• Military

• WMD Menu                           

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

U.S. Department of State

Daily Press Briefing

..........

QUESTION: Can you give us some sense of whether the amounts, whether the numbers of programs that the Iraqis are saying that we are - or that the numbers of orders that the US and Britain are blocking in the Oil For Food Program and the amounts of - in terms of dollars that they are saying we are blocking - can you give us some sense of whether that's a small percentage of these orders? A large percentage?

MR. RUBIN: Right. My understanding is that the normal practice has been that we are raising questions and not permitting to go through immediately proposals - roughly 5 percent of the proposals fall into the category where we end up blocking them. There are usually pretty good reasons to block them. Either the company involved is a company that has been involved in sanctions busting in the past, or that the proposal lacks any specificity and could be seen as a blank check to purchase goods that could be used for other than humanitarian purposes, or the goods involved are so transparently not for humanitarian purposes that it was another attempt -

Let's remember who were dealing with here. Iraq is in violation of all of the Security Council resolutions. Some countries may want to assume that Iraqi proposals for oil in the Oil For Food Program, they should get the benefit of the doubt that these are actually for good purposes. Our view is that we want to check them rigorously because if Iraq were acting in good faith with the United Nations in general, we wouldn't have this embargo on in the first place.

So there are a very, very small number of contracts that end up getting blocked, and the reality is that Iraq now imports more food and medicine today than it did prior to the Gulf War, that Iraq now exports more oil today than it did before the Gulf War. So these claims that we are harming the Iraqi population because of the oil embargo and on the question of food and medicine are transparent nonsense.

We know that those areas where the United Nations runs the Oil For Food Program, the child mortality is now lower than it was prior to the Gulf War. In those areas where Iraq runs the program, there are major problems. So all of this is by way of suggesting, we do ask hard questions about a relatively small number of contracts. But meanwhile, billions of dollars of oil is sold and billions of dollars in food and medicine have gone in. So much so, that they've reached the threshold that they sell as much oil as they did before the Gulf War and that they import as much food and medicine as they did before the Gulf War.

QUESTION: Do you have anything to add to where the new resolution stands?

MR. RUBIN: We continue to meet with the other permanent members. Assistant Secretary Welch has been in New York most days this week. Secretary Albright discussed with Foreign Minister Ivanov some of the key elements that Russia has concerns about. We are trying to work our way through those concerns so that in a matter of weeks we can come to a conclusion one way or another about this. But we have still plenty of work to do.

..........

[end of document]