U.N. officials in charge of monitoring the distribution disagree. Every contract Iraq makes with a foreign company must include a complete specification of the end use of every item contracted for. It must then be approved by the U.N. Sanctions Committee, a body with one representative from each member of the Security Council, any one of whom can veto or indefinitely suspend any contract for any reason. If a contract cannot be fulfilled exactly as written, it is canceled and the whole process must begin again. This procedure creates many problems for the Iraqis.
Some warehouses have only a single operating forklift.
Frequently, the Iraqis receive insulin but no syringes, heart-lung machines but not the computers to run them. They are then forced to keep the goods they receive warehoused, hoping that the Sanctions Committee will allow the complementary equipment in. This problem occurs so often that many activists suspect that it is done on purpose. Such peremptory behavior suggests we should question closely the government's stated motives. As Anthony Arnove points out in the introduction to Iraq Under Siege, however, the US has expressed no desire to limit its own weapons of mass destruction, or those of its allies.