The New York Times blames the victim

In an article about Iraqi doctors receiving threats and deciding to stop practicing and even leave the country, the New York Times has this to say about what came before:

"In the early years of Saddam Hussein, the health care system in Iraq was a showcase, with most Iraqis receiving excellent, inexpensive care. Iraqi doctors often studied in England, and Iraq's medical schools, based at hospitals, had high standards. But Mr. Hussein let the economic penalties of the 1990's bite deeply into medical care and used the damage to the increasingly worn system to try to persuade the world to ease economic pressure on Iraq."

Yes, it wasn't the euphemistically-named "economic penalties" (also known as sanctions) which caused the Iraqi medical system to go to hell, it was a deliberate decision by Saddam Hussein.

This would be a good place to point out that the sanctions, which were supposedly put in place to ensure the disarming of Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, had in fact achieved that goal by 1991, and that it was a deliberate decision by Bill Clinton (not Saddam Hussein) to keep those sanctions in place until Saddam Hussein was no longer in power, regardless of disarmament, which was responsible for the deaths of a million Iraqis. We also take time to recall that Madeleine Albright said those deaths were "worth it", although, since we now know that almost all of those deaths occured after Iraq was disarmed, exactly what "we" got in return for "paying that price" (generous of the U.S. to pay for something with the blood of Iraqis, wasn't it?) isn't clear. Not in any kind of moral or legal sense, anyway; what the U.S. really got out of a decade of sanctions was the ability to subsequently invade Iraq and overthrow its government and install a compliant puppet government. What it got out of that is still a work in progress.

Something else to remember on this Memorial Day.