They had no medicine. Robinson points out the absurd and hypocritical restrictions the United Nations committee places on the money Iraq is allowed to earn from selling limited amounts of oil. These restrictions have prevented Iraq from buying the medicines and other basics it needs. Iraq was told, for example, it could not import cloth, which it wanted to do to provide jobs for unemployed seamstresses sewing sheets for hospital beds. Oh, no, the cloth might be put to military use.
Children have no pencils.
After all, graphite is a dual-use commodity, and so it goes. The fault is yours and mine. It is our government that insists on maintaining an economic embargo nine years after the last Iraqi soldier left Kuwait. We also continue to conduct an ongoing undeclared and unconstitutional war by bombing northern and southern Iraq on a weekly basis. Not only is this policy cruel, vicious, immoral and a war crime by any rational definition, it is also not in America's national interests.