Christopher Shays: “our staff has been through some of the minutes of the U.N. 661 committee of the Security Council members responsible for…”

“our staff has been through some of the minutes of the U.N. 661 committee of the Security Council members responsible for the sanction monitoring and oversight of the Oil-for- Food program. Those minutes have told our staff a story of diplomatic obfuscation and an obvious purposeful unwillingness to acknowledge the program was being corrupted. Questions about oil or commodity contracts were dismissed as dubious media rumors beneath the dignity of the U.N. to answer while Saddam was given the undeserved benefit of every doubt. That is what is really striking about this whole program. Bottom line. After the war in the gulf, after we got Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, and I would say parenthetically, somehow he never thought we would seek to get him out of Kuwait, he had an obligation. His obligation was to cooperate with U.N. inspectors in terms of chemical, biological and nuclear program. He simply chose not to. So the sanctions were put in place until he cooperated. The problem was Iraqis were starving and they were not getting their health care. What was obvious to us is Saddam did not care that his own people were dying. He was simply not going to cooperate. In a sense he kind of pushed the world community into doing its best to make sure that Iraqis did not starve and they got some medicine by saying that there would be this Oil-for-Food program that he basically would run with the supervision of the U.N.…”