MARCH 27, 2022
The Price America Paid for Madeleine Albright
The Awful Mortuary of Empire
Albright speaking at a February 1999 press conference, where she threatened the Serbs by announcing that the Clinton administration is adding 51 US warplanes to its attack force in Europe.
Martyrdom is hard to beat. In the first few centuries after Christ the Romans tried it against the Christians, whose martyrdoms were almost entirely sacrificial of themselves, not of others. The lust for heaven of a Muslim intent on suicidal martyrdom was surely never so eloquent as that of St Ignatius in the second century who, under sentence of death, doomed to the Roman amphitheater and a hungry lion, wrote in his Epistle to the Romans,
I bid all men know that of my own free will I die for God, unless ye should hinder me. . . Let me be given to the wild beasts, for through them I can attain unto God. I am God’s wheat, and I am ground by the wild beasts that I may be found the pure bread of Christ. Entice the wild beasts that they may become my sepulchre. . . Come fire and cross and grapplings with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, hacking of limbs, crushings of my whole body; only be it mine to attain unto Jesus Christ.
Eventually haughty imperial Rome made its accommodation with Christians, just as Christians amid the furies and martyrdoms and proscriptions of the Reformation, made accommodations with each other.
What sort of accommodation should America make now? How about one with the history of the past hundred years, in an effort to improve the moral world climate of the next hundred years? We use the word accommodation in the sense of an effort to get to grips with history, as inflicted by the powerful upon the weak.
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What moved those kamikaze Muslims of September 911 to embark, on the training that they knew would culminate in their deaths as well of those (they must have hoped) of thousands upon thousands of innocent people? Was it the Koran plus a tape from Osama bin Laden? The dream of a world in which all men wear untrimmed beards and women have to stay at home or go outside only when enveloped in blue tents?
I doubt it. If I had to cite what steeled their resolve the list would surely include an exchange on CBS in 1996 between Madeleine Albright and then US ambassador to the United Nations and Lesley Stahl. Albright was maintaining that sanctions had yielded important concessions from Saddam Hussein.
When the US imposed sanctions on Iraq, they had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. In July 1991, Doug Broderick, a professional aid worker who was sent to Baghdad by the US charity Catholic Relief Services, predicted that as a consequence of sanctions 175, Iraqi children would die because of the deteriorating health conditions. Broderick called it a “disaster in slow motion.” It turned out his prophecy was badly off.
After five years of sanctions Iraq found itself in desperate straits. In May of 1996, the World Health Organization said that “the vast majority of the country’s population has been on a semi-starvation diet for years.” The sewage treatment plants either barely functioned or didn’t work at all. Denis Halliday, who worked for the United Nations Development program in Iraq and who had issued many public denunciations of the sanctions, said that they were “in contradiction of human rights provisions in the UN’s own charter.”
The hospitals were filled with dying children, while medicines necessary to save them were banned by the US-officials in New York supervising the operations of the sanctions committee. By the end of 1995 alone, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization said that after careful investigation it had determined that as many as 576,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of sanctions. The mortality rates were soaring with terrifying speed. The infant mortality rate had gone from 47 percent per 1000 in 1989 to 108 per 1000 in 1996. For kids under five the increase in the rate was even worse, from 56 per 1000 in 1989 to 131 per 1000 in 1996. By 1996 the death count was running at 5,000 children a month.
By the late 90s, UN officials working in Baghdad explained that the root causes of child mortality and other health problems were no longer simply lack of food and medicine, but lack of clean water (freely available in all parts of the country prior to the Gulf War) and of electrical power, now running at 30 percent of the pre-bombing level. Of the 21.9 percent of contracts vetoed as of mid-1999 by the UN’s US-dominated sanctions committee, a high percentage were integral to repair the water and sewage systems. The Iraqis submitted contracts worth $236 million in this area, of which $54 million worth–roughly one-quarter of the total value–were disapproved. “Basically, anything with chemicals or even pumps is liable to get thrown out,” one UN official revealed.
The same trend was apparent in the power supply sector, where around 25% of the contracts were put on hold–$138 million worth, out of $589 million submitted. But the proportion of approved/disapproved contracts does not tell the full story. UN officials referred to the “complementarity issue,” meaning that items approved for purchase were useless without other items that had been disapproved. For example, the Iraqi Ministry of Health ordered $25 million worth of dentist chairs, said order being approved by the sanctions committee–except for the compressors, without which the chairs were useless and consequently spent the next several years gathering dust in a Baghdad warehouse.
