According to one science-fictiony novel that I read a while back (1999), Gulf War Syndrome may or may not have been caused by nanomachines ingeniously engineered to scramble Americans' minds so badly that they would send their army back to Iraq for a return engagement, whereupon it would be destroyed. The book is called Acts of the Apostles and you can download the entire thing for free from the author's website.
This is a little bit OT for a DKos diary, I know, but this site seems populated with the kind of readers who might get a kick out of a novel based (in part) on conjectures about what Hussein Kamel was really up to in the months before the invasion of Kuwait. The mind-control plot involves a nefarious Silicon Valley genius, a Swiss pharmaceutical company and dark military-industrial multinationals looking to cash in by engineering Gulf War part deux.
As you would expect from this kind of book it's wacky and over-the-top. But the disturbing thing about it is how prescient it was. Not only about technology, but about a country apparently gone mad and working to further the enemy's cause instead of its own.
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