March 26, 2022
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT was the first woman to be appointed as Secretary of State in 1997 under then-President Bill Clinton. She served as ambassador to the U.N. previously. In 2012, then-President Obama awarded her the Medal of Freedom. She died, age 84, from cancer on Wednesday.
The Clintons loved her, so that should tell you something about this Prague native. Among other things, she encouraged NATO to be the world’s policemen in Kosovo after the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1999. It established a precedent for later wars of aggression, such as Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and yes, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
She was also instrumental in enforcing harsh sanctions against Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein through the 1990s that starved Iraqi civilians of food and killed them from lack of medicines. When asked by the CBS TV news-magazine “60 Minutes” in 1996 whether the Iraqi sanctions after the 1991 Gulf war were worth it, she replied they were, despite resultant deaths of some 500,000 Iraqi children, a figure Albright did not bother to dispute. (Eventually it was estimated up to 1.5 million Iraqis had died as a result of the sanctions, probably rising to the scale of a genocide.) Osama bin Laden later said the cruel sanctions were one of the primary reasons for al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Albright thought then, as the imposter in the White House, Joe Biden, does today, that sanctions would force the nation to capitulate and cause the population to overthrow their leader. It didn’t work any better back then than it does today, but Biden was probably too busy then beating up Corn Pop outside the gym to notice. Time will tell if the analogy stops there, or if, like the pretext of WMDs being used to rationalize the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the pretext of chemical or bio-weapons will justify a possible U.S. invasion of Russia for regime change. (There were no WMDs and hopefully there will be no chem- or bio-weapons, but one cannot trust reporting on it as a contemporaneous matter given recent history of ‘mistakes.’)
Before we venerate a woman such as Albright, perhaps we should think about how we might feel if another country, say, Russia, just for giggles, did to us what Albright did to them. Would they call us what our own call Putin: a worse-than-Hitler soulless war-criminal killer madman? The MSM is not clear on this.
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