In February of 2000, the US moved to prevent Iraq from importing 15 bulls from France. The excuse was that the animals, ordered with the blessing of the UN’s humanitarian office in Baghdad to restock the Iraqi beef industry, would require certain vaccines which, who knows, might be diverted into a program to make biological weapons of mass destruction.
We know that the big killers were the prohibitions the US placed on the import of medicines, medical equipment and parts for power plants and water treatment stations. But many of the items banned were absurd in their pettiness, marking a captious cruelty designed to have a demoralizing effect on the minds of Iraqi citizens. Here are few: baby food (because adults might eat it), ping pong balls, cotton swabs, syringes, bicycles, nail polish and lipstick, funeral shrouds, pencil sharpeners, erasers, school notebooks, computers, blood testing machines, pagers, ambulance sirens, heaters and tennis balls.
This, then, is the ghastly context for Lesley Stahl famous question.
Stahl: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And you know, is the price worth it?”
Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price? We think the price is worth it.”
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Surely, the 9/11 hijackers read that exchange in the Middle East. It was infamous all over the Arab world. I’ll bet the September 11 kamikazes knew it well enough, just as they could tell you the crimes wrought against the Palestinians. So would it have been unfair to take Madeleine Albright down to the ruins of the Trade Towers, remind her of that exchange, and point out that the price turned out also to include that awful mortuary. Was that price worth it too, Mrs. Albright?
Mere nit-picking among the ruins and the dust of the 3,000? I don’t think so. America has led a charmed life amid its wars on people. The wars mostly didn’t come home and the press made as sure as it could that folks including the ordinary workers in the Trade Towers weren’t really up to speed on what was been wrought in Freedom’s name. In freedom’s name America made sure that any possibility of secular democratic reform in the Middle East was shut off. Mount a coup against Mossadegh in the mid-1950s, as the CIA did and you end up with the Ayatollah Khomeini 25 years later. Mount a coup against Kassim in Iraq, as the CIA did, and you get the Agency’s man, Saddam Hussein.
What about Afghanistan? In April of 1978 an indigenous populist coup overthrew the government of Mohammed Daoud, who had formed an alliance with the man the US had installed in Iran, Reza Pahlevi, aka the Shah. The new Afghan government was led by Noor Mohammed Taraki, and the Taraki administration embarked, albeit with a good deal of urban intellectual arrogance on land reform, hence an attack on the opium-growing feudal estates. Taraki went to the UN where he managed to raise loans for crop substitution for the poppy fields.
Taraki also tried to bear down on opium production in the border areas held by fundamentalists, since the latter were using opium revenues to finance attacks on Afghanistan’s central government, which they regarded as an unwholesome incarnation of modernity that allowed women to go to school and outlawed arranged marriages and the bride price. Accounts began to appear in the western press along the lines of this from the Washington Post to the effect that the mujahedeen liked to “torture their victims by first cutting off their noses, ears and genitals, then removing one slice of skin after another.”
At that time the mujahedeen were not only getting money from the CIA but from Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi who sent them $250,000. In the summer of 1979 the US State Department produced a memo making it clear how the US government saw the stakes, no matter how modern minded Taraki might be or how feudal the Muj. The memo was dispatched to US embassies around the world, including the one in Tehran.
A few months later the embassy was occupied by Iranian students and the occupants taken hostage. The diplomats and CIA residents shredded their secret files but the students laboriously reassembled them, and ultimately they were published in 68 paperback volumes. Among the documents was the following memo, written shortly after the Taraki coup:
The United States’ larger interest would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan. The overthrow of the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan] would show the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, that the Soviets’ view of the socialist course of history being inevitable is not accurate.
Taraki was killed by Afghan army officers in September 1979. Hafizullah Amin, educated in the US, took over and began meeting regularly with US embassy officials at a time when the US was arming Islamic rebels in Pakistan. Fearing a fundamentalist, US-backed regime in Afghanistan, the Soviets invaded in force in December 1979.
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Of course, sanctions weren’t Albright’s only method of enforcing the dictates of American power. She didn’t hesitate to call in airstrikes, after sanctions had softened up a target population. Take Serbia.
