Mr. Speaker, I detect a certain cognitive dissonance in what this member has to say. On the one hand, she lauds the United Nations as the font of virtue in international policy and yet she goes on to blame it for the most hideous human rights violations imaginable, in the form of its sanctions on Iraq to compel the regime there to comply with some 16 UN resolutions. I am wondering if she could perhaps square this contradiction. If she has so much faith in the United Nations, then why does she at the same time accuse it of hideous violations of human rights?
Further, is she not aware that the figure that she uses of a million children having died as a result of sanctions in fact has been exhaustively studied, including by independent Middle Eastern experts, and is found to have no basis in fact? It is a figment of the Iraqi regime.
Finally, she says that she is very proud of the position taken by the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Is she not aware, and perhaps she was not in the chamber, that her very minister this evening pointed out that any deaths or any suffering as a result of those sanctions are the fault of the Iraqi regime, as he said, which at any time could stop the sanctions by complying with the UN resolutions? Does she not agree with her minister on that point?