years.

Hollande, in Devoirs de vérité (The Duties of Truth, 2006), admitted that the Socialists and the liberal right were of one mind on European economic, financial, monetary, trade and industrial policy: “It was François Mitterrand … with Pierre Bérégovoy … who deregulated the French economy and effectively opened the way for all forms of competition. It was Jacques Delors who … helped to establish the European monetary system with its political implications for the development of macroeconomic policy. It was Lionel Jospin who introduced the most innovative industrial changes, even though it meant partly privatising utilities — a move for which he was criticised. So, let’s get rid of this wretched ideological baggage that deceives no one” (1). Eight years later, there is nothing to add.

It is this lack of grip on the direction of the country that explains why French people object to the sound and fury of their political class, all the more so because parliamentary representation is monopolised by two rival, complicit factions. The Socialists and the right may hold 92.2% of seats in the National Assembly and 89% in the Senate, but public opinion does not like the government’s decisions, and the conservative opposition is barely less unpopular. No matter: the regime holds firm, backed by institutions that confer full powers on the president, including the power to defer without limit an environmental tax (the Ecotax) approved by almost all members of parliament.

But French people are rebellious, and encouraged in that because politicians are discredited and clearly have no vision to offer. Moreover, the press constantly reports and exaggerates malicious gossip and personal squabbles. The poisonous indiscretions attributed to Sarkozy’s comments on his political friends are a more rewarding line for journalists to pursue than Socialist attacks on the prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault. That kind of atmosphere encourages a widespread Tea Party-style, neo-Poujadist movement outside the traditional parties, through intermittent outbursts of rage and the incessant tub-thumping of social networks (2). In barely 18 months, we’ve had small businessmen refusing to pay their taxes, Catholic crowds protesting against gay marriage, and farmers and truck drivers wearing the bonnet rouge (red hat) in the style of 18th-century Breton rebels.

Americanisation of French politics

The split between voters and their elected representatives is partly the result of the Americanisation of French political life: the largest parties are now simply electoral machines, cartels of local officials who rely for support on the ranks of senior citizens (3). It is easy to see why new members do not want to join: the instruments of any policy alternative seem to have been cast aside. Protests against gender education in schools or objections to tolls on motorways have no effect on the resources allocated to national education or to the level of tax avoidance, but they do provide an opportunity for a get-together, and the satisfaction of forcing a minister to give way. But the bitter feelings return a week later, when it is clear that nothing has really changed because nothing depends on a minister’s decision. Or on the Elysée.

Hollande, when he came to power, immediately chose to stick to a course he had promised to change: caution rather than courage (4). The rest is just an act, a political puppet-show. As soon as the left takes over, the right accuses it of undermining national identity, welcoming immigrants and taxing too hard. When the right gets back into power, it immediately claims that it is being unfairly blamed for supporting privilege, and reminds its opponents (who have almost returned to their revolutionary ways), that they themselves had sometimes pursued policies more neoliberal than the right’s. The prime minister François Fillon took offence during a debate with the Socialist leader Martine Aubry in February 2012: “I am deeply hurt when I hear it said that we have favoured the rich. When you were a minister [between 1997 and 2000] the tax on capital was 10% less than it is today. When you were a minister, income tax was reduced. We impose a tax on capital, we have taken decisions that you never took on stock options, traders’ profits, workers’ retirement pensions … In 2000, Laurent Fabius [then minister of the economy] reduced the tax on certain stock options” (5).

A decade before, the opposition leader Laurent Fabius had blamed Fillon, who was then minister of social affairs, for not increasing the minimum wage enough. Fillon replied: “You didn’t increase the SMIC [the growth-linked guaranteed minimum wage] in 1999. You didn’t increase the SMIC in 2000. You gave it a bit of a boost, 0.29%, in 2001.” There won’t be a bit of a boost in January 2014. The same players, the same words, the same reasons: you just need a good memory to predict what will happen. In three and a half years’ time, the “world of finance” will probably be the Socialists’ “real enemy” once again (6). But for the moment, the banking lobby is safe with this government’s finance ministry.

The right would however be mad to admit that the Socialists are following the same directions as Sarkozy and Fillon, who were bound by treaties they had all negotiated and signed. In the right’s view, France under a Socialist president lives in fear, with immigrants everywhere and the rich departing; Figaro readers are told that Hollande is responsible for “the greatest exodus since Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes”; that “the Ayrault government has decided to open the gates of state aid to children” to “condition them to be completely dependent on the state and remain on benefits for ever”; that “white heterosexuals in our country may soon be forced into hiding”. Give us a break.

