Interviewer: "We have heard that a half a million children have died. I mean that's more children than died in Hiroshima. 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."
This is from a 1996 interview with this woman [1] about the Iraq invasion. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
George H. W. Bush sanctioned Saddam to death instead of toppling his government. From the end of the Persian Gulf war until it was "liberated" it was basically impossible to do business in Iraq.
Yes, most politicians would adamantly deny the the facts, or that they were making a tradeoff at all. So, credit where credit is due (what little it might be).
The invasion of Iraq, or at least the one you are alluding to, happened in 2002, six years after that quote and a few years after Albright was making those decisions.
And what is it you are objecting to, exactly? Saddam was a sadist who gassed his own citizen. People demanded someone go in and stop him back then, like they are now asking for a no-flight-zone in Ukraine. Sometimes, there are no good choices.
At the time, embargoes were seen as effective because they had just brought down South Africa’s regime of Apartheid, and (to some degree) the Soviet Union. The alternative in US politics was not non-interventionism. It was outright invasion, something that had to wait for an administration without Clinton and Albright. The “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iraq” party came in and that likely killed an order of magnitude more people, especially if you consider that it caused the collapse in Syria, as well.
Some context here. This was because Saddam and Iraq launched scud missiles at and invaded Kuwait. US coalition forces freed Kuwait from Iraq's invasion, then pushed into the border of Iraqi territory to destroy the scud missile launchers and then promptly secured a ceasefire and left, leaving Saddam's regime.
This is the first thing I thought of when I saw her name.
But I have to wonder what info she had that made her believe this? How many Iranians does in the 1980s in the war against Iraq? How many Kurds died to the government in Baghdad?
I have started to question whether those in power actually have perverted value systems (as is a common meme) or whether they are privy to different facts.
Not trying to apologize for this woman’s statement, just genuinely curious.
They don’t even need to be privy to different facts for things like this to make some sense without resorting to assuming they have perverse values. You cited some possibilities yourself, data like that isn’t and wasn’t classified information.
Most internet commentary and discussion on any matters of significance is hopelessly warped by an inability to understand context and scale. Some of that inability is bad faith argument, the rest is a mess of laziness, naivety, and shallow displays of superiority.
The point of my comment wasn’t to ignore your very plausible explanations. I expect there are many people that suffer from those.
The point was to point out that epistemology works best when you make a good faith effort to understand how other people arrived at their conclusions.
I have spent a lot of time recently trying to understand why many people are convinced about things like New World Order / Global Cabal / QAnon / Soros, Stop the Steal, various vaccine/COVID topics, multiple religious beliefs, and even why Putin believed he should “protect” Ukraine (assuming good faith). It’s far easier to bridge misunderstandings if you understand their motives, intent, desires, and the chain of facts that inform their worldview.
I don't understand this video. If it was 1996, then is wasn't about the Iraqi invasion because it hadn't occurred yet. The 1993 action was not an invasion of Iraq. The caption says something about Iran, but I can't imagine what the US did to cause 1/2 million deaths of children in Iran. So what was this video actually about?
I guess her answer stands either way, but the idea that sanctions killed half a million children is Hussein’s phony propaganda, and subsequent research has shown no increase in child mortality during the time of the sanctions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/08/04...
"We have investigated ourselves and found we have done nothing wrong" is the takeaway here.
Rather than deferring to Liz Sly from WaPo, why doesn't the U.S government submit itself and the administrations of the 90s to The Hague so this can be confirmed?
I’m not deferring to WaPo, but rather two academics at the London School of Economics. Their paper is linked in the WaPo article. I don’t believe either is affiliated with the US government, or even an American citizen, so I don’t see how their article could be called “investigating ourselves.”
It really bothers me when obituaries of political figures omit the negative or controversial things they have done. It feels like a denial of history to not mention the legitimate complaints that exist against someone. In her case I'm thinking specifically of her involvement in sanctions against iraq, and the human consequences of that - consequences that are especially relevant today as we heavily sanction russia - but the specific issues are pretty moot to my point.
I don't think every obituary needs to be critical, but I do think political figures have opted into that by being a part of history.
Everybody is complex and complicated. No one is all good or all bad. Obituaries are a short way of honoring the good in people while biographers can flesh out the complexities that show our poor choices.
The bad that most of us do in our lifetimes doesn't reach the geopolitical scale. When it does, it seems negligent to ignore it when they pass.
This idea of honoring the good in the dead is also arbitrarily applied. An obituary of Osama Bin Laden wouldn't neglect to mention his involvement in 9/11.
That depends on the obituary's avenue. Pretty sure that any obituary published where it matter to his family and close friends highlighted 9/11 with pride.
I'm doubtful that this is true, as I believe bin laden is seen as an extremist by most, but even if it is true - that's the same thing I'm talking about. Celebrating what you see as the "good" someone did, without acknowledging the bad. Even if you cheered for 9/11 - you would not have cheered when it resulted in countless civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I don't even get what you doubt. Bin laden was a leader of an international organization dedicated to his ideas. Their agenda is extremist by most, but that leaves big group of people, arguably even a country, that welcome it as the true will of Allah. They have papers and they publish books. There's a place for many people on the fringe.
I just read the Economist's Obituary someone linked above, which is good and somewhat disorienting. The last sentence is a quote of him with exact negation of what you say about cheering - (spoiler alert - it is probably better to read
the whole thing before the quote) - The difference between pure Muslims and Americans, he said, was that Americans loved life, whereas Muslims loved death.
All that says is that bin laden himself was proud of his legacy. I'm sure his followers are too. But of all the people in the world, his followers are a fraction of a sliver of a hair - and there is no country that is ruled by his followers.
L. Ron Hubbard had thousands of followers, but to conflate an internal Scientology paper obituary with "any obituary published where it matter to his family and close friends" would be a mistake.
What you say is true, luckily. But I honestly don't understand what are you are arguing for, you mean that you believe that his wives and followers couldn't find solacing obituary to read? if so than I'm firmly believe that you are wrong, but I'm not going to search for it as this isn't the kind of things I want to engage with - the Economist's was more than enough for me. And if you are right on this and I'm wrong, well, even better.
Edit, in response to OP edit:
I am not sure if Hubbard is comparable, I don't know if his family and followers cared about what the NYT write about him, for example. But Bin Laden's followers don't care much for the approval of outsiders, that's pretty obvious.
Also, bad things are often not known until sometime after the people died. Anyway, it is much more civilized to honor the deceased family during their mourning. There's plenty of pages to fill in future newspaper articles and history books.
Knowing that people have died, she gave her personal opinion that she personally supported it[0].
That's a large part of the reason why she's disliked. It's because she advocates for genocide. If you replace "Iraqis" with "Jews" and have someone say that the deaths of half a million Jewish children is "worth it" nobody will be in this comment section trying to talk about honoring the deceased or suggesting everyone has good and bad sides.
Those sanctions were imposed as a response to an evil act (invasion of a neighboring country, Kuwait). Hussein could have not committed the evil act in the first place. When a dictator does an evil act, they cannot hide behind consequences to their people. That is obviously of great importance in current events, also.
The deaths of Kuwaitis, the deaths of Kurds, the deaths of Southern Iraqis and other dissidents, and any number innocent human beings that died because of the sanctions are tragic... But consequences for crimes belone with the criminal. Hussein killed tens of thousands of Iraqis with chemical weapons over his time in power. He really was a monstrous person.
> You can play that video over and over, but the sanctions were imposed as a response to an evil act (invasion of a neighboring country)
Should half a million Americans die for each US invasion? If I said it's worth it does that make it OK?
> When a dictator does an evil act, they cannot hide behind consequences to their people
A dictator, by definition, is not representative of a "people." There is no "their people" in this case.
> Also, the result that led to that comment was retracted
So the fact that she said it was worth it -- explicit support for it -- doesn't matter because the data might have been wrong? If I was told half a million Jews were killed yesterday and in my position as representative to the UN said it was "worth it" am I absolved if it turned out to be fake news?
> Hussein killed tens of thousands of Iraqis with chemical weapons over his time in power
This never actually happened. It was just about 2000 people. From what we've learned in this discussion I guess that absolves Saddam for thinking it was worth it to crush the Kurdish uprisings.
Great chatting. I won't be participating any further though.
"blaming powerless besieged people for their own suffering is a special type of reasoning that only seems to pop up whenever brown people are mentioned"
I agree with you. And Hussein was a US ally when he was fighting Iran. OBL was a US ally when he was fighting the Soviets. That can't be ignored, either. The US helped make those enemies. And the difference in public reaction to Ukrainian dead and refugees vs those who are Palestinian, Syrian, Yemeni, Ahgan ... it is shameful. It is hard to believe racism isn't a part of the disparity, certainly enormous lack of capability for empathy. That being said I think that Albright's comment is out of context and - taken at face value - is not reflective of reality, though. You can blame a lot of people in Russia, the UN, the US, in KSA, from a lot of places.. and, add Madeleine Albright to that list, for what happened to the people of Iraq in the 90s. It will feel great to righteously hate on her but it won't promote understanding what happen or prevent it from recurring. ps - I removed, "You can play that video over and over, but" because I sounded like a jerk and regretted it.
