Saddam had no input on the decisions, made by the US and backed by Britain, to embargo medical and water purification supplies, or electrical infrastructure parts, or agricultural supplies. Nor did Saddam have the slightest influence on the bureaucratic setup arranged by the US to delay and make expensive supplies not embargoed completely. The consequences of those decisions were accurately foreseen, and the situation in Iraq understood by those who made them. For example: The US bombed the sewer and water and electrical systems of the cities of Iraq, and embargoed the repair parts for them and the medical supplies for dealing with water-borne disease. That choice of strategy was entirely voluntary, conscious, and made with complete foreknowledge of the likely consequences. The US is responsible for it, not Saddam.
What fun would that be? The US deserves a share of blame for their implementation of the sanctions being incongruent with their intent. They were poorly administered by all. But there is a gulf of difference between validating those discrete events and extrapolating to their systemic impact country wide. You're using a biased sample to reach a hasty generalization, while at the same time ignoring Saddam's misallocation of resources on the distant end. Less than compelling.
Not discrete events, but ten years of consistent behavior, was "validated". It is impossible for Saddam to have misallocated supplies not delivered into Iraq. The UN was in charge of distribution of a lot of stuff in northern Iraq, and UN observers on the ground (as well as WHO folks, the weapons inspectors, etc) supported the observations of widespread shortages in Iraq. As did the health statistics, of course. The hypothesis that things like syringes and water pumps were "misallocated" inside Iraq needs explanation. To where, and whom, and for what advantage ? And finally, no great storehouses of delivered stuff - like morphine, or blood transfusion bags, or chemo drugs, or chlorine, or pumps and generators and such, sufficient to account for more than ten years of "misallocation" - was discovered in the invasion, despite the propaganda coup that such a discovery would have been. You can blame a lot on Saddam, but not the blockading of medical supplies and the rest (nor the bombing of the infrastructure in the first place, if it comes to that). I'll keep the self-entertainment factor in mind, in future.
