Mr. Speaker, at several points in the debate, including in the speech immediately preceding her own, for instance, we heard from the member for Lac-Saint-Louis say that the United States is a villain and a culprit in this matter because it was in fact, he claimed and many have claimed today, the principal arms supplier of Iraq in the 1980s. I would like to ask the member to reflect on whether she shares this view.
Perhaps she could comment on the report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute which keeps a database of the arms transfers. It reported that the Soviet Union delivered $17 billion in major conventional arms to Iraq in the 1980s. China shipped $5.2 billion and France transferred $4.9 billion. The other big players were Czechoslovakia, Poland, Brazil, Egypt and Romania. The United States was at the bottom of the list at $200 million, one-fifteenth of the weapons trade to the Iraqi regime from france.
Would the member care to speculate on whether the $22 billion in weapons provided by Russia and France to the Iraqi regime, in addition to the very substantial oil concessions recently signed with the Iraqi regime, may have in some way influenced their decision to exercise a veto against the implementation of 1441?