She recanted her statement, and she's right, the question was a trap. It is sad to say so, but the consequent deaths were incidental, not intentional. Place the responsibility where it belongs: the Ba'athists caused those deaths, not the sanctions. Do you think if the Ba'athists had treated the Iraqi people like human beings and asked for food because people were starving, Albright would have been against such aide even while Iraq was under sanction? Honestly, your argument sounds like the abusive partner that asks, "why did you make me hit you?" But here, it is "Look what you did, Albright, you heartlessly starved Iraqi children!" Absurd.
> but the consequent deaths were incidental, not intentional.
Isn't this a bit naive? According to this reasoning, Holodomor death's weren't intentional as well, while most poeple argue that, since the effect of that policy could be easily predicted, they are, for all intents and purposes, intentional. I would apply the same standard to US sanctions against Iraq.
The problem here depends on what "it" she believe was the it that was worth, isn't it?
If she believed their death is worth, like the linked video title suggest, finding Iraq's non existent WMDs, than yes. But if she believed that the alternative is a much worse state with a lot more bodies and suffering then it is a defensible moral choice.
And it is not like she was standing behind what she said - she said she fell into a trap[0]. Compare to Truman, who approved the actual Hiroshima, and "never lost any sleep over that decision.” [1]
It should have been defensible moral choice, I have corrected it.
If Putin or Stalin believed that their actions are the right thing, meaning they have decided to act due to moral reasons, than it would be moral choice. If the moral choice is defensible or not depends on the moral reasoning - you don't have to agree with someone's moral position to see agree that it is a valid position even if you don't share it (even strongly oppose it). Saying someone's position is defensible doesn't mean he did the right thing.
Obituaries are also a short way of white-washing the incredible number of bad things that their subject has done.
It's convention that they don't speak ill of the dead. A convention that overwhelmingly benefits the legacies of people who have inflicted disproportionate amounts of misery and suffering in life.
I'll have to look into more of the story of her involvement in 1990s actions against Iraq. Whatever it is I am sure it's not as bad as what the other party did in 2003.
Need to vent about something your comment is reminding me of. I saw it in Putin's speeches, and a recent RT clip -- this notion that what the US did to Iraq in 2003 justifies actions in Ukraine. As an American who was very opposed to the second Iraq war I find this false justification very disappointing. Firstly, that one bad action does not justify another. Second, the story that the US tells about itself is that we sometimes make mistakes, then our political process tries its best to correct them as time goes on. See also: slavery. Or the fact that the Iraq war is pretty unpopular in retrospect. We openly admit to not being perfect, but try to commit ourselves to continuous improvement. That's an important point.
> Whatever it is I am sure it's not as bad as what the other party did in 2003.
...
> Firstly, that one bad action does not justify another.
I'm not trying to start a fight, because I agree with your overall point - learning and growing as a nation is important. That's honestly a big part of why I believe political figures obituaries should include their full context. But these two sentences seem to me to sharply contradict each-other.
I think in this case it's important to note that many public officials stopped short of boots on the ground in Iraq because they knew it was trouble.
In this thread i feel like some are conflating the two gulf wars and the sanctions in between. (I seem to recall there was also a Clinton air strike in the middle) Albright was really against the second war if i recall correctly.
> Whatever it is I am sure it's not as bad as what the other party did in 2003.
Democrats don't get to wash their hands of that invasion. Both parties supported it.
Sanctions and sporadic bombings on critical infrastructure under Clinton was estimated to cause on the order of a million deaths, mostly children dieing of disease because the US destroyed water treatment facilities. Albright infamously defended the deaths of 800,000 children as worth the cost in a 60 minutes interview.
(Unfortunately the political lesson from that wasn't don't cause mass death, it was don't acknowledge that you've caused mass death)
Republicans used this as a campaign issue in the 2002 midterms. They wanted to paint a no vote on Iraq as weak. I believe this is a substantial component for why many congressional and senate Democrats voted for it.
It was a really ugly thing to see playing out in public and media... Policy was set arbitrarily in the executive branch and media and congress were ... Yes also responsible, and not really exercising their full power and responsibility, but also some of them bullied into it. The patriotism of anyone against the war was very harshly attacked and unfortunately it seemed pretty effective at the time.
215 (96.4%) of 223 Republican Representatives voted for the resolution.
82 (39.2%) of 209 Democratic Representatives voted for the resolution.
6 (<2.7%) of 223 Republican Representatives voted against the resolution: Reps. Duncan (R-TN), Hostettler (R-IN), Houghton (R-NY), Leach (R-IA), Morella (R-MD), Paul (R-TX).
126 (~60.3%) of 209 Democratic Representatives voted against the resolution.
The only Independent Representative voted against the resolution: Rep. Sanders (I-VT)
Reps. Ortiz (D-TX), Roukema (R-NJ), and Stump (R-AZ) did not vote on the resolution.
Yeah, according to HN, the invasion was mostly the NYT's fault...
Realistically, there is zero chance the invasion would have happened without exaclty that trio of President, Sec-State & VP, plus or minus a Wolfowitz.
But the Republicans successfully goaded some Democrats into voting for it by threatening to taunt them. The US public needed some more important foreign blood to be spilled than Afghani. And that's the way the cookie crumbled...
Yeah, it was more like dishonest politicians suggested to the US public that Iraq and 9/11 were related and a lot of people didn't know the difference, and didn't bother to learn. In that respect the US public was responsible and at fault. But not a "prime mover" as you say.
I thought Richard Clarke's book a few years later was pretty informative. Iirc, in his telling, they wanted to attack Iraq before 9/11 happened, and when it did happen, many in the administration didn't care at all who did it, they just wanted Iraq to pay. There was a line attributed to Rumsfeld "but Iraq has better targets".
> But the Republicans successfully goaded some Democrats into voting for it by threatening to taunt them.
Really? Wow, voting for a war you (allegedly) know to be wrong because you're worried about being "taunted". That's the most pathetic spineless thing I've ever heard. Worse than unashamed pro-war crowd, in some ways.
What happened to all those cowardly losers anyway? They all get voted out and replaced with people who were happy to continue those occupations and support the new wars and interventions during the Obama administration?
Doesn't change anything that's just a sorry excuse for cowardly corrupt warmongers. They clearly knew what the executive branch would do.
More generally, that would be a dereliction of duty too. The entire point of these checks and balances is so that an individual branch does not need to be trusted to make a wise choice.
By convention obituaries don't speak ill of the dead. Everyone knows this convention. To get a complete story you don't look to the obit. Particularly because this is well known should be harmless.
The sanctions on Iraq after the first Gulf War were approved by the UN and the bulk of their practical problems had to do with Iraqi non-compliance. There's a decent argument to be made they strengthened Saddam Hussein's regime but the 'human consequences' were themselves direct consequences of the regime's cruelty and intransigence.
I guess 9/11 was a just direct consequence of the US government's cruelty and intransigence given that OBL's stated reason for the attacks were the sanctions. That's a hot take, not one you'd want to say out loud around NYC.
In any case, performing literal siege against a group -- exclusively chosen for political reasons -- and then blaming powerless besieged people for their own suffering is a special type of reasoning that only seems to pop up whenever brown people are mentioned.
Just because race is part of a subject doesn't mean it's racebaiting. You can't just remove race when its inconvenient or makes you uncomfortable, any more than you can separate WWII from a discussion about the Germany economy during the Third Reich.
You made race a part of the subject when discussing Albright. You were likely called out for disingenuous "race-baiting" since you don't provide any evidence for her animus against "brown people", a questionable claim because even if true it's not clear that Iraqis identify as "brown people" or Madeleine thinks in those terms.
Moreover, you ignore the the actual war she was more famous for and had a bigger role in, "Madeleine's War" (https://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/1999/05/10/albright...). This involved her advocating (successfully) to bomb Serbia, a nation of nominally white Christian people she argued were committing genocide against a Muslim (also white) population. This was also against the UN charter due to Russian and Chinese veto. This war, more so than the Iraq war, has much more relevance in discussing her legacy today given the invasion of Ukraine but you appear to ignore it intentionally or are perhaps unaware of it entirely.
I'm not arguing that racism isn't important in understanding the Iraq war (or other wars), but it is one factor among many. Some of the most brutal wars are actually between groups of people that to outsiders appear to be be very similar (Ukraine/Russia, Serb/Croat, various civil wars, etc...)
No I did not. I am not the original person making the comment.
Just because she bombed white people to protect white people doesn’t mean she was somehow completely objective and unaffected by questions of race in her decision making. That is absolutely ridiculous. No one is.
