346 DESTINY DISRUPTED
living in 1990 to one that approached the most impoverished on Earth. In-
comes dropped about 95 percent. Disease spread, and there was no medicine
to stem it. Over two hundred thousand children-and perhaps as many as
half a million-died as a direct result of the sanctions. One U.N. official,
Denis Halliday, resigned because of these sanctions, claiming that "Five thou-
sand children are dying every month .... I don't want to administer a pro-
gram that results in figures like these."^5 Iraqis, who had suffered through so
many years of deepening horror trapped in a war-mad police state, were now
reduced to inconceivable squalor. The only sector of Iraqi society on whom
the sanctions had little impact was the Ba'ath Party elite, Saddam Hussein
and his cohorts, the very people the sanctions were intended to punish.
And in the east, the Soviets, who had invaded Afghanistan less than a
year before Iraq invaded Iran, pulled out of Afghanistan less than a year
after Iraq finally left Iran. The Afghan communists clung to power for an-
other three years, but when they did at last go down, the entire Soviet
Union was crumbling too, its empire unraveling in Eastern Europe, its
constituent republics-even Russia-declaring independence until there
was nothing left to declare independence from.
In America, conservative historian Francis Fukuyama wrote that the
collapse of the Soviet Union marked not just the end of the Cold War but
the end of history: liberal capitalist democracy had won, no ideology could
challenge it anymore, and nothing remained but a little cleanup work
around the edges while all the world got on board the train headed for the
only truth. In fact, he offered this thesis in a book tided The End of His-
tory and the Last Man.
On the other side of the planet, however, jihadists and Wahhabis were
drawing very different conclusions from all these thunderous events. In
Iran, it seemed to them, Islam had brought down the Shah and driven out
America. In Afghanistan, Muslims had not just beaten the Red Army but
toppled the Soviet Union itsel£ Looking at all this, jihadists saw a pattern
they thought they recognized. The First Community had defeated the two
superpowers of its day, the Byzantine and Sassanid empires, simply by hav-
ing God on its side. Modern Muslims also confronted two superpowers,
and they had now brought one of them down entirely. One down, one to
go was how it looked to the jihadists and the Wahhabis. History coming to
an end? Hardly! As these radicals saw it, history was just getting interesting.