This clandestine trade may not be enough to raise the living standards of ordinary Iraqis, but it certainly puts soap and tyres within Mr Hussein's reach, not to mention more luxurious or sinister items. Indeed, while his country is in desperate straits, Mr Hussein shows no eagerness to spend on his own people the money he gets from illicit oil exports. Instead, he has built several new palaces for himself. Friends of the regime have plenty of money to spend on computers with the latest Pentium III chips, which are sold at prohibitive prices in several shops in Baghdad. Yet, under sanctions, no computers with a Pentium chip of any sort may be imported for Iraqi schools lest they fall into the army's hands.
American ships try to intercept the tankers that spirit out Iraqi oil through the Gulf.
But the United States has made no attempt to stop the illegal trade with Turkey, in the hope of assuaging Turkish misgivings about America's policy on Iraq. Indeed, to Turkey's great satisfaction, the Security Council recently scrapped an Anglo-Dutch scheme to close this loophole. America has also resisted changes to the regulations that would allow the UN to spend cash in Iraq. But that also means that UN food imports, for example, undercut Iraqi farmers, driving many of them to abandon their fields and so exacerbating the shortage of food. The UN also cannot spend money training Iraqi doctors or teachers an obstacle no amount of imported medicines or textbooks can make up for.