The 'political reasons' in question were the unprovoked attack on a sovereign state. The responses were, again, approved through the global legal framework we have for adjudicating such matters - one that typically has so many checks it's almost never used. None of this can be said of either terrorism or the responses to that so I don't really follow this analogy at all.
What global legal approval was granted for the Iraq war in 2003, or even the Afghanistan war in 2001? Can you clarify what "responses" you're talking about in these clauses?
> The responses were, again, approved through the global legal framework [...]. None of this can be said of either terrorism or the responses [...]
Edit: I think I understand now, the first responses are the sanctions post-Kuwait invasion, the second responses are the Afghan and Iraq wars.
I know that. Are you implying that my "Edit" is incorrect, and you weren't referring to those events? If so, what were you referring to?
I don't get the sense that this conversation is locked down to the specifics of Albright, as plenty of people (and according to my understanding in the "Edit", you yourself) have made reasonable reference and analogies to events outside her time in office.
In my experience, if you didn't like the deceased in life, you'll probably want to criticize them at their death, and vice versa. If you ask me, there's no point to tearing someone down in their obituary. The deceased certainly doesn't care one way or another. The people that are grieving in the slightest don't want to hear it and you come off as a jerk without accomplishing anything. The people that aren't grieving already agree with you.
My suggestion is coming from a place of thinking about those who have no opinion. Maybe because Madeleine Albright was out of office before they were born, or maybe because they weren't paying attention at the time. There is a moment now where these people can be exposed to her legacy, good and bad, and it can help inform their understanding and their choices going forward.
I'm not sure those ambivalent about the deceased will suddenly not be. I'm also not sure what you mean by choices. Who to vote for? If this were a startup I'd say you're making way too many assumptions about your audience.
Nah. You aren’t entitled to a sanitized story just because you died. Doubly so when you made decisions that negatively impacted millions. That’s the price of being in power.
Like it or not, the story has already been told once the person has died. All that's left is how you feel about that story. History will be judging us all for a long time and there's no rush. Dunk all you like on someone when they die if it makes you feel better, but it's hardly a classy move and doesn't exactly change hearts and minds.
I didn’t say “dunk” on them. I’m saying you can tell a story that isn’t “oh my god they were angels in life and they’re angels now in death.” There’s a whole range of tones between sanitizing and slandering.
If we're arguing semantics there probably isn't much point in continuing. You can certainly tell that story, but I'm not sure a person's wake is the place to do it...if for no better reason than out of kindness for the grieving. There's plenty of time for history to develop a nuanced opinion.
It’s not just semantics when you change my argument from “we can talk about the negative/more complex sides of a person in an obituary” to “I should be able to ‘dunk’ on someone in an obituary if I feel the need to.” You are misstating my intention in an effort to make my position seem less reasonable than it is.
Your description was off by a large margin, it wasn’t just semantics.
I do agree this discussion probably isn’t going to be fruitful though, so have a nice weekend.
That goes into the history book, not the obituary. Obituaries are published when the death is still raw and you still have grieving family members. They're not supposed to be historically accurate (how can you compress someone's life into a page-long news story?), and are as much about breaking news & closure as about facts.
A history book has much more room to examine nuance & consequence, as well as more time to do thorough research and usually the benefit of hindsight and distance from the events in question.
I’m not sure what you’re saying is universally accepted when it comes to celebrities, politicians, just generally complicated people who are in the public eye. There is no rule that says that has to be the case, and I’m sure you can find a dozen obituaries that show the complexity of a person.
> Apr 24, 2000, Agence France Presse, NEW YORK, April 24 (AFP) - "US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Monday called on the United States Congress to vote in favour of China's entry into the World Trade Organisation. . . Turning to globalisation in general, Albright said the United States "must help those hurt by change; but also reaffirm our belief that an open and competitive world economy is the best route to higher standards of living for people everywhere."
Corporations are tools. They'll just do their thing in the environment that they find themselves in. Hoping or depending on them being "good" or lamenting them being "evil" is a fool's errand. They're unthinking automaton.
Absolutely blame the politicians and "experts" who conspired to allow corporations to circumvent our progress on labor and environmental regulation the past 100+ years.
> In her case I'm thinking specifically of her involvement in sanctions against iraq, and the human consequences of that
I think this is a little bit of blaming the jury for sentencing the criminal. Yeah, I think this is bad taste, because, wow, that's really placing an awful lot on her shoulders, that because she was involved she is thus morally responsible for the consequences, as though the UNSC had no part in it. IMO the Ba'athists themselves are entirely responsible for the consequences of the sanctions for creating the conditions that forced the sanctions.
The West is writing all the history books, and with the US having a monopoly in printing the worlds reserve currency and being the backbone of the West’s military might, history is obfuscated. An indictment of a former US Secretary of State is an indictment of America itself, and by proxy, its ally nations.
I’ve worked in big tech companies with some of the most intelligent and capable people I’ve met in my entire life. And while they have very strong views on American politics — labeling Presidents, Senators, and other politicians corrupt, nefarious, incompetent, or some combination of all three - their views on Americas role on the world stage are more like America in a Hollywood film.
The other countries are corrupt, “shitty”, “evil”, etc and only America has the capability, will, and sort of a divine “right” to interfere and fix things, and fixing things means doing whatever we believe is right.
No one in the West batted an eye when children would be murdered in drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal region. When America and Russia fought proxy battles in Syria, there was no solidarity with the Syrian people. When our “ally” Saudi Arabia bombed the hell out of people in Yemen, again - there was no one asking questions. “We’re not targeting civilians” they’ll all say. I mean, America gave a new classification to all the “collateral damage”, simply labeling anyone they thought might be 18 years or older as being a militant, even if they’re just civilian bystanders.
Sure, the ones read in the west. The history books read in the East are frequently written in the East.
Iran, Russia, and China have very old societies with long histories. They, among others, have their own written histories. There is nothing significant preventing western citizens from researching history books written elsewhere.
It’s not difficult to find common books/movies/documentaries which challenge the rose-colored-glasses narrative of the US / The West. Noam Chomsky, Oliver Stone, et al are “writing the history books” which violate your assertion.
There is plenty of media content which is extremely critical of US. There are hurdles to get the US DoD to participate in projects which are strongly counter to pro-US narratives, but possible to do without their participation.
> Iran, Russia, and China have very old societies with long histories. They, among others, have their own written histories. There is nothing significant preventing western citizens from researching history books written elsewhere.
Their long histories are besides the point. How many Americans recognize Kim Kardashian? Now tell us how many could recognize where Iran is on a map.
The average American doesn’t know Noam Chomsky. The average US middle school or high school textbook gives a distorted perspective of history. The US “founding fathers” are portrayed as being all wise and noble, but I digress.
> There is plenty of media content which is extremely critical of US.
The media content is critical of the other political party. In international matters, they’ve generally presented Russia, China, and other non-European or NATO countries as corrupt, threatening, etc.
In international matters, the US media has not only supported but practically cheerlead American war efforts. During the second Iraq War, CNN, ABC news, Fox, etc had correspondents “embedded” with the US military, purposely creating this fictitious narrative that Iraqis were viewing Americans as liberators.
Meanwhile, American troops were rounding up civilians, forcing entry into their homes and searching house by house for hidden ammunitions and the so called “weapons of mass destruction”. Innocent Iraqis were murdered in cold blood for shooting at the invaders. Ya know, the same thing that Russians are doing now in Ukraine where we’re now calling them war criminals.
You are just complaining. You don’t have a theme in your comments except The West has done things to complain about (I totally agree).
The average person would rather watch celebrity sleaze content and corporate outrage news than challenge their own priors by reading challenging pieces on foreign policy. Same as every place on Earth.
I’m not going to defend US foreign policy, but your false equivalence of US collateral damage and Russian purposefully attacking civilian dwellings only wdilutes any argument you might have been making.
> I’m not going to defend US foreign policy, but your false equivalence of US collateral damage and Russian purposefully attacking civilian dwellings only wdilutes any argument you might have been making.
When America murders innocent civilians or starts illegal wars, it’s simply “collateral damage”. When another country does it, it’s “purposefully attacking civilian dwellings”.
This is exactly what I wrote in my post above - the sort of God/righteous complex that Westerners and particularly Americans have about their government, the same Americans who otherwise recognize their government is corrupt, sleazy, “the swamp”, or whatever other names they’ve come up with.
It’s ironic that you responded a post later literally just confirming my claim. :)
The Russian harm to innocents is orders of magnitudes higher than the US harm to innocents. It actually appears to be a core strategy in Ukraine, Chetchnia, and Afghanistan. They are firing artillery at civilian dwellings, cutting off food/fuel supply lines, and firing at refugee lines that aim for Poland rather than Russia.
The US has a bad name from drone strikes, but those are done intentionally to minimize harm to innocents and Are avoided when the harm is too high compared to the target. There are very few cases of the US military intentionally firing on civilians.
you are talking to the wrong person if you think I have a God/righteousness complex about my country/government. I am heavily critical of my own.