Amid all these outbursts, the most explosive section of the right reproaches itself for its lack of vigour when it was in power and swears to make up for it as soon as it gets back in. The scenario is familiar, like the situation in 1983-86 that gave the Front National (FN) its big chance; then, the Socialists’ neoliberal course had horrified some of their supporters; the right, interpreting this as an admission that leftwing policies had plunged France into an abyss, claimed that a move towards a market society was imperative. The Socialists then attacked their opponents’ radical position and, being unable to defend their own poor economic and social record, resorted to crying “Help, help, the right is coming back!” Some senior conservatives made xenophobic pronouncements and attempted to form alliances with the far right, and the resultant uproar became the focus of public attention. Meanwhile, businesses were outsourcing their production and inequalities were increasing.

A new shock programme?

The right now has a shock programme for the future. In an interview inLes Echos, Jean-François Copé, president of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) laid it out: “the end of the 35-hour week, massive tax cuts and public spending cuts … No one can understand why the broadcasting system continues to cost a billion euros. Do we need so many public television channels? … With our state medical service, we are the only country in Europe that continues to cover 100% of illegal immigrants’ medical expenses. … Public spending now accounts for 57% of GDP. We must get back to the Eurozone average, approximately 50% of GDP” (7). Was Copé trying to suggest that the Socialists’ policy is genuinely leftwing?

Ayrault will not help him in that, having just announced that austerity will continue throughout Hollande’s presidency: “Savings will amount to €15bn in 2014, but we shall have to continue to save at the same rate in 2015, 2016 and 2017” (8). Public spending increased by an average of 1.6% a year during Sarkozy’s five years of office. The Socialists have set a target, limiting the increase to 0.2% for the next three years. They don’t have any choice, since the European supervisory authorities will remind them that the “public books can no longer be balanced by raising taxes” (9).

Things do not look any brighter on the production and employment front. The French government wants to restore the soundness and external competitiveness of national undertakings in a free and fair market. How? By favouring what Hollande calls a “reduction in the cost of labour”. And by introducing a universally applicable increase in value-added tax to fund a generous tax credit for competitiveness and employment, €20bn to be handed out to all profitable businesses, without requiring them to recruit any new employees. Underpaid employees will subsidise their employers including the retail giants, who have no international competitors and are buckling under the weight of their profits (10).

It may be useless to point out that there is nothing socialist about this policy. But we can at least observe that it is not successful. Within the euro, France cannot devalue its currency, so it must pursue a policy of budget austerity and reducing the cost of labour — wages (11). But the “improvement of the supply side of the economy”, painfully achieved by reducing the purchasing power of the average household, is immediately lost as a result of the revaluation of the euro against other currencies (6.4% in 2013). It would take a supreme act of faith to believe that a country with zero growth and low domestic demand, and with many of its best European customers facing poverty, can permanently reverse rising unemployment and cut public spending. This was tried in the early 1930s, by Herbert Hoover in the US and Pierre Laval in France, and we all know how successful that was.

In 1983, when the left abandoned the battle over economic and financial matters and severed all connections with its revolutionary past, it attempted to replace its old ideals with a universalist, antiracist, European utopian dream, as sold by artists and journalists. This doesn’t work any more. With Hollande, there is no hope, real or contrived, only the droning of an accountant caught between the expectations of voters, who believed one last time that change was on the way, and the demands of his financial watchdogs. He must constantly convince them he is conducting “a credible policy” because “any sign of weakness would be severely sanctioned” (12). When the only progress he’s pursuing is to spend less than Sarkozy, belief in progress dies.

Easy advance of the FN

The FN has advanced easily because of this general loss of hope: no one expects it to improve things, only to set off a little dynamite. Its claims to be outside the system, its undiminished political will and the radical nature of its proposals make its agenda more attractive (including its views on European issues). So it is no accident that a former rightwing minister and vice-president of the UMP, Laurent Wauquiez, well known for his opportunism, should take liberties with the Brussels consensus and propose (in December) to reduce Europe to a hard core of eight members “France, Germany, the Benelux countries, Italy, and probably Spain and Portugal, but not much more… With the UK on the one hand and the central European countries on the other, it is impossible for Europe to move forward … There are too many different countries with different sets of social rules” (13). Presumably this also applies to the euro.

