How the former Secretary of State and UN Ambassador, who died this week, failed the test of history
In May 1996, on CBS’ 60 Minutes, Leslie Stahl asked then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about the ongoing economic sanctions that the United Nations, led by the US, had imposed on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in response to his illegal invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The sanctions banned nearly all trade with Iraq until it rid itself permanently and unconditionally of all nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons capabilities and allowed inspectors full access to verify and monitor compliance. At the time of the interview, it was widely believed that the child mortality rate in Iraq had soared due to the sanctions, leading to the following exchange between Stahl and Albright:
Stahl: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it….It is a moral question, but the moral question is even a larger one. Don’t we owe to the American people, and to the American military and to other countries in the region that this man not be a threat?
Stahl: Even with the starvation and the lack…
Albright: I think, Leslie — it is hard for me to say this because I am a humane person, but my first responsibility is to make sure that the United States forces do not have to go and refight the Gulf War.
Stahl later won an Emmy for this interview. But it was based on a shaky premise, as Michael Spagat, a British historian, documented later. Members of a study team from the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, which had visited Iraq in 1995 to investigate health and nutrition conditions, had extrapolated from a small sample of mothers interviewed in Baghdad to claim that 567,000 Iraqi children had died due to the sanctions, but experts quickly found problems with their research. Two years after making the original estimate, one of those researchers retracted most of her findings. It was impossible to know if the mothers interviewed had exaggerated their own reports out of fear of the repressive Iraqi government, or because they believed that telling interviewers their children had died would lead to the sanctions being lifted. A later in-depth study found that conditions in the Kurdish portion of the country, which was also subject to the sanctions, led to very modest increase in child mortality.
Albright, who sadly passed away this week at the age of 84, later wrote that she deeply regretted how she answered Stahl’s question and wished that she had challenged its premise. In a 2020 interview with The New York Times, she described how she would use the episode in her classes “as an example of how thinking through what you’re going to say is important.” She added, “I regret it. I have apologized for it I can’t tell you how many times.”
I’ve long remembered Albright’s “the price is worth it” quote as an extreme example of how far American leaders have been willing to go to try to justify insane actions, as well as a reminder of how often Democrats have caved in to or embraced Republican militarism. In my 2003 book The Iraq War Reader (which I co-edited with Christopher Cerf), the Albright quote is included as the opening of a chapter on the UN sanctions and inspections regime that framed the build-up to President George W. Bush’s ill-fated invasion. But we placed the quote underneath one from President George H.W. Bush, W’s father, who said in 1991, “At this juncture, my view is that we don’t want to lift these sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.” That choice — to punish Iraq until Saddam was somehow removed, went beyond the actual terms of the UN resolutions imposing sanctions on the country. But in 1997, Albright endorsed it, saying “We do not agree with the nations who argue that, if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted.” In October 1998, President Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which committed the US to “regime change,” and at the end of the year he bombed the country for four days, claiming it was necessary to “degrade” Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programs. Justifying this action, Albright said, “The weapons of mass destruction are the threat of the future. I think the president explained very clearly to the American people that this is the threat of the 21st century.”
There’s a straight line from Bush I’s elevation of Saddam as an existential menace to Bush II’s fatefully stupid decision to make war on him after 9–11, a line that Albright helped draw with her own bellicose assertions about Saddam.