But Russia’s invasion is as idiotic as most of the worst Trump/QAnon conspiracy theories.
That said, I agree that too many people don’t seek out narratives/facts that counter their priors (I think this is psychically painful like an attack on our ego/identity).
And I agree with the bottom of your comment about the lack of empathy for Syrians, Yemenese, etc. Personally I think it’s difficult to understand the different belligerents and their incentives/intents when looking at say Pakistan or Yemen instead of the more obvious “Russia invades Ukraine” plot.
It’s worth explaining this through the lens of the Military-Entertainment Complex (movies, shows/series, books, and sports sponsorships).
If you don’t care for the way pull requests are usually written, then feel free to write your own and submit it.
See how little sense that makes? Even if I were to write an obituary that included some of the critical points I think should have been included - and were to somehow get it published instead of this one - that doesn’t change the fact that almost every other obituary (for this person, and for every other person) follows this convention.
I’m criticizing the convention and the norm, not this particular piece of writing.
Every once in a while I notice that Kissinger is still alive and it's surprising. He's outlived most other political figures from his generation and starting to outlive those from the next gen.
Can't wait for the next Bush and Obama too. Probably got a while to go there :(
These clowns are all just the front-men though. They may have had a non-trivial hand in pushing for and profiting from war, but for every one of them there's ones we don't know about who have control over many administrations, and many countries, and who don't really give two shits about the fungible public figures in their pockets.
He's famously Jewish and blood libel is an old and notorious anti-semitic attack, used by Nazis and the Holocaust and Imperial Russian pogroms. There are countless of ways to attack Henry Kissinger without debasing one's self in that way.
Nowhere in my original comment or the GP’s response is anyone being accused of antisemitism. Lots of people reference the blood libel without realizing that it’s an antisemitic canard; the object of the comment is to educate rather than shame.
Agreed, I didn't accuse anyone here of anti-semitism, either, my comment was in the same spirit. You can say Kissinger is a ghoul and murderer. I have no problem with that. I endorse that.
It was a finger-wagging, needlessly deflecting type of 'education' that had no real relevance to the actual topic at hand. No-one was discussing his monstrous behavior in terms of his Jewishness.
You do see that everybody in this thread agrees that Henry Kissinger is a monster and a war criminal, correct? Nothing has been deflected; we are all on the same page.
There is no excuse for invoking the blood libel, barring the basic kind of ignorance that was presumed in my initial response. If you want to describe Kissinger’s monstrosity, you can do better than leaning on cheap antisemitic canards.
There's no evidence that anyone here was invoking a blood libel. That would require anti-semitic intent on the part of the speaker, of which none has been demonstrated.
You've used the words "frame", "reference" and "invoke" to describe what the original commenter did vis-à-vis the blood libel and associated antisemitism.
All of those words can imply intent. They can also be somewhat neutral.
You're doubling, tripling, down on your original comment. I think your original comment was a big leap, honestly.
The "obvious" reference to ~"drinking blood of children to preserve youth" (OP now edited out) is vampirism, or possibly Silicon Valley (HBO TV) / Peter Thiel analogue.
Not Nazis though, not for everyone at least. You jumped there, and while I do think it's fair to warn of the adjacency, being more clear that you were reading OP charitably would have avoided this kerfluffle.
And FWIW, the blood libel accusation is ancient and Christian. The Nazis just borrowed it because it was convenient.
I think you’re confusing multiple responses. I never said that the blood libel was a uniquely or even originally Nazi invention.
I’ll summarize again: it is understandable to be ignorant of the blood libel. It is normal, even. My sole object in this conversation is to identify it, or “call it out” in modern parlance.
You keep using words that can be interpreted as accusatory/confrontational/adversarial.
I don't think OP deserves that. I think they were probably unaware of the arguably-adjacent antisemitism, but I think your "error" is at least as large, in making the leap from the obvious reference (vampirism) to the strained reference (antisemitism).
With the benefit of all of this post-comment context (!) and if I felt the need to comment at all, I'd have gone with something like "We agree that Kissinger was a monster, but you might be careful about the blood-drinking-preserves-youth comment, because it could be twisted into a reference to the ancient Blood Libel accusation against Jews (HK is Jewish)."
Anyway that is all for me here. Sorry for wading in. I think you both had innocent/good intent at the start, but that your linguistically ambiguous response turned this thread into something it didn't need to be.
Warning people away from accidental invocation of infamous bigoted myths is always worth doing. Just as it is worth warning people away from using ethnic slurs or telling racist jokes, even if explicitly targeted at someone horrible.
I think Orson Scott Card, despite being a complete loon, raised an interesting concept in the book Speaker For The Dead. Obituaries should be spoken honestly to all. Not speaking ill of the dead is morally wrong.
Maybe just me but I feel like this misses what Speaker For the Dead does. It isn't about speaking ill or not ill of people but understanding their life experience, to give context to who they were as a person. This moves past the superficial reading of a person that just listing their actions and classifying them as good or bad.
It's an interesting idea, but it has a few drawbacks.
You can't defend yourself when you're dead. You can't be your own witness. Nor can you face your own accuser. Also, who would you trust to speak that truth for you?
Also, grieving family members are not the most rational people. Doing this could trigger violence in practice.
And obituaries have a legal function. As a modern society, we want to encourage the publication of obituaries as soon as someone passes away. It mitigates the risk of potential fraud.
Anyone who followed the US foreign policy for the past 30 years would have made the same comments, if a person is dead his/her sins don't magically wash away.
DW just released a documentary caller Iraq: The Killing of a Nation. I hadn't realised the extent to which the gulf war and subsequent sanctions devastated Iraq. It's pretty atrocious.
Now she isn't the only person guilty and not even mentioned in this documentary. Still I think it's an important watch.
If we continue to lay blame on the Corporation, or the sociopath or the psychopath for the destruction caused by the rules that we enact, it isn't the predictable response of the automaton that is to blame. It simply allows us to continue the game of chicken when we know what the response will be. It is of little difference whose hand is holding the knife when the outcome is known. All we have done is shifted blame and white washed the actions that we ourselves are responsible for.
Zelensky could have stepped down, and ended the war.
Noone asked americans to come and kill people half the planet away, and you still did that, many many times in many many countries... middle east, africa, south american, even some european ones. You're the ultimate bad guys. Once i though you were atleast aware of that (from hippie movement, to micheal moore documentaries), but stayed quiet because of all the cheap oil and other resources, but i'm genuinely more and more disappointed in you, because some of you honestly think you're the good guys for killing people.
The largest atrocity was creating a power vacuum by firing the entiry Iraqi army after the war.
"After the initial invasion, most of the Iraqi military's former soldiers and officers offered little resistance to Coalition forces in the early days of the occupation. Many soldiers had simply gone home rather than openly fight the invading forces. This seeming acceptance of Coalition authority stemmed from the US military continuing to pay the salaries of Saddam's former soldiers, while promising senior Iraqi officers that they would have a major role to play "in building a new Iraq." [0]
Paul Bremer, head of the CPA, issued an order dissolving the entire Iraqi military, as well as most civilian employees of the old government, and pledged to build a new military and government from scratch. [0]
Thus, a decade of hell and eventually ISIS, began.
It is interesting that people are so angry with secretaries of state, rather than presidents. Or is it both? I rarely hear Bill Clinton's name spoken with such bitterness as Albright's as it relates to Kosovo, for example.
Honestly I am too young to have remembered the oil for food program and just read some about it. I didn't know we were sanctioning Iraq like that through the 90s.
Former presidents have entire organizations dedicated to rehabilitating and amplifying their legacies. Former presidents also make high-profile appearances at sporting and other events which serve to make them more relatable to the populace. In other words, much better marketing.
Personally, I might be biased by my personal friendship with Kosovar Muslims, but I view the NATO interventions in Kosovo as a pretty unambiguously good thing. No idea whether this sentiment will be popular here. They ended a genocide and acted within clear guidelines with international unity.
Yes. Long term bots, or people with malicious intent. This is not why were are at HN. People like them are completely ruining this site.
Spreading hate and missinfo. She wasn't in power both when 91 and 2003 invasions (it was republican presidents for both parts).
Also they are leaving the part:
Sadam invaded Iran
Sadam gased/chemical attacked Iran
Sadam invaded Kuwait
Sadam Chemically attacked/killed almost 100k of Kurds in Northern Iraq
Sadam was cruel to his own people and killed and repressed many
There you. They wont tell you that the sanctions of the 90s, were directly correlated with his brutal repression (up to using gas attacks) to the Kurdish people in the north.
So, whoever ommits these things is completely using dissinfo for hateful purposes.
I will say this, I personally know several Serbians who dislike her. You should go to Belgrade and ask around how they like the Clintons.
I agree that there is a lot of bot/shill activity in places like Twitter/reddit, but please reconsider thinking everyone who thinks different is doing so in bad faith.
