If sanctions made it harder for Iraqis to dislodge Saddam, they also kept Iraqis from rebuilding the infrastructure America had destroyed during the Gulf War. Joy Gordon, author of Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, has detailed the interlocking ways in which international sanctions stymied reconstruction: Iraq’s “water treatment system was compromised first when the U.S. blocked equipment and chemicals for water purification; but if Iraq had somehow been able to produce or smuggle those, the water system would then have been compromised by the lack of electrical power, because electrical generators and related equipment had been bombed by the U.S., and because the replacement equipment was blocked by the United States. If Iraq had been somehow able to generate sufficient electricity, then the clean water could not have been distributed because the bombings had caused so much breakage in the water pipes, and the United States then blocked the importation of water pipes, on the grounds that they could be used for weapons of mass destruction. If Iraq had somehow been able to smuggle or manufacture water pipes, it did not have the bulldozers or cranes necessary to install them because those were blocked by the U.S. as well.”

But sanctions didn’t only devastate Iraq’s physical capital. They devastated its human capital too. According to one estimate, “more than three million professionals and intellectuals” left the country during the 1990s. And as Gordon explained to me, even many of the civil servants who stayed in Iraq stopped showing up to their jobs because their salaries had become worthless as a result of hyperinflation. The result was an “infrastructure running with far fewer people and people who had far fewer credentials and less experience.”

As the sanctions literature predicts, Iraqis turned to the black market. “The unemployment and impoverishment brought about not only malnourishment and disease, but crime and a deterioration of the social fabric,” writes Gordon. Saddam relied on Sunni tribal networks to smuggle oil and other goods across Iraq’s borders, thus increasing their power. And to avoid destitution, many Shia Iraqis turned to the charity provided by local Islamist groups. Queen Mary University political scientist Lee Jones, who studied Iraq in the 1990s for his book, Societies Under Siege, told me, “The result of dictatorship and sanctions was the destruction of secular opposition to Saddam. The only thing that survived were tribes, which became the core of al-Qaeda and ISIS, and Shia clerics that formed basis of Shia political parties.”

After toppling Saddam in 2003, the Bush administration discovered that governing and rebuilding Iraq was far harder than it had predicted. Ironically, that was partly because America’s own sanctions policies had made Iraq a less modern, less secular, less educated society than it had been 15 years before.