As always, the initial predictions were optimistic and the rhetoric ebullient. The NATO bombing was to be of Serbian military units, and brief in duration. Milosevic would soon come to his senses. The committal of ground forces was out of the question. Public opinion was hesitant even on the bombing, and dead-set against any ground war.
The Serbian military in Kosovo was certainly behaving in a disgustingly brutal fashion. What army doesn’t, when under attack by a rebel army, this one almost certainly supplied by NATO powers, in breach of the UN Security Council’s embargo on arms imports into the territory of the former Yugoslavia.
Clinton and Albright wanted confrontation, which had been the US strategy with Serbia for close to a decade: the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia, the heightening of ethnic tensions, economic siege and the supply of a client armed force: the KLA. They had no interest a peaceful diplomatic resolution. Otherwise they would have parleyed further with Milosevic on the Serb’s final offer to countenance peacekeepers in Kosovo, if the latter were under the auspices of the UN, which seemed entirely reasonable.
Yes, Milosevic was a monstrous fellow, though a midget in thuggery when his deeds when compared to the records of those who orchestrated the bombing of his country.
So, the bombs and missiles started falling steadily. Soon there were even more refugees heading into Belgrade than out of Kosovo into Macedonia. Belgrade itself was going the way of Baghdad, on exactly the same US targeting strategy: bridges gone, power plants gone, sewage treatment plants destroyed. Missiles started on killing civilians as they did in Novi Sad. Shrapnel in the marketplace. High explosives on a hospital, and for good measure, NATO bombed Chinese sovereign territory in the form its embassy in Belgrade. On the latter blunder, NATO and the State Department flacks at first tried to argue that the embassy was inconveniently located amid “targets” in downtown Belgrade and it was all an understandable error. But the embassy’s actual location was in a residential neighborhood and, as someone said, the “mistargeting” was like aiming for Newark and hitting Queens.
By May, Clinton and Albright’s war had descended into straightforward terror bombing with cable news footage of explosions lighting of the night sky over Belgrade, in an eerie preview of Bush’s “shock and awe” airstrikes on Baghdad four years later. “Lights out in Belgrade,” as the deplorable opportunist John McCain shouted.
We were treated to pictures of a burned-out train in the Grdelica Gorge, where fifty-five Serbian passengers were blown to bits or burned alive and another sixteen wounded. There was the carnage amid the refugee columns.
But those snapshots alone don’t paint the full-picture of what had been done to Serbia. The bombing put more than 500,000 Serbs out of work and plunged 2 million people in destitution. Roads were blown up. Railways gone. Bridges gone. Factories destroyed or damaged. More than 200 schools hit by bombs and missiles. Power plants bombed out. Phone lines cut. Refineries destroyed. In the first month of bombing alone, more than 1000 civilians killed and nearly 5000 maimed or seriously injured.
After the demolition of the Petrovardian Bridge, the water supplies to Novi Sad and Petrovardin were cut, leaving more than a million people without water.
The protocols of the Geneva Convention prohibit bombing not justified by clear military necessity. If there is any likelihood that the target has a civilian function, then bombing is prohibited. In other words, the vast majority of NATO targets in Serbia were criminally attacked. Both NATO supremo Wesley Clark and Madeleine Albright both publicly stated that they hoped the suffering of would prompt them to rise up against Milosevic. NATO, in other words, was waging war on Serbian civilians–and Kosovar civilians for that matter.
Before the war, many Serbs detested Milosevic and worked for his downfall. But as their country was being destroyed most rallied to the national flag. And who could blame them? For years, they had awaited invasion from the East. What a shock to be reduced to rubble by those liberals, like Clinton and Albright, who piously claimed the mantel of humanitarians.
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Well, the typists and messenger boys and back-office staffs throughout the Trade Center didn’t know this history. There’s a lot of other relevant history they probably didn’t know but which those men on the attack planes did. How could those people in the Towers have known, when US political and journalistic culture is a conspiracy to perpetuate their ignorance?
Those people in the Towers were innocent portions of the price that Albright insisted, in just one of its applications, as being worth it. It would honor their memory to insist that in future our press offers a better accounting of how America’s wars for Freedom are fought and what the actual price might include.
(This column is in part adapted from reporting done for our book Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.)
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