People in the balkans were actually rooting for Trump both times, because they (we) were afraid that another clinton in the white house will cause another war in the balkans.
Now you guys have biden, but luckily (for us), the war is in ukraine and not here again.
Now [all but several countries in the world] have [leaders who oppose unprovoked wars in Europe] - Fixed it for you.
Are there credible sites, books or videos that try to say there wasn't a genocide and brutal war being perpetrated primarily by the Serbs against muslims?
Genocide? nah... if there was a genocide, there'd be no albanians left in kosovo. The situation was more like the situation in ukraine, where some separatist movements wanted a separate country, and the serbia wouldn't let them. The KLA would attack the serbs, and they'd attack the KLA. Then USA decided to attack serbia, like putin is attacking ukraine now, but that was considered good, because when america bombs someone, it's "bombing for peace".
I'm in no position to judge the actions of the US back then, but you're wrong about the genocide:
> Although Serb forces had long been blamed for the massacre, it was not until June 2004—following the Srebrenica commission's preliminary report—that Serb officials acknowledged that their security forces planned and carried out the mass killing. A Serb commission's final report on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre acknowledged that the mass murder of the men and boys was planned. The commission found that more than 7,800 were killed after it compiled thirty-four[citation needed] lists of victims.
> A concerted effort was made to capture all Bosniak men of military age.[114] In fact, those captured included many boys well below that age and elderly men several years above that age who remained in the enclave following the take-over of Srebrenica. These men and boys were targeted regardless of whether they chose to flee to Potočari or to join the Bosnian Muslim column. The operation to capture and detain the Bosnian Muslim men was well organised and comprehensive. The buses which transported the women and children were systematically searched for men.[114]
What a life… being born Marie Korbelová in Prague in the 1930s was a death sentence for most. She survived, thrived, and made sure she never had to feel powerless again. A personal witness to half of human history, by volume.
She survived, thrived and became a monster just like the monsters she fled. Millions of innocent iraqis and others who suffered directly or indirectly because of her probably wished she had not survived. A war criminal died, but I doubt the media will take that angle.
What war are you talking about? Albright and the Democratic Party were not in power in either 1991 or 2002, the two invasions in Iraq.
Albright stopped a life genocide in the balkans with a few weeks of air strikes. That was a war so unavoidable, Germany reversed 60 years of pacifism and felt obliged to participate. The region, today, is prosperous and peaceful. It’s really the best possible example the concept of humanitarian intervention could have, apart from WW2.
> What war are you talking about? Albright and the Democratic Party were not in power in either 1991 or 2002, the two invasions in Iraq.
They were in power when they sanctioned and starved millions of innocent iraqis after the war. You know the "silent war". Hundreds of thousands of iraqi children starved to death - something she said was worth it. Not someone people should be defending but everyone has their supporters I guess.
A "silent war" is to a war as a silent rock opera is to Bohemian Rapsody: something entirely different, even if you try to change the definition of words.
War crimes need a war, and crimes. Albright didn't commit any crimes, and you can't even name a war.
Yeah, never mind the dictator who used chemical weapons against the population of Iraq on multiple occasions. Never mind the invasion of Kuwait, either, the monster in this story was clearly Albright. /s
> Yeah, never mind the dictator who used chemical weapons against the population of Iraq on multiple occasions.
Who was allied with said dictator and provided the chemical weapons to use on iraqis and others? I wonder. Which is more evil. Being an evil dictator or giving the evil dictator chemical weapons?
> Never mind the invasion of Kuwait, either, the monster in this story was clearly Albright. /s
I don't remember anyone praising saddam. And there is nothing preventing both saddam and albright from being monsters. Saddam and Albright are both monsters. If there is a hell, I'd imagine they are both there right now. Wouldn't you agree?
Sure, we could call everyone who does something bad a monster. The world is not binary though, everyone is not either a perfect hero or a villain. Unless your point is that Saddam and Albright were equally bad it makes little sense to call them both monsters.
People that were too young or not alive yet in the 1990's might not understand that most conservative Republican party dynamics really started with Clinton administration, and that Albright has been (and will continue to be, in death) subject to the same well-funded character attacks. She was a historic and effective SoS in a complicated time in the world, and a reduction to sound bites is just a disservice to her and history.
She had a book signing in Prague where she encountered people unhappy with her role in bombing Serbians, "disgusting Serbs" was her comment to them.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children lacked medical care and were malnourished under her crushing sanctions. Lesley Stahl from 60 Minutes asked her about this, Albright said "the price is worth it".
The "well-funded character attacks" are words out of her own mouth, compliments to her blood-soaked actions around the world.
I recently came across what Colin Powell wrote about her in his memoirs[1]:
> In his memoir My American Journey, Colin Powell recounts a discussion he had when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" she asked. "I thought I would have an aneurysm," Powell write. "American G.I.'s were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board."
> American G.I.'s were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board
Yes, but you must be believed in that you may use your military. The current problem in Ukraine is that Putin believes (and seems to be correct) that NATO will not use its assets.
My country owes a lot to her. In years 90', there wasn't really much support from USA for Eastern Europe countries to join NATO. Her lobbying for Poland was one of the reasons we got into NATO. If not for that, we'd be already at war with Russia.
HN guidelines [1] suggest that we avoid insinuations about shilling:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
She was around for a lot of things, some very good and some very bad. I'm glad she worked to stop the genocide in Kosovo, but for me (39, US) the most salient thing I've known about has been about Rwanda—we signed a treaty saying we had to intervene in genocide, and then when genocide happened in 1994, we re-interpreted it to mean we're merely allowed to intervene. And then we largely blocked UN intervention. 700,000 people were murdered in 100 days.
Clinton is obviously the main culprit in this failure, but Albright, then the US Ambassador to the UN, certainly had a part.
This isn't true since her legacy spans more than just Eastern Europe. She is generally derided in the Middle East (save for Israel) and it is hard not to see why.
The nineties saw the demise of pacifism as a viable mainstream idea as the Democratic party under Clinton wholeheartedly and unconditionally embraced militarism. Today there are two parties in the USA, one that loves war and another that loves war even more. The results of this disaster are in the news today.
The US and the Democratic party were never pacifist any time during the 20th century (and certainly US foreign policy was not pacifist under Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, or Carter). Clinton’s foreign policy was not in any way outside of the party mainstream.
But under Clinton the US did dramatically cut back on training/arming fascist death squads, and the 90s–2000s were a period of relative peace and prosperity for Latin America, as the US left them more or less alone (the Bush II administration was more worried about fearmongering/warring vs. Muslims, so continued benign neglect of LA). Clinton also presided during a period when the US had less military activity/conflict than pretty much any other time since WWII. Obama didn’t get to make such a choice, having inherited Middle East wars from his predecessor.
There is always a choice, and he made his. Choice to bomb and crush Libya in 2014, which became a stone-age bloodbath ever since, choice to invade and bomb Syria in 2014, choice to continue wasting lives and money in Iraq and Afghanistan. These were deliberate decisions, not something inherited from someone.
I wasn’t a fan of Obama’s foreign policy, but this is a disingenuous, misleading summary which echoes Russian state-sponsored propaganda of recent years.
Her comment on the consequences of sanctions in Iraq has to be one of the worst things I heard in my life. I thought about it recently in the context of the sanctions on Russia and Biden looking to deal with Maduro. So the people of Venezuela are suffering for years now because the most powerful country in the world is leading the charge to basically destroy them as a sort of necessary moral stance against their government. But once another moral stance was needed, suddenly everything was forgotten including of course all the consequences of the actions in past years. These are not only headlines and macroeconomic trends, they are basically a bunch of destroyed lives of regular people like myself.
These people in charge of all this are obviously completely immoral, so the catch is - how can they possibly take a moral stance on anybody, including Sadam?
Most of the negative comments so far are regarding her approach to Iraq. It would be more topical to consider that she was one of the main architects of America's treatment of post-Soviet Russia, which perhaps could have been better handled.
246 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadAlbright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it."
This is from a 1996 interview with this woman [1] about the Iraq invasion. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8
Actually in regards to the sanctions against Iraq during the Clinton admin.
> Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I’m sure we’ll hear plenty of swamp creatures lauding what a trailblazer she was over the next few days.
Which administration were the sanctions imposed under?
It seems really weird to make a partisan jab over that.
Both parties carried this out.
Looks like GHWBush after the Kuwait invasion[1]
That said, presidents have the power to adjust sanctions if they affect too many innocents.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq
What’s more weird is implicating partisanship where there is none.
Maybe you think of things in this frame. Not everyone else does.
-Lord Farquaad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm2x6CVIXiE
Russia: Right now, worth it.
North Korea: Who knows if it's worth it.
Cuba: Not worth it. We're still upset that they kicked out our dictator.
Iran: Not worth it. We're still upset that they kicked out our dictator.
And what is it you are objecting to, exactly? Saddam was a sadist who gassed his own citizen. People demanded someone go in and stop him back then, like they are now asking for a no-flight-zone in Ukraine. Sometimes, there are no good choices.