The anti-capitalist left may be divided over the single currency (14), and the Socialists don’t talk about it. But even in their ranks, there are signs of a shared desire to find a way out, to recover some measure of sovereignty and hope. Shortly before he became a minister in the Hollande government, Benoît Hamon summarised “the left’s dilemma — to fight or to betray its ideals” (15). But his government is not fighting, and this, rather than its lack of success, is why it should be blamed. A bolder team would no doubt have faced enormous difficulties: a Europe in which progressives are weak and discouraged, and liberal and monetarist rules are increasingly strict — there are Socialists who rule on rightwing lines, or in collaboration with the right, in more than half the countries of the EU; a social movement stuck in limbo; a very low rate of unionisation (7.6% in France). But it is waiting for Godot to expect that some day leaders in Brussels and Berlin may have second thoughts and realise the economic and democratic risks involved in the austerity they have imposed. To react sharply to all the conservative opposition’s outbursts, in order to accuse it of playing to the far right, is to be resigned to the far right gradually commanding the game.

At times when fatalism and waiting for history’s tide to turn delay the work of regaining lost intellectual ground (16) and mobilising political forces, there is no alternative but to build up a confident, victorious social force, and take courage in spite of all. In the words of Glenn Greenwald, who took the risk of publishing Edward Snowden’s revelations about US spying activities, history teaches us that “courage is contagious”.

Serge Halimi is president of Le Monde diplomatique.

(1) François Hollande, Devoirs de vérité, Stock, Paris, 2006, p 192. Pierre Bérégovoy was finance minister between 1984 and 1986. Jacques Delors, who had been finance minister from 1981 to 1984, left Paris for Brussels to head the European Commission. Lionel Jospin was prime minister between 1997 and 2002. All three were (or are) Socialists.

(2) See Cécile Cornudet, “Ces politiques qui veulent faire oublier qu’ils le sont”, Les Echos, Paris, 10 December 2013. See also Pierre Rimbert, “Deserving and undeserving poor”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, May 2013.

(3) See Rémy Lefebvre, “Faire de la politique ou vivre de la politique?”, Le Monde diplomatique,October 2009.

(4) See Serge Halimi, “Sacking Sarkozy won’t be enough”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, April 2012.

(5) “Des paroles et des actes”, France 2, 2 February 2012.

(6) In a famous speech in January 2012 while campaigning for president, François Hollande lashed at his “real enemy”, “the world of finance”.

(7) Les Echos, 10 December 2013.

(8) Interview in Les Echos, 19 November 2013.

(9) Interview with Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), in the Journal du dimanche, Paris, 15 December 2013.

(10) See Martine Bulard, “Neoliberality, inequality, austerity”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, April 2013.

(11) See Christine Jaske, “Vous avez dit ‘baisser les charges’?”, Le Monde diplomatique, November 2012. On 17 December 2013, asked by RMC-BFM about the government decision not to review the minimum wage, Benoît Hamon, deputy minister for the social solidarity, economy and consumer affairs explained: “In order to encourage employment, it is necessary to ensure that the cost of labour does not place too heavy a burden on the competitiveness of undertakings.”

(12) Interview with Pierre Moscovici, economics and finance minister, Journal du dimanche, 19 August 2012.

(13) BFM-RMC, 3 December 2013.

(14) See Frédéric Lordon, “No currency without democracy”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, September 2013.

(15) Benoît Hamon, Tourner la page: Reprenons la marche du progrès social, Flammarion, Paris, 2011, p 23.

(16) See Serge Halimi,“We can’t go on like this”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, September 2013.

This article appears in the excellent Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month.

Exciting news, related by Mark Mazzetti, “Burglars Who Took on F.B.I. Abandon Shadows,” in the New York Times (Jan. 7), concerns eight antiwar activists in the Philadelphia area who broke into an FBI office to gather evidence documenting federal spying and suppression of dissent, to be sent to newspapers for publication of illegal government activity. Betty Medsger, formerly of the Washington Post, one of several reporters to whom documents were sent, is out with a new book, Burglar: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret F.B.I.,” which details the logistics of the break-in and sheds light on the Bureau’s felonious activities. I’m sorry, but I must break into my own discussion to say that although in political discourse it is permitted to use the term “fascist,” one cannot use the terms “Nazi” and “Naziism,” as if somehow over-the-top, even when reality suggests interchangeable usage. I use these latter terms in a generic sense –not the extermination camps, but underlying political-structural practices and ideological themes which make such conditions possible. In America, engineering consent from above obviates the need thus far of death camps and crematoria.

