Hussein, um, Saddam Hussein or his people figured out that they could make Iraq function with "only" 5 or 6 million out of the 26M they had in the early 1990s.
Of course, he was more interested in saving his regime, no matter how many of the 20M available for cannon fodder he had to lose, than in "saving the planet".
5 posted on 06/30/2012 6:19:57 PM PDT by Calvin Locke