At the time, embargoes were seen as effective because they had just brought down South Africa’s regime of Apartheid, and (to some degree) the Soviet Union. The alternative in US politics was not non-interventionism. It was outright invasion, something that had to wait for an administration without Clinton and Albright. The “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iraq” party came in and that likely killed an order of magnitude more people, especially if you consider that it caused the collapse in Syria, as well.
But I have to wonder what info she had that made her believe this? How many Iranians does in the 1980s in the war against Iraq? How many Kurds died to the government in Baghdad?
I have started to question whether those in power actually have perverted value systems (as is a common meme) or whether they are privy to different facts.
Not trying to apologize for this woman’s statement, just genuinely curious.
Most internet commentary and discussion on any matters of significance is hopelessly warped by an inability to understand context and scale. Some of that inability is bad faith argument, the rest is a mess of laziness, naivety, and shallow displays of superiority.
The point was to point out that epistemology works best when you make a good faith effort to understand how other people arrived at their conclusions.
I have spent a lot of time recently trying to understand why many people are convinced about things like New World Order / Global Cabal / QAnon / Soros, Stop the Steal, various vaccine/COVID topics, multiple religious beliefs, and even why Putin believed he should “protect” Ukraine (assuming good faith). It’s far easier to bridge misunderstandings if you understand their motives, intent, desires, and the chain of facts that inform their worldview.
Rather than deferring to Liz Sly from WaPo, why doesn't the U.S government submit itself and the administrations of the 90s to The Hague so this can be confirmed?
I don't think every obituary needs to be critical, but I do think political figures have opted into that by being a part of history.
This idea of honoring the good in the dead is also arbitrarily applied. An obituary of Osama Bin Laden wouldn't neglect to mention his involvement in 9/11.
I just read the Economist's Obituary someone linked above, which is good and somewhat disorienting. The last sentence is a quote of him with exact negation of what you say about cheering - (spoiler alert - it is probably better to read the whole thing before the quote) - The difference between pure Muslims and Americans, he said, was that Americans loved life, whereas Muslims loved death.
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.economist.com/obituary/2...
L. Ron Hubbard had thousands of followers, but to conflate an internal Scientology paper obituary with "any obituary published where it matter to his family and close friends" would be a mistake.
Edit, in response to OP edit: I am not sure if Hubbard is comparable, I don't know if his family and followers cared about what the NYT write about him, for example. But Bin Laden's followers don't care much for the approval of outsiders, that's pretty obvious.
That's a large part of the reason why she's disliked. It's because she advocates for genocide. If you replace "Iraqis" with "Jews" and have someone say that the deaths of half a million Jewish children is "worth it" nobody will be in this comment section trying to talk about honoring the deceased or suggesting everyone has good and bad sides.
[0] https://youtu.be/RM0uvgHKZe8
It is worth pointing out the sanctions caused human suffering, but the result that led to that comment was retracted by the author: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The deaths of Kuwaitis, the deaths of Kurds, the deaths of Southern Iraqis and other dissidents, and any number innocent human beings that died because of the sanctions are tragic... But consequences for crimes belone with the criminal. Hussein killed tens of thousands of Iraqis with chemical weapons over his time in power. He really was a monstrous person.
Should half a million Americans die for each US invasion? If I said it's worth it does that make it OK?
> When a dictator does an evil act, they cannot hide behind consequences to their people
A dictator, by definition, is not representative of a "people." There is no "their people" in this case.
> Also, the result that led to that comment was retracted
So the fact that she said it was worth it -- explicit support for it -- doesn't matter because the data might have been wrong? If I was told half a million Jews were killed yesterday and in my position as representative to the UN said it was "worth it" am I absolved if it turned out to be fake news?
> Hussein killed tens of thousands of Iraqis with chemical weapons over his time in power
This never actually happened. It was just about 2000 people. From what we've learned in this discussion I guess that absolves Saddam for thinking it was worth it to crush the Kurdish uprisings.
Great chatting. I won't be participating any further though.
"blaming powerless besieged people for their own suffering is a special type of reasoning that only seems to pop up whenever brown people are mentioned"
I agree with you. And Hussein was a US ally when he was fighting Iran. OBL was a US ally when he was fighting the Soviets. That can't be ignored, either. The US helped make those enemies. And the difference in public reaction to Ukrainian dead and refugees vs those who are Palestinian, Syrian, Yemeni, Ahgan ... it is shameful. It is hard to believe racism isn't a part of the disparity, certainly enormous lack of capability for empathy. That being said I think that Albright's comment is out of context and - taken at face value - is not reflective of reality, though. You can blame a lot of people in Russia, the UN, the US, in KSA, from a lot of places.. and, add Madeleine Albright to that list, for what happened to the people of Iraq in the 90s. It will feel great to righteously hate on her but it won't promote understanding what happen or prevent it from recurring. ps - I removed, "You can play that video over and over, but" because I sounded like a jerk and regretted it.
Isn't this a bit naive? According to this reasoning, Holodomor death's weren't intentional as well, while most poeple argue that, since the effect of that policy could be easily predicted, they are, for all intents and purposes, intentional. I would apply the same standard to US sanctions against Iraq.
And it is not like she was standing behind what she said - she said she fell into a trap[0]. Compare to Truman, who approved the actual Hiroshima, and "never lost any sleep over that decision.” [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_Albright#Sanctions_a...
[1] https://apjjf.org/-Peter-J.-Kuznick/2479/article.html
If Putin or Stalin believed that their actions are the right thing, meaning they have decided to act due to moral reasons, than it would be moral choice. If the moral choice is defensible or not depends on the moral reasoning - you don't have to agree with someone's moral position to see agree that it is a valid position even if you don't share it (even strongly oppose it). Saying someone's position is defensible doesn't mean he did the right thing.
It's convention that they don't speak ill of the dead. A convention that overwhelmingly benefits the legacies of people who have inflicted disproportionate amounts of misery and suffering in life.
Need to vent about something your comment is reminding me of. I saw it in Putin's speeches, and a recent RT clip -- this notion that what the US did to Iraq in 2003 justifies actions in Ukraine. As an American who was very opposed to the second Iraq war I find this false justification very disappointing. Firstly, that one bad action does not justify another. Second, the story that the US tells about itself is that we sometimes make mistakes, then our political process tries its best to correct them as time goes on. See also: slavery. Or the fact that the Iraq war is pretty unpopular in retrospect. We openly admit to not being perfect, but try to commit ourselves to continuous improvement. That's an important point.
...
> Firstly, that one bad action does not justify another.
I'm not trying to start a fight, because I agree with your overall point - learning and growing as a nation is important. That's honestly a big part of why I believe political figures obituaries should include their full context. But these two sentences seem to me to sharply contradict each-other.
In this thread i feel like some are conflating the two gulf wars and the sanctions in between. (I seem to recall there was also a Clinton air strike in the middle) Albright was really against the second war if i recall correctly.
Democrats don't get to wash their hands of that invasion. Both parties supported it.
Sanctions and sporadic bombings on critical infrastructure under Clinton was estimated to cause on the order of a million deaths, mostly children dieing of disease because the US destroyed water treatment facilities. Albright infamously defended the deaths of 800,000 children as worth the cost in a 60 minutes interview.
(Unfortunately the political lesson from that wasn't don't cause mass death, it was don't acknowledge that you've caused mass death)
It was a really ugly thing to see playing out in public and media... Policy was set arbitrarily in the executive branch and media and congress were ... Yes also responsible, and not really exercising their full power and responsibility, but also some of them bullied into it. The patriotism of anyone against the war was very harshly attacked and unfortunately it seemed pretty effective at the time.
29 (58%) of 50 Democratic senators voted for the resolution. 48 (98%) of 49 Republican senators voted for the resolution. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...
Don't use numbers to repaint history.
Realistically, there is zero chance the invasion would have happened without exaclty that trio of President, Sec-State & VP, plus or minus a Wolfowitz.
But the Republicans successfully goaded some Democrats into voting for it by threatening to taunt them. The US public needed some more important foreign blood to be spilled than Afghani. And that's the way the cookie crumbled...
I really don't see how you can reach that conclusion that prime mover on the Iraq invasion was the US public at large.
I thought Richard Clarke's book a few years later was pretty informative. Iirc, in his telling, they wanted to attack Iraq before 9/11 happened, and when it did happen, many in the administration didn't care at all who did it, they just wanted Iraq to pay. There was a line attributed to Rumsfeld "but Iraq has better targets".
Really? Wow, voting for a war you (allegedly) know to be wrong because you're worried about being "taunted". That's the most pathetic spineless thing I've ever heard. Worse than unashamed pro-war crowd, in some ways.
What happened to all those cowardly losers anyway? They all get voted out and replaced with people who were happy to continue those occupations and support the new wars and interventions during the Obama administration?