Thus it is not name-calling, as I see it, to suggest a continuity of spirit from Heinrich Himmler to J. Edgar Hoover, two men of equally depraved mental-sets, and the amoral cynicism of the police/agents they lead. The common thread, unified around the practice of surveillance and a related contempt for the personal privacy and dignity of the individual, is what I shall term the psychopathology of antiradicalism. Let’s stay with Hoover, for in microcosm, he gives us a glimpse, from three to five decades previous, of what has come to pass today: Enlarged through technological sophistication, massive surveillance in the present (which must be part of any functionaldefinition of fascism or, for that matter, Naziism) merely continues the authoritarian trajectory, now under a liberal manner—with surveillance at home part of the same dynamic as intervention abroad, as though USG and POTUS are control freaks committed to ironclad Order on behalf of the political economy and social system.

When, therefore, I say, FBI=Gestapo Lite, as I did in a Comment to the Mazzetti article (see below), that The Times suppressed, I had in mind State-authorized tactics, returning now to documents gleaned from the break-in, which included, as stated in one memo, instructions to agents to step up their interviews with antiwar activists and dissident student groups (among them, SDS obviously in mind) because “[i]t will enhance the paranoia endemic in these groups and will further serve to get the point across there is an F.B.I. agent behind every mailbox.” Disruption, part of what we learned from Watergate as “dirty tricks operations,” yes, but far more—and here standing behind the mailbox reminds one of the Nazi block leader, especially in the intended thoroughness of coverage—the intent to strike fear, intimidate, stop dissent and protest dead in their tracks looms large. The FBI searching for gangsters, was led by the Leading Gangster in America.

We see in the earlier period, Cointelpro (Counterintelligence Program) operating without restraint, as in phone tapping, infiltrating and spying on the antiwar and civil-rights movements, even the sending of an anonymous blackmail threat to Dr. King, promising to reveal his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide. How many lives were blasted, faculty members fired, the Rosenbergs executed—please don’t lecture to me that “fascist” and “Nazi” are exaggerations and out of place. We are indebted to the Media Eight (my designation), just as we are to Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, for standing up to the ruthless negation of patriotism on the part of ruling groups fearful of their loss of status, privilege, and wealth, and who find a radical under every bed, dynamite in hand, ready to blow up the social order (theirsocial order) to smithereens. Hence, surveillance, hence, Espionage Act prosecutions, hence, the Obama White House standing on one of the twin towers of Fortress America, the other tower–? A bit crowded, with Wall Street, Big Pharma, still bigger, Big Oil, stiller bigger, banking giantism, which leaves even Wall Street behind as it soars into the Empyrean of Wealth, protected on all sides by the National-Security State, NSA, FBI, CIA, and Big Military Itself.

From Cointelpro to Obama’s NSA, itself the bastardized version of the FBI (or rather, NSA, bastard of the FBI-CIA marriage, with JSOC and Blackwater, whatever its new corporate name, as bridesmaids), we see that history in America does not change, but only perfects the instruments of inequality and repression. John Mitchell before, Eric Holder now: DOJ in desperate need of a name change, into the Department of Injustice. Obama, however, is sui generis—no previous Chief Executive so nimbly and ably synthesized military power and business consolidation so well, with the financial sector now assuming the lead in the modernized version of Naziism—I don’t blanch from using the word—i.e., the narcotization of the public via the rhetoric and practice of liberalism (itself, at bottom, exemplar, over the last six or seven decades, of the psychopathology of antiradicalism), rather than the concentration camp.

My New York Times Comment to the Mazzetti article, also Jan. 7 (suppressed, which I protested in a note to the Public Editor) follows:

Wow, first glad tidings of the New Year. It will appear harsh, overdramatic to NYT readers, but I submit: FBI=Gestapo Lite. I recall during Mississippi Freedom Summer 1965 being in COFO headquarters, when young SNCC workers had made complaints to the FBI (same time of disappearance of Schwerner, Goodman, Cheney, later found murdered), and agents came in, instead of gathering information, treated complainants as CRIMINALS and browbeat them. As young Yale professor I could only stand there, bear witness, try, coat and tie, to look somehow official.

