Christopher Shays: “We know that we could not allow the sanctions to deprive Iraqi citizens of food and medicine. The problem was they did…”

“We know that we could not allow the sanctions to deprive Iraqi citizens of food and medicine. The problem was they did not get the food they paid for and they did not get the medicines they paid for, because Saddam Hussein was basically allowed to run the program with the oversight of the U.N. that chose not to provide oversight, particularly the Chinese and the Russians who did not believe that there should even be sanctions and did not go out of their way to make this system work. So we had countries that knowingly allowed Saddam to rip off his own people. He undersold oil and then got huge kickbacks, and he overpaid for commodities and got huge kickbacks, $4.4 billion in the overcharges, the surcharges for the oil and the kickbacks on humanitarian purchases and an estimated $5.7 billion going through Syria.”