In the two decades following 1958, Iraq leapt from being a country that exhibited one of the highest income inequality and illiteracy rates in the world, to a country with an impressive record of human and social development, including a narrowing gap in earning disparities (Todaro 1979). Economic and human development indicators also attested to faster- than- usual improvements in health, educational and social conditions (AMF various years). That was Iraq then.

When, in Geneva in 1991, US Secretary of State James Baker III warned Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister of Iraq, that Iraq would be bombed back into the Stone Age, he probably meant that the United States would deprive the Iraqi civilian population of the right to security of person, water, health, shelter and, more generally, the requirements for decent living. In 2015, Iraq has become a war- plagued and divided territory, and its first prime minister in the Paul Bremer government of 2003, Ayad Allawi, has recently declared that ‘the Iraqi people are longing for the days of Saddam Hussein’. This is Iraq now.

Between then and now, hundreds of thousands have died as an immediate outcome of the first US aggression in 1991, the ensuing embargo and the allout invasion and subsequent colonisation. The war's impact fragmented Iraq as a state. There are territories that are ethnically or sectarianly cleansed under a nominal republic. According to a 2011 report, nearly ten years after the fall of Saddam's regime, and with oil revenues that have increased nearly tenfold as a result of rising oil prices, more than a million orphaned children remained abandoned in the streets of Baghdad (Aljazeera 2011). Rates of birth defects where depleted uranium- laced artillery rounds were fired in US bombardments are significantly high (Al Sabbak 2012; Halliday 2013); what is not so unusual, given how sensitive Iraq is to US- led imperialism, the World Health Organisation (WHO) covered up Iraq's nuclear nightmare (Ahmed 2013). The electric- power crisis has lingered since 2003, and a government report prepared by the advisers to the board in the prime minister's office estimates that Iraq loses billions of dollars annually due to the power crisis (Shafaq News 2013).