In 1993, as UN Ambassador, for example, she claimed the US had irrefutable evidence that Iraq had tried to assassinate Bush I earlier that year when he visited Kuwait on a victory tour. She held up photos of circuit boards of a radio-controlled firing device seized in Kuwait, asserting that it matched the “signature” of one made in Iraq. This, she claimed, proved that Iraqi intelligence was involved. The fact that these devices were mass produced items commonly used in walkie-talkies, model airplanes and cars, and that they had no identifiable “signature,” went unmentioned. The New York Times editorialized that the information Albright presented “was not conclusive enough for a reasonable citizen to join her in being ‘highly confident’ that force — rather than criminal trials and diplomatic measures — was the wisest course.” A CIA study leaked to the Boston Globe suggested that Kuwait’s leaders might have “cooked the books” on the alleged plot in order to play up the “continuing Iraqi threat” to the West. The lack of clear evidence didn’t matter in the context of the times — after all, Saddam was universally viewed as a monster. So after the FBI concluded that Iraq and its leader were implicated, President Clinton fired 23 Tomahawk missiles at the downtown Baghdad headquarters of Iraq’s intelligence service. Three of the missiles, each armed with a thousand pounds of high explosives, missed their mark and landed on nearby homes, killing eight civilians. (Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh ultimately concluded in a careful article published in The New Yorker that the evidence linking Saddam to an attempted assassination was “seriously flawed,” and that Clinton ordered a relatively modest strike on Baghdad in order to assuage domestic expectations that he look “tough”; so much for the lives of those eight civilians.)
Though Albright disagreed with Bush II’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq, a fateful mistake that we are still paying for, her dissent in no way challenged the broad, and flawed, consensus across elite opinion that Saddam was a threat to world peace because of his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. In a September 2002 op-ed in the New York Times, she cheered Bush’s intense rhetoric against Saddam and even validated his fantastical belief that international intervention could eventually bring democracy to Iraq. She wrote:
The core of President Bush’s forcefully delivered message on Iraq at the United Nations yesterday was irrefutable. Saddam Hussein is a serial liar, a bully and a threat to peace. He has used chemical weapons, and he yearns to impress an Arab world that despises him by building a deliverable nuclear bomb.
The president made a strong case for international action that results either in Iraqi compliance with its obligations or the establishment of a new and, ultimately, democratic government in Baghdad. There should be bipartisan backing for such a policy here at home, and the president wisely has chosen to solicit global support instead of attempting to go it alone.
I hope, however, that the president will not be pushed by his hard-line advisers into an unwise timetable for military action. We should pick this fight at a moment that best suits our interests. And right now, our primary interest remains the thorough destruction and disruption of Al Qaeda and related terrorist networks.
In other words, let’s hold off on invading Iraq until we’ve vanquished al Qaeda. Instead of, let’s reject the insanity of invading Iraq in the first place.
We now know that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, nor was he anywhere close to getting nuclear weapons. After the invasion, the intelligence community determined that he had ended his nuclear weapons development program in 1991 and stopped biological weapons research in 1996. Inspectors found no caches of chemical weapons or any evidence that it resumed its chemical weapons program after 1991. (In effect, the UN sanctions were working.) But it was impossible in 2002–3 to challenge those notions, such was the hysteria in this country about Saddam.
Albright’s own comments during that time shows how hard it was to even meekly dissent. In December, as Bush II was making clearer that war was on the horizon, she told ABC’s Good Morning America, “The timing of this is something that troubles me. And I think we need to know more about what all this is about. You know, a lot of people who have been asking questions or accused of being unpatriotic. My sense is is that it’s our patriotic duty as citizens to ask the questions.” Two months later, she had caved, telling Meet the Press, “I think we’re going to war, and so I will support the president and I will support our troops in Iraq. … So I am not flat-out saying that I think this is a mistake.” Even afterwards, in September 2003, she was still justifying Bush’s war of choice instead of challenging its whole basis. “I understood the why of the war … But I always said that I didn’t know why now.”
Albright’s last book, Fascism: A Warning, skates past all of this, blaming the rise of authoritarianism in America solely on Donald Trump. It makes no mention of America’s rush to invade Iraq in the wake of 9–11, nor of her own role in fueling the national hysteria that took us into that quagmire, or of the danger of allowing any President to so demonize another country that dissent is punished by death threats and self-censorship by the press. Of the waste of lives and trillions in treasure on America’s failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she says nothing, even though she correctly notes how military defeat fueled the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany. Whatever else one may say about the good she represented, as a child of European refugees who made a new life in America, as a woman who broke into and rose to the top of the male-dominated profession of diplomacy, and as a feminist who inspired many younger women, her career as a champion of America’s most fateful mistake in recent history should also not be forgotten.
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