FBI is a domestic terrorist organization, sponsoring disruption, involved in spreading lies, violating privacy, contemptuous of people of conscience, working under the cover of law to intimidate dissenters and stifle dissent. I say again, Gestapo Lite. Why should we believe, in the wake of the Media revelations, that the FBI has turned over a new leaf? Why think DOJ today is any more respectful of civil liberties than in 1960s. (When we picketed on Boston Common in the late 1950s against nuclear testing, the FBI was present photographing each and every one as we passed.)

I’m deeply proud of the “Burglars,” who give meaning to patriotism as it should be expressed–in opposition to despotic government, one that flies a liberal banner, as POTUS makes the National-Security State the vehicle for abuses, from the least transparent government and its program of massive SURVEILLANCE, to the drone assassination of far-off civilians.

Norman Pollack is the author of The Populist Response to Industrial America (Harvard) and The Just Polity (Illinois), The Humane Economy, The Just Polity, ed. The Populist Mind, and co-ed. with Frank Freidel, Builders of American Institutions. Guggenheim Fellow. Prof. Emeritus, History, Michigan State.  He is currently writing The Fascistization of America: Liberalism, Militarism, Capitalism.  E-mail: pollackn@msu.edu.

On January 1, Cubans 2014 marked the 55^th anniversary of their revolution’s victory.  Fidel Castro’s words spoken May 1, 2000 cropped up in President Raul Castro’s speech in Santiago de Cuba. Revolution, they said, is “to   believe deeply there’s no force in the world capable of crushing the force of truth and ideas.”

Commentator Ángel Guerra Cabrera recalls one idea: “To understand the conflict between Cuba and the United States it’s necessary to study Latin American history. It shows the superpower has never tolerated our countries developing internal or external politics separate from its dictates.”

Raul Castro articulated another: “[N]ew generations of leaders … never will be able to forget that this is the socialist Revolution of the humble, by the humble, and for the humble. This is the essential premise and effective antidote for not falling for the siren songs of the enemy.”

Political talkers sometimes label ideas as utopian, among them that of ending the anti-Cuban U.S. blockade now. “Cuba [however] is still embracing utopia in year 55 of the triumph of its revolution,” affirms Guerra Cabrera.

U. S. defenders of Cuban independence could do with truth and ideas, or at least new ones. On their watch, “Cuba has suffered under the longest blockade in history.” Objective realities in the two countries may vary enough for Cuba’s U. S. friends to accept what they see as truth as allowing for small gains only, and waiting. By contrast, Cubans seem to take the realities they live with as encouragement for keeping on. Indeed, there are “55 reasons for a new anniversary,” says one observer. They would fit within Fidel Castro’s notion of the “truth.” A  listing follows:

Cuba’s infant mortality rate is at a new low: 4.2 babies died during 2013 out of every 1000 births. Average rates for the region remain at around 30. Maternal mortality has dropped, and life expectancy at 77.9 years matches that of industrialized nations. Physician density in Cuba is one physician for 197 persons, one of the world’s top rates. That doesn’t include 40,000 Cuban physicians serving abroad in 70 countries.

Universal education and health care are intact; 1,993,300 students from preschool through university level will be enrolled in 2014, and eighty million physician consultations are anticipated, plus 22 million visits to dentists and 1.140.000 hospital admissions.

The United Nations Program in Human Development ranked Cuba 59th overall out of 187 countries.  UNESCO’s 2011 Education for All Global Monitoring Report had Cuba as 14th in the world. Health care expenses consumed 22 percent of Cuba’s 2013 state budget, education 27 percent. Cuba’s 54 percent current budgetary allowance for social services is among the world’s highest. Only 30 countries share Cuba’s below-five percent unemployment rate.

Cuba maintains its outsized role in international solidarity. Two thousand teachers work abroad. Cuba’s “Yo sí puedo” literacy program has benefited eight million learners in 29 countries. “Operation Miracle” has restored sight for two million people worldwide.  By 2011, the Latin American School of Medicine had graduated 9,960 new doctors from 58 countries. Tens of thousands of other medical students and graduate physicians study in Cuba.

