“What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?’ Madeleine Albright screamed at Colin Powell. Her stinging rebuke could not have been better designed to scrape a raw American nerve, challenging the nation’s machismo and role as leader of the free world. Powell reacted furiously. ‘I thought I would have an aneurysm,’ he recalled. ‘American GIs are not toy soldiers to be moved around on some global game board. Source
When you stop valuing one person’s life, the number of dead then just become an inconvenience. Is there a hell? A special place for special treatment to those who think this way? Madeline Albright just died. Dead of cancer.
The interview:
An Iraqi mother peeks through her black and gold embroidered hijab to gaze upon her child dying in her arms. The malnourished toddler lies motionless — his eyes shut, his skin pale. The words of 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl can be heard.
“We have heard that half a million children have died,” she says, referring to the effects of the U.N. sanctions effort in Iraq. Pausing for a brief moment to regain her thought, Stahl continues, asking then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, “Is the price worth it?” The camera pans to Albright, who responds in a tempered diplomatic tone, “This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.” For Stahl, this historic interview would result in an Emmy award and wide journalistic praise. For Secretary Albright, however, her choice of words would spark a heated response from swath of the Arab world and would reinforce a narrative of anti-US sentiment festering since the very inception of the Iraq sanctions. Read more
Today, the press wouldn’t even ask a question like this. Good question and soulless response. Longer interview farther down.
The U.S. has a nasty belief that sanctions are the way to bring a “country to heel.” Albright was a believer. Economic destruction. Starvation.
With sanctions it may be cheaper material wise, the cost is in the large number of innocent lives that suffer. Corrupt people with power in Iraq did not suffer, their needs came first over the masses.
By the end of the 1970’s Iraq had received an award from UNESCO for its campaign to eradicate illiteracy. Before the implementations of sanctions, over 80 percent of the nation regularly drank safe, clean, drinking water, child mortality rates were comparable to European nations and Irai children had access to a nearly universal primary school education. For all intensive purposes, Cockburn writes, 1989 Iraq was, “a rich modern city.”
The combination of sanctions and coalition bombings resulted in the destruction of nearly half of Iraq’s infrastructure by 1991. Telecommunications, agricultural development, and electrical power sustained crippling blows. In Gordan’s book, Martii Ahtisaari, the Under Secretary General for Administration and Management for the U.N. at the time of the sanctions said of the sanctions affect, “the recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the economic mechanized society…Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre industrial age.’”
More complete interview. The clip moves on to a different topic at the end.
The numbers of children who died is in some dispute but even at best, hundreds of thousands of children died no doubt.
“There are no operational water and sewage treatment plants and the reported incidence of diarrhea is four times above normal levels,” one post-war assessment reported; “further infectious diseases will spread due to inadequate water treatment and poor sanitation,” another predicted.
Combine this with harsh and arbitrary restrictions on medicines, the destruction of Iraq’s vaccine facilities, and the fact that, until this summer, vaccines for common infectious diseases were on the so-called “1051 list” of substances in practice banned from entering Iraq. Deliberately creating the conditions for disease and then withholding the treatment is little different morally from deliberately introducing a disease-causing organism like anthrax, but no major U.S. paper seems to have editorialized against the U.S. engaging in biological warfare–or even run a news article reporting Nagy’s evidence that it had done so. (The Madison Capitol Times–8/14/01–and the Idaho Statesman–10/2/01–ran op-eds that cited Nagy’s work.)
Another opinion:
….Other critics of Albright, however, featured fewer degrees of civility. Mixed within the analytical criticisms of Albright’s seemingly indifferent tone when speaking about Iraqi civilian casualties and the US’s neglect to properly address humanitarian concerns resulting from the prolonged sanctions, were a slew of attacks on the secretary targeting her female identity and supposed jewish ancestry. US news outlets, like the Los Angeles Times, swiftly condemned such criticism, denouncing the attacks on Abright as misogynist, anti-semitic, and inaccurate. This sentiment was shared vocally by members of the US State Department, whose spokesman Glyn Davies called Arab backlash against Albright, “biased and reprehensible.”