More generally, that would be a dereliction of duty too. The entire point of these checks and balances is so that an individual branch does not need to be trusted to make a wise choice.
In that book, a Speaker for the Dead would speak all the truth about the deceased, good and bad, warts and all.
In any case, performing literal siege against a group -- exclusively chosen for political reasons -- and then blaming powerless besieged people for their own suffering is a special type of reasoning that only seems to pop up whenever brown people are mentioned.
Moreover, you ignore the the actual war she was more famous for and had a bigger role in, "Madeleine's War" (https://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/1999/05/10/albright...). This involved her advocating (successfully) to bomb Serbia, a nation of nominally white Christian people she argued were committing genocide against a Muslim (also white) population. This was also against the UN charter due to Russian and Chinese veto. This war, more so than the Iraq war, has much more relevance in discussing her legacy today given the invasion of Ukraine but you appear to ignore it intentionally or are perhaps unaware of it entirely.
I'm not arguing that racism isn't important in understanding the Iraq war (or other wars), but it is one factor among many. Some of the most brutal wars are actually between groups of people that to outsiders appear to be be very similar (Ukraine/Russia, Serb/Croat, various civil wars, etc...)
Just because she bombed white people to protect white people doesn’t mean she was somehow completely objective and unaffected by questions of race in her decision making. That is absolutely ridiculous. No one is.
> The responses were, again, approved through the global legal framework [...]. None of this can be said of either terrorism or the responses [...]
Edit: I think I understand now, the first responses are the sanctions post-Kuwait invasion, the second responses are the Afghan and Iraq wars.
I don't get the sense that this conversation is locked down to the specifics of Albright, as plenty of people (and according to my understanding in the "Edit", you yourself) have made reasonable reference and analogies to events outside her time in office.
It was not approved by the UN, it was approved by the UNSC.
Your description was off by a large margin, it wasn’t just semantics.
I do agree this discussion probably isn’t going to be fruitful though, so have a nice weekend.
To be fair I don't know how much of it was her idea. But so cringy.
A history book has much more room to examine nuance & consequence, as well as more time to do thorough research and usually the benefit of hindsight and distance from the events in question.
There's plenty of room for it in both.
> Apr 24, 2000, Agence France Presse, NEW YORK, April 24 (AFP) - "US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Monday called on the United States Congress to vote in favour of China's entry into the World Trade Organisation. . . Turning to globalisation in general, Albright said the United States "must help those hurt by change; but also reaffirm our belief that an open and competitive world economy is the best route to higher standards of living for people everywhere."
Didn't work out so well for the Rust Belt...
Absolutely blame the politicians and "experts" who conspired to allow corporations to circumvent our progress on labor and environmental regulation the past 100+ years.
I think this is a little bit of blaming the jury for sentencing the criminal. Yeah, I think this is bad taste, because, wow, that's really placing an awful lot on her shoulders, that because she was involved she is thus morally responsible for the consequences, as though the UNSC had no part in it. IMO the Ba'athists themselves are entirely responsible for the consequences of the sanctions for creating the conditions that forced the sanctions.
As for the Iraq sanctions, she was asked and famously replied that it was a hard choice but the price was worth it. People may disagree.
I’ve worked in big tech companies with some of the most intelligent and capable people I’ve met in my entire life. And while they have very strong views on American politics — labeling Presidents, Senators, and other politicians corrupt, nefarious, incompetent, or some combination of all three - their views on Americas role on the world stage are more like America in a Hollywood film.
The other countries are corrupt, “shitty”, “evil”, etc and only America has the capability, will, and sort of a divine “right” to interfere and fix things, and fixing things means doing whatever we believe is right.
No one in the West batted an eye when children would be murdered in drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal region. When America and Russia fought proxy battles in Syria, there was no solidarity with the Syrian people. When our “ally” Saudi Arabia bombed the hell out of people in Yemen, again - there was no one asking questions. “We’re not targeting civilians” they’ll all say. I mean, America gave a new classification to all the “collateral damage”, simply labeling anyone they thought might be 18 years or older as being a militant, even if they’re just civilian bystanders.
> The West is writing all the history books
Sure, the ones read in the west. The history books read in the East are frequently written in the East.
Iran, Russia, and China have very old societies with long histories. They, among others, have their own written histories. There is nothing significant preventing western citizens from researching history books written elsewhere.
It’s not difficult to find common books/movies/documentaries which challenge the rose-colored-glasses narrative of the US / The West. Noam Chomsky, Oliver Stone, et al are “writing the history books” which violate your assertion.
There is plenty of media content which is extremely critical of US. There are hurdles to get the US DoD to participate in projects which are strongly counter to pro-US narratives, but possible to do without their participation.
Their long histories are besides the point. How many Americans recognize Kim Kardashian? Now tell us how many could recognize where Iran is on a map.
The average American doesn’t know Noam Chomsky. The average US middle school or high school textbook gives a distorted perspective of history. The US “founding fathers” are portrayed as being all wise and noble, but I digress.
> There is plenty of media content which is extremely critical of US.
The media content is critical of the other political party. In international matters, they’ve generally presented Russia, China, and other non-European or NATO countries as corrupt, threatening, etc.
In international matters, the US media has not only supported but practically cheerlead American war efforts. During the second Iraq War, CNN, ABC news, Fox, etc had correspondents “embedded” with the US military, purposely creating this fictitious narrative that Iraqis were viewing Americans as liberators.
Meanwhile, American troops were rounding up civilians, forcing entry into their homes and searching house by house for hidden ammunitions and the so called “weapons of mass destruction”. Innocent Iraqis were murdered in cold blood for shooting at the invaders. Ya know, the same thing that Russians are doing now in Ukraine where we’re now calling them war criminals.
The average person would rather watch celebrity sleaze content and corporate outrage news than challenge their own priors by reading challenging pieces on foreign policy. Same as every place on Earth.
I’m not going to defend US foreign policy, but your false equivalence of US collateral damage and Russian purposefully attacking civilian dwellings only wdilutes any argument you might have been making.
When America murders innocent civilians or starts illegal wars, it’s simply “collateral damage”. When another country does it, it’s “purposefully attacking civilian dwellings”.
This is exactly what I wrote in my post above - the sort of God/righteous complex that Westerners and particularly Americans have about their government, the same Americans who otherwise recognize their government is corrupt, sleazy, “the swamp”, or whatever other names they’ve come up with.
It’s ironic that you responded a post later literally just confirming my claim. :)
The Russian harm to innocents is orders of magnitudes higher than the US harm to innocents. It actually appears to be a core strategy in Ukraine, Chetchnia, and Afghanistan. They are firing artillery at civilian dwellings, cutting off food/fuel supply lines, and firing at refugee lines that aim for Poland rather than Russia.
The US has a bad name from drone strikes, but those are done intentionally to minimize harm to innocents and Are avoided when the harm is too high compared to the target. There are very few cases of the US military intentionally firing on civilians.
you are talking to the wrong person if you think I have a God/righteousness complex about my country/government. I am heavily critical of my own.
But Russia’s invasion is as idiotic as most of the worst Trump/QAnon conspiracy theories.
And I agree with the bottom of your comment about the lack of empathy for Syrians, Yemenese, etc. Personally I think it’s difficult to understand the different belligerents and their incentives/intents when looking at say Pakistan or Yemen instead of the more obvious “Russia invades Ukraine” plot.
It’s worth explaining this through the lens of the Military-Entertainment Complex (movies, shows/series, books, and sports sponsorships).
See how little sense that makes? Even if I were to write an obituary that included some of the critical points I think should have been included - and were to somehow get it published instead of this one - that doesn’t change the fact that almost every other obituary (for this person, and for every other person) follows this convention.
I’m criticizing the convention and the norm, not this particular piece of writing.
These clowns are all just the front-men though. They may have had a non-trivial hand in pushing for and profiting from war, but for every one of them there's ones we don't know about who have control over many administrations, and many countries, and who don't really give two shits about the fungible public figures in their pockets.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel
That anti-semites have referenced drinking the blood of children, does not mean that anyone else who says similar is being anti-semitic.
Kissinger being Jewish is not the issue here, you have chosen to make it the issue for some unknown reason.
There is no excuse for invoking the blood libel, barring the basic kind of ignorance that was presumed in my initial response. If you want to describe Kissinger’s monstrosity, you can do better than leaning on cheap antisemitic canards.
All of those words can imply intent. They can also be somewhat neutral.
You're doubling, tripling, down on your original comment. I think your original comment was a big leap, honestly.
The "obvious" reference to ~"drinking blood of children to preserve youth" (OP now edited out) is vampirism, or possibly Silicon Valley (HBO TV) / Peter Thiel analogue.
Not Nazis though, not for everyone at least. You jumped there, and while I do think it's fair to warn of the adjacency, being more clear that you were reading OP charitably would have avoided this kerfluffle.
And FWIW, the blood libel accusation is ancient and Christian. The Nazis just borrowed it because it was convenient.