Economic readjustment is proceeding. A new Labor Code became law following discussions among almost three million workers.   State businesses, newly autonomous, are on track to increase exports and reduce imports.  Mariel is the site of a new “Special Development Zone” directed at promoting foreign investment, exports, jobs, and fostering modern business technologies. New patterns of land use and agricultural marketing prevail.

Some 400,000 Cubans are recently self-employed without loss of social services. Over 250 new cooperatives are functioning. Cuba’s economy maintains a three percent rate of growth. Russia recently agreed to forgive 90 percent of Cuba’s $29 billion debt incurred during the Soviet era. Provision of electricity has improved through the use of new generator facilities.

Cuban diplomats joined the United Nations Council on Human Rights in 2013. Cuba that year served as president pro tem of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States that includes all Western Hemisphere nations save Canada and the United States.  During 2013, Cuba hosted peace talks between the Colombian government and the insurgent Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

These facts – these truths – suggest Cuba’s revolution is established and continuing. In Santiago, President Raul Castro once more called for “respectful dialogue” with the United States. “We don’t claim the United States has to change its political and social system, [but] we have to learn mutual respect for our differences, only that. [Otherwise] we are disposed to endure another 55 years in the same situation.”

Cuba’s real experiences and achievements demonstrate that big, utopian ideas can materialize. New realities add substance and serve to motivate. Fidel Castro’s must have presumed listeners on May 1, 2000 were ready “to challenge powerful forces dominating inside and outside boundaries of society and the nation … defend values in which we believe at the price of any sacrifice.”

That kind of commitment exercised within U.S. society could help convert utopian longings into existing facts. One would be the unrealized dream of U.S. acceptance of Cuba as a regular nation. Actually to fight to change existing U. S. realities would move that dream along, and others too.

W. T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.

Paris.

The last thing the U.S. should do is become militarily embroiled in the conflict raging again in Iraq. But for Americans to shake their heads in lofty disdain and turn away, as if they have no responsibility for the continued bloodletting, is outrageous. Why? Because America bears a large part of the blame for turning Iraq into the basket case it’s become.

The great majority of Americans don’t realize that fact. They never did. So much of what the U.S. did to Iraq has been consigned by America to a black hole of history. Iraqis, however, can never forget.

In 1990, for instance, during the first Gulf War, George H.W. Bush, called on the people of Iraq to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein. But when they finally did, after Saddam’s forces were driven from Kuwait, President Bush refused any gesture of support, even permitted Saddam’s pilots to keep flying their deadly helicopter gunships. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered.

[pullquote]As usual, all our despicable crimes bear the stamp of the immaculate conception. —Eds[/pullquote]

[H.W. Bush later denied any responsibility for that uprising, but you can hear his appeal to the Iraqis in a documentary I produced with Michel Despratx, “The Trial of Saddam Hussein.”]

Even more devastating to Iraq was the Draconian  embargo  that the United States and its allies pushed through the U.N. Security Council in August 1990, after Saddam invaded Kuwait.

The embargo cut off all trade between Iraq and the rest of the world. That meant everything, from food and electric generators to vaccines, hospital equipment—even medical journals. Since Iraq imported 70 percent of its food, and its principal revenues were derived from the export of petroleum, the sanctions dealt a catastrophic blow, particularly to the young.

Enforced primarily by the United States and Britain, the sanctions remained in place for almost 13 years and were, in their own way, a weapon of mass destruction far more deadly than anything Saddam had developed. Two U.N. administrators who oversaw humanitarian relief in Iraq during that period, and resigned in protest, considered the embargo to have been a “crime against humanity.”

Early on, it became evident that for the United States and England, the real purpose of the sanctions was not the elimination of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but of Saddam Hussein himself, though that goal went far beyond anything authorized by the Security Council.

The effect of the sanctions was magnified by the wide-scale destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure —power plants, sewage treatment facilities, telephone exchanges, irrigation systems—wrought by the American air and rocket attacks preceding the first Gulf War. That infrastructure has still to be completely rebuilt.

Iraq’s contaminated waters became a biological killer as lethal as anything Saddam had attempted to produce. There were massive outbreaks of severe child and infant dysentery. Typhoid and cholera, which had been virtually eradicated in Iraq, also packed the hospital wards.

Added to that was a disastrous shortage of food, which meant malnutrition for some, starvation and death for others. At the same time, the medical system, once the country’s pride, careened toward total collapse. Iraq would soon have the worst child mortality rate of all 188 countries measured by UNICEF.