Though some of the criticism directed at Albright was surely laced with unsavory sentiment, the US press condemnation of criticism towards the Albright in totality failed to address the real underlying feeling of distrust and anger felt by a large group of people as a result of US foreign policy measures. As Joy Gordon notes in her book, Invisible War, one of the greatest catalysts of this anger seems to have arisen through the US and Albright’s perceived unwillingness to share the burden of responsibility for the deaths resulting from the sanctions. The United States deflected culpability, and held strong to the position that the Hussein regime was, “flatly responsible for whatever suffering there was.”
Source: “Is the Price Worth It?” The Crippling Effects of U.N. Sanctions in Iraq
Here is an interview maintained by the government.
I will choose a few points. The full read is worth the ride.
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright
Interview on NBC-TV “The Today Show” with Matt Lauer
Columbus, Ohio, February 19, 1998
As released by the Office of the Spokesman
U.S. Department of State
MR. LAUER: On “Close Up” this morning — the showdown with Iraq. As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan heads to Baghdad in a last-ditch diplomatic effort to end the standoff, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is traveling around the United States making the administration’s case for a possible strike against Saddam Hussein. Madame Secretary, good morning to you, good to see you.
……
MR. LAUER: That’s true. You did have people who stood up and expressed their concern over military action against Iraq. Did you walk away from the meeting, Madame Secretary, with a different point of view, a different perspective on the situation?
SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: Absolutely not. I think that we know what we have to do, and that is help enforce the UN Security Council resolutions, which demand that Saddam Hussein abide by those resolutions, and get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, and allow the inspectors to have unfettered and unconditional access. That’s what we have to do.
Matt, we would like to solve this peacefully. But if we cannot, we will be using force; and the American people will be behind us, and I think that they understand that.
MR. LAUER: I’m just curious. Do you think yesterday’s session helped or hurt your case? I mean, back in the early 1990s, Madame Secretary, you used to appear on this show as an analyst for foreign affairs with William Hyland. And you’d come on and talk about the Administration’s reaction to foreign affairs. If you were analyzing yesterday’s performance by you and your colleagues, how would you rate it?
SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: I thought our performance was great. But I think that the issue here is that there were people who disagree. I would probably say that there were a few dozen hecklers who disagreed. But what I would have said, actually, is that there were more people that asked questions and directed their thoughts about the fact that we ought to send in ground forces.
That’s what I found interesting — that there are more Americans who really would like us to go in and finish off Saddam Hussein. That was the message that I got from that meeting.
MR. LAUER: And you lead me right into my next question, because one man you heard from yesterday was a retired serviceman named Mike McCall, whose son died during the Vietnam War. Here’s what he said.
(Audio clip)
SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: Well, we had a half-a-million troops there in 1991. And the decision was that they could not take out Saddam Hussein. And I don’t think, frankly, that if we got into it, that the American people would want us to send in huge numbers of forces. So we are doing what must be done.
First of all, we would like to have a diplomatic, peaceful solution and have him give unfettered access to these places, so that we could tell what is happening with his weapons of mass destruction. But otherwise, the purpose of a very substantial strike will be to substantially reduce his weapons of mass destruction threat and his threat to the neighbors. We think that is an appropriate goal, and our goal — and we’ve said this, Matt — may not seem really decisive; but what we’re trying to do here is contain Saddam Hussein. We’ve managed to do that for seven years. This has been a successful policy. Whenever he puts his head up, we push him back.
…
MR. LAUER: Mike, let me ask you to stand by, and let me ask a couple more questions to Madeleine Albright.
Madame Secretary, your trip to the Middle East several weeks ago was not as successful as I think you would have liked, in building a coalition against Saddam Hussein at this point — certainly not as successful as the coalition in 1991. Have you spoken to President Bush or former Secretary of State Baker and asked for any advice on gaining support from the Arab world?
SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: First of all, I think my trip actually went pretty well, because this is a very different situation from ’91, when there was a cross-border invasion of one Arab country into another. And frankly, I got a lot more support than is publicly visible, because these people live in the region.
MR. LAUER: So they’re saying one thing in public, and saying something else to you in private?
SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: Yes, yes. And we feel comfortable that should we have to use military force, that they will be very cooperative.
And as a matter of fact, I did talk to both former President Bush and former Secretary of State Baker; and they both agreed that we have a much more complicated situation than they had on their hands. And they were very supportive, and I especially enjoyed — well, I enjoyed talking to both of them, because they do have some very good points.
Continue……
https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/1998/980219a.html
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