Madeleine Albright: Death of 500,000 Iraqi children ‘worth it’

The news of Madeleine Albright’s death on Wednesday, aged 84, brought back many fond memories of her, but there was also scathing criticism on social media regarding comments she made in 1996 about the deaths of Iraqi children.

However, this dynamic woman, nicknamed “hawk” during the war in the former Yugoslavia, had dark spots in her political career, some of which caused shock and disgust from the world community.

In April 2016, Madeleine Albright performed on the program Euronews Global Conversationwith journalist Isabel Kumar.

Great to meet a feisty & interesting @madeleine Albright for discussion at the #GLOBSEC2016 security forum @euronews pic.twitter.com/csxtDvWLjB

— Isabelle Kumar (@Isabelle_kumar) April 17, 2016

“We heard that half a million [иракских] children died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima,” Stahl said. And is it worth the price?

“I think it’s a very difficult choice,” Albright replied. but the price we think is worth it“.

Clips from this segment were circulated on social media following the news of Albright’s passing.

Dima Khatib, managing director of Al Jazeera news service AJ+, said: “Please, before you bombard us with words about how wonderful Madeleine Albright was, ask her what she thinks about the half a million Iraqi children killed by US sanctions against Iraq. As soon as you hear her say “it was worth it”, go back and rewrite the words about her “greatness!”

“Madeleine Albright, another Middle Eastern butcher, she joined John McCain in hell, purgatory or any afterlife punishment place you believe in”, the Minnesota Libertarian Party said in a statement. “Don’t forget the 500,000 Iraqi children she thought were worth dying for.“.

She was a force for murder. Just ask those 500k dead Iraqi Children. But you have as much blood on your hands so it is unlikely their lives nor freedoms mattered to you

— Libertarian Party of Minnesota (@LPofMN) March 23, 2022

Some people remember Madeleine Albright saying in 1996 that the sanctions were worth it to kill 500,000 Iraqi children. No one remembers that, by law, the sanctions were supposed to be lifted when Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, which, of course, they did not.

— John Black (@black) March 23, 2022

“Still makes my blood boil,” Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding (Caabu), tweeted of Albright’s response.

“I would like Madeleine Albright to be remembered for her heartless commentary on the massacre of Iraqi children by the United States sanctions regime,” wrote Vijay Prashad, historian and executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

“Mrs. Albright’s War”

In April 1999, it became clear even to then US President Bill Clinton that the words of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that Slobodan Milosevic would immediately succumb to military pressure were not true. Bombings in Kosovo continued and the stalemate became apparent, with more and more US media blaming the first female US Secretary of State.

The Washington Post, considered the newspaper with some of the closest ties to the US capital’s diplomatic establishment, went so far as to write in a front-page report that Ms. Albright misjudged Slobodan Milosevic’s intentions.

The newspaper described the Kosovo bombings as “Mrs. Albright’s war” and said both the foreign minister and her top advisers misjudged that the Yugoslav president would act like a “liar” who would return.

Condemnation of Mrs. Albright, prompted the US and NATO to launch a military offensive against Yugoslavia, without prior preparation for possible resistance from the Serbian side, is due to the fact that Milosevic agreed to sign an agreement on Bosnia after only a few days of bombing.

However, no one in the US diplomatic leadership realized that the secession of Bosnia from Yugoslavia was much less important than the secession of Kosovo from Serbia.

As the “architect of chaos” Soros, a native of Hungary, as well as the born Pole Brzezinski, Albright, who was born in the Czech Republic in a Jewish family who fled Nazism to Britain, retained a persistent hostility to the “communist East” for life. It is significant that she passed away on the eve of the anniversary of the bombing of Yugoslavia, which began on March 24, 1999, to which, together with her colleague and boss Bill Clinton, she was most directly related.

Madeleine Albright has an obsession, as the Washington Post wrote at the time: “She believes the United States and its allies must unite to control aggression from wherever it comes, but especially in Europe. Because if they don’t exist, then conflicts will be generalized”

Behind her, as observers noted, was the decisive word when Clinton doubted the need for the bombing of Belgrade, which destroyed the center of the now Serbian capital and erased the union state of Yugoslavia from the map of the world. Speaking with her usual impenetrable expression, Albright called the bombing of Yugoslavia a “humanitarian mission.”

How cynical are the words of President Obama in 2012 when presenting Albright with the Medal of Freedom, emphasizing that the then Secretary of State contributed to the establishment of peace in the Balkans. “Peace”, which actually contributed to the incitement of hatred between the once friendly Balkan peoples, the open genocide by the Kosovars of Serbs, which resulted in the burning of Serbian enclaves, the extermination of children, women, the elderly, the murder of young Serbs and the illegal sale of them organs to wealthy patients from the West and the Middle East.

It seems that it was her belief that led to such a serious mistake in the case of Slobodan Milosevic.

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