re: Tom has become an anomalist, in a right-wing world where reality meets the door.
"The infrastructure was a pile of crap largely because of US sanctions."
UN sanctions. And enforced mostly by the US [and of course, at the expense of US tax payers] though other countries were involved in the enforcement. And the sanctions were at the end of Gulf war I mostly managed by the US, but within a few years, US was not the major party involved in the Food for Oil program. And of course, the management of program was done by the UN which is currently being investigated- though without any investigation, it's plainly obviously that it was managed very very poorly.