I’ll summarize again: it is understandable to be ignorant of the blood libel. It is normal, even. My sole object in this conversation is to identify it, or “call it out” in modern parlance.
You keep using words that can be interpreted as accusatory/confrontational/adversarial.
I don't think OP deserves that. I think they were probably unaware of the arguably-adjacent antisemitism, but I think your "error" is at least as large, in making the leap from the obvious reference (vampirism) to the strained reference (antisemitism).
With the benefit of all of this post-comment context (!) and if I felt the need to comment at all, I'd have gone with something like "We agree that Kissinger was a monster, but you might be careful about the blood-drinking-preserves-youth comment, because it could be twisted into a reference to the ancient Blood Libel accusation against Jews (HK is Jewish)."
Anyway that is all for me here. Sorry for wading in. I think you both had innocent/good intent at the start, but that your linguistically ambiguous response turned this thread into something it didn't need to be.
The objection is not with Kissinger's monstrosity; it is with describing that monster - that Jewish monster - using an anti-Semetic canard.
Edit: From Zeta Reticuli of course!
https://pauleccles.co.za/wordpress/index.php/2022/01/09/chom...
Which makes me think – who is the oldest person alive who has had a non-trivial amount of impact on global politics and the current world order?
Edit: just realized Jimmy Carter is older than both of them!
Kissinger: b. May 27, 1923 (98)
Carter: b. October 1, 1924 (97)
The Queen's a youthful 95, though.
I think Orson Scott Card, despite being a complete loon, raised an interesting concept in the book Speaker For The Dead. Obituaries should be spoken honestly to all. Not speaking ill of the dead is morally wrong.
Maybe just me but I feel like this misses what Speaker For the Dead does. It isn't about speaking ill or not ill of people but understanding their life experience, to give context to who they were as a person. This moves past the superficial reading of a person that just listing their actions and classifying them as good or bad.
Obituaries tend not to.
You can't defend yourself when you're dead. You can't be your own witness. Nor can you face your own accuser. Also, who would you trust to speak that truth for you?
Also, grieving family members are not the most rational people. Doing this could trigger violence in practice.
And obituaries have a legal function. As a modern society, we want to encourage the publication of obituaries as soon as someone passes away. It mitigates the risk of potential fraud.
It's great that I survived, and I can dance on her grave on behalf of the half million children that didn't.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8
Now she isn't the only person guilty and not even mentioned in this documentary. Still I think it's an important watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLRfecGZhts
Noone asked americans to come and kill people half the planet away, and you still did that, many many times in many many countries... middle east, africa, south american, even some european ones. You're the ultimate bad guys. Once i though you were atleast aware of that (from hippie movement, to micheal moore documentaries), but stayed quiet because of all the cheap oil and other resources, but i'm genuinely more and more disappointed in you, because some of you honestly think you're the good guys for killing people.
"After the initial invasion, most of the Iraqi military's former soldiers and officers offered little resistance to Coalition forces in the early days of the occupation. Many soldiers had simply gone home rather than openly fight the invading forces. This seeming acceptance of Coalition authority stemmed from the US military continuing to pay the salaries of Saddam's former soldiers, while promising senior Iraqi officers that they would have a major role to play "in building a new Iraq." [0]
Paul Bremer, head of the CPA, issued an order dissolving the entire Iraqi military, as well as most civilian employees of the old government, and pledged to build a new military and government from scratch. [0]
Thus, a decade of hell and eventually ISIS, began.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Iraq_(2003%E2%80...
Honestly I am too young to have remembered the oil for food program and just read some about it. I didn't know we were sanctioning Iraq like that through the 90s.
Spreading hate and missinfo. She wasn't in power both when 91 and 2003 invasions (it was republican presidents for both parts).
Also they are leaving the part:
Sadam invaded Iran
Sadam gased/chemical attacked Iran
Sadam invaded Kuwait
Sadam Chemically attacked/killed almost 100k of Kurds in Northern Iraq
Sadam was cruel to his own people and killed and repressed many
There you. They wont tell you that the sanctions of the 90s, were directly correlated with his brutal repression (up to using gas attacks) to the Kurdish people in the north.
So, whoever ommits these things is completely using dissinfo for hateful purposes.
Just take it as different opinion and get over it.
I agree that there is a lot of bot/shill activity in places like Twitter/reddit, but please reconsider thinking everyone who thinks different is doing so in bad faith.
Now you guys have biden, but luckily (for us), the war is in ukraine and not here again.
Are there credible sites, books or videos that try to say there wasn't a genocide and brutal war being perpetrated primarily by the Serbs against muslims?
Anyway, thanks for the extensive sourcing, but I'll go read some books on Kosovo myself.
> Although Serb forces had long been blamed for the massacre, it was not until June 2004—following the Srebrenica commission's preliminary report—that Serb officials acknowledged that their security forces planned and carried out the mass killing. A Serb commission's final report on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre acknowledged that the mass murder of the men and boys was planned. The commission found that more than 7,800 were killed after it compiled thirty-four[citation needed] lists of victims.
> A concerted effort was made to capture all Bosniak men of military age.[114] In fact, those captured included many boys well below that age and elderly men several years above that age who remained in the enclave following the take-over of Srebrenica. These men and boys were targeted regardless of whether they chose to flee to Potočari or to join the Bosnian Muslim column. The operation to capture and detain the Bosnian Muslim men was well organised and comprehensive. The buses which transported the women and children were systematically searched for men.[114]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebrenica_massacre
Sure, we can start with, oh, the Wikipedia maybe?
"there had been no evidence of genocide or ethnic cleansing"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War
and continue on to the UN as reported by BBC:
A United Nations court has ruled that Serbian troops did not carry out genocide against ethnic Albanians
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1530781.stm
Albright stopped a life genocide in the balkans with a few weeks of air strikes. That was a war so unavoidable, Germany reversed 60 years of pacifism and felt obliged to participate. The region, today, is prosperous and peaceful. It’s really the best possible example the concept of humanitarian intervention could have, apart from WW2.
They were in power when they sanctioned and starved millions of innocent iraqis after the war. You know the "silent war". Hundreds of thousands of iraqi children starved to death - something she said was worth it. Not someone people should be defending but everyone has their supporters I guess.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5717930/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/08/04...
She got asked a loaded question for a soundbite. She wrote, "I had fallen into a trap and said something I did not mean."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_Albright#Sanctions_a...
War crimes need a war, and crimes. Albright didn't commit any crimes, and you can't even name a war.
Who was allied with said dictator and provided the chemical weapons to use on iraqis and others? I wonder. Which is more evil. Being an evil dictator or giving the evil dictator chemical weapons?
> Never mind the invasion of Kuwait, either, the monster in this story was clearly Albright. /s
I don't remember anyone praising saddam. And there is nothing preventing both saddam and albright from being monsters. Saddam and Albright are both monsters. If there is a hell, I'd imagine they are both there right now. Wouldn't you agree?
Edit: Here, with sources and all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_weapons_program
Also, Milosevic and his cronies died in prison as war criminals that killed tens of thousand of innocent people.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children lacked medical care and were malnourished under her crushing sanctions. Lesley Stahl from 60 Minutes asked her about this, Albright said "the price is worth it".
The "well-funded character attacks" are words out of her own mouth, compliments to her blood-soaked actions around the world.
[1]: https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/
> In his memoir My American Journey, Colin Powell recounts a discussion he had when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" she asked. "I thought I would have an aneurysm," Powell write. "American G.I.'s were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board."
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=TZU1SGMOx70C&pg=PA144#v=on...
Yes, but you must be believed in that you may use your military. The current problem in Ukraine is that Putin believes (and seems to be correct) that NATO will not use its assets.
Now both are gone. RIP.
"Madeleine Albright Saying Iraqi Kids' Deaths 'Worth It' Resurfaces"
https://www.newsweek.com/watch-madeleine-albright-saying-ira...
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(The rest of your comment seems sincere and expressed with clarity.)
Clinton is obviously the main culprit in this failure, but Albright, then the US Ambassador to the UN, certainly had a part.
But under Clinton the US did dramatically cut back on training/arming fascist death squads, and the 90s–2000s were a period of relative peace and prosperity for Latin America, as the US left them more or less alone (the Bush II administration was more worried about fearmongering/warring vs. Muslims, so continued benign neglect of LA). Clinton also presided during a period when the US had less military activity/conflict than pretty much any other time since WWII. Obama didn’t get to make such a choice, having inherited Middle East wars from his predecessor.
There is always a choice, and he made his. Choice to bomb and crush Libya in 2014, which became a stone-age bloodbath ever since, choice to invade and bomb Syria in 2014, choice to continue wasting lives and money in Iraq and Afghanistan. These were deliberate decisions, not something inherited from someone.
These people in charge of all this are obviously completely immoral, so the catch is - how can they possibly take a moral stance on anybody, including Sadam?
She was a terrible person. Rest in peace?