There is no question that U.S. planners knew how awful the force of the sanctions would be.  In fact, the health calamity was coolly predicted and then meticulously tracked by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. Its first study was entitled “Iraq’s Water Treatment Vulnerabilities.”

Indeed, from the beginning, the intent of U.S. officials was to create such a catastrophic situation that the people of Iraq—civilians, but particularly the military—would be forced to react. As Denis Halliday, the former U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, put it to me, “the U.S. theory behind the sanctions was that if you hurt the people of Iraq and kill the children particularly, they’ll rise up with anger and overthrow Saddam.”

But rather than weakening Saddam, the sanctions only consolidated his hold on power. “The people didn’t hold Saddam responsible for their plight,” Halliday said. “They blamed the U.S. and the U.N. for these sanctions and the pain and anger that these sanctions brought to their lives.”

Even after the sanctions were modified in the “Oil for Food Program” in 1996, the resources freed up were never enough to cover Iraq’s basic needs. Hans von Sponeck, who also resigned his post as U.N. coordinator in Iraq, condemned the program as “a fig leaf for the international community.”

By 1999 a UNICEF study concluded that half a million Iraqi children perished in the previous eight years because of the sanctions—and that was four years before they ended. Another American expert in 2003 estimated that the sanctions killed between 343,900 and 529,000 young children and infants–certainly more young people than were ever killed by Saddam Hussein.

Beyond the deaths and wholesale destruction, the sanctions had another equally devastating but less visible impact, as documented early on by a group of Harvard medical researchers. They reported that four out of five children interviewed were fearful of losing their families; two-thirds doubted whether they themselves would survive to adulthood. They were  “the most traumatized children of war ever described.”

The experts concluded that “a majority of Iraq’s children would suffer from severe psychological problems throughout their lives.”

Much more chilling, is the fact that the Harvard study was done in 1991, after the sanctions had been in effect for only seven months. They would continue for another 12 years, until May 22, 2003, after the U.S.-led invasion.

By then, an entire generation of Iraqis had been ravaged. But rather than bringing that nightmare to an end, the invasion unleashed another series of horrors.

Estimates of Iraqis who died over the following years, directly or indirectly due to the savage violence, range up to 400,000. Millions more became refugees.

But there was more. The military onslaught and the American rule that immediately followed, destroyed not just the people and infrastructure of Iraq, but the very fiber of the nation.  Though Saddam’s tyranny was ruthless, over the years the country’s disparate peoples had begun living together as Iraqis, in the same towns and neighborhoods, attending the same schools, intermarrying—slowly developing a sense of nationhood.

That process was shattered by the American proconsuls who took charge after the invasion. They oversaw a massive political purge, a witch hunt, that led to the gutting of key ministries, the collapse of the police and military and other key government institutions, without creating any viable new structures in their place. The Shiites who the U.S. helped bring to power took revenge on the Sunnis, many of whom had backed Saddam.

The result was catastrophic. Frightened Iraqis turned for security to their own tribal or sectarian leaders. Local militias flourished. The violence spiraled out of control. Thousands perished in a horrific surge of ethnic cleansing.

Through bribery and political arm twisting, the U.S. was able to tamp down the conflagration it had helped ignite. Underneath, however, the distrust and hatred  continued smoldering.

And then, in 2011, the U.S. troops pulled out. President Maliki continued pouring oil on the fire, refusing to give Sunnis and Kurds a share of power. And now, fed by the conflict in neighboring Syria, Iraq is once again caught up in bloody turmoil.

And who is having to deal with all this?  The generation of Iraqis that the Harvard researchers had long labeled “the most traumatized children of war ever described.” The majority of whom “would suffer from severe psychological problems throughout their lives.”

It is they now, who have come of age. It is they who, if they have not fled the country, are the military and police commanders, the businessmen and bureaucrats and newspaper editors, the tribal chiefs and sectarian leaders, the imans and jihadis and suicide bombers–all of them now still caught up in the ever-ending calamity of Iraq.

That, America, is the legacy you helped create for Iraq. How do you deal with it? God knows.

BARRY LANDO is a former producer for 60 Minutes who now lives in Paris. He is the author of The Watchman’s File. He can be reached at: barrylando@gmail.com or through his website.