Iraq in the 1990s lives under a decade of UN sanctions backed by Washington and London, and journalist John Pilger sets out to measure what they actually did to the country. He interviews UN officials who administered the embargo, doctors working wards without basic medicine, and families burying children the sanctions regime helped kill, building toward a death toll Pilger puts above a million, most of them elderly, poor, or very young. The stated goal was regime change, but the film shows Saddam Hussein still stocked with cars, mansions, and imported medicine while ordinary Iraqis went without clean water and antibiotics. Pilger presses UN officials on camera about who actually pays the price for a policy aimed at a leader who never seems to feel it. The film's argument is blunt: sanctions marketed as a humane alternative to war produced a body count of their own, concentrated entirely among people who had no say in Saddam's survival.