Most Popular Choices
Share on Facebook 37 Printer Friendly Page More Sharing
OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 2/8/16

Albright And Kissinger Bring Shame To Hillary Clinton

By       (Page 1 of 2 pages)   10 comments
Message Jacob Hornberger
Become a Fan
  (2 fans)

Reprinted from fff/Hornberger's Blog

Madeline Albright and Henry Kissinger
Madeline Albright and Henry Kissinger
(Image by U.S. Department of Defense Current Photos)
  Details   DMCA
>

This past week's campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination reveals that Hillary Clinton not only has good friends on Wall Street who pay her hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches but also some good friends who have served as loyal servants of the U.S. national-security establishment.

At a campaign event last Saturday in New Hampshire, Madeleine Albright, who Clinton brought to New Hampshire to help her faltering campaign in that state, told people that "there is a special place in hell for women who don't help" Hillary Clinton become president.

That's funny because that is precisely how people in the Middle East felt about Albright during her time as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in Bill Clinton's administration. They felt that there was a special place in hell reserved for Albright for what she said about the Iraqi children that she, the president, and the U.S. national-security establishment were killing with the deadly sanctions that the U.S. government was enforcing against Iraq.

During her time as UN ambassador, Albright was interviewed by Sixty Minutes about the system of sanctions that the United Nations, owing to the instigation of the U.S. government, was enforcing against Iraq. Albright was asked whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were worth it. Albright responded that while the decision was a difficult one, yes, the deaths were nonetheless "worth it."

When Ramzi Yousef was being sentenced for his role in the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, he cited the brutal sanctions against Iraq -- butchery, as he called it -- as one of the principal motivating factors that induced him to retaliate against the United States with terrorism.

The continuous horror produced by the sanctions on Iraq -- 11 years of death and economic destruction of Iraq's middle class -- were also a major motivating factor for subsequent acts of terrorism against the United States, including the attacks on the USS Cole, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 9/11 attacks, the Ft. Hood killing spree, the attempted shoe bombing of a plane headed to Detroit, and others.

It wasn't just Iraqis who were deeply angry over the killing of the Iraqi children and the utter callousness displayed by Albright and the rest of the Clinton administration to the deaths of those Iraqi children. Two high UN officials, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponek, resigned their positions in protest to what they called genocide being brought to Iraq by the UN and the U.S. government.

This is what all the presidential candidates -- Republican and Democrat alike, together with many of their enthusiastic supporters -- just don't get. They've convinced themselves that the problem is with Muslims, the Koran, Islam, and burqas rather than with their very own government, which has essentially become their god. They just can't comprehend that people get angry when children are intentionally killed, even Arab children, even Muslim children. And since they just don't get it, all they want to do is just keep bombing and killing, bombing and killing, and bombing and killing. I'll bet you that they would get it if hundreds of thousands of American children were being killed by Iraqi or Iranian sanctions.

One thing to remember is that there is was nothing anyone could do about the sanctions. The embargo operated as a total blockade of Iraq, preventing the country from exporting any its oil and from importing goods without the express permission of U.S. bureaucrats. (See Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions by Joy Gordon or "Cool War: Economic Sanctions as a Weapon of Mass Destruction" by Joy Gordon.)

The Iraqi armed forces lacked the ability to break free of the blockade and if they tried, they would have been subjected to another massive U.S. bombing campaign that would have killed even more Iraqis and destroyed even more of the country. Meanwhile children were dying and the Iraqi people were losing their life savings. There were only two things that angry people in the Middle East could do: passively accept the death and destruction or retaliate with acts of terrorism.

Here at FFF, we were publishing articles before the 9/11 attacks warning Americans that if the U.S. government persisted in this misconduct, Americans would ultimately see a major act of retaliatory terrorism on American soil. We weren't the only ones. That's what Chalmers Johnson said in his pre-9/11 book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, a book I still highly recommend, along with Johnson's other two books: The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.

Of course, apologists of the U.S. national-security state and proponents of foreign interventionism and regime change attacked us libertarians as being "unpatriotic" for daring to speak out against the sanctions, the death and destruction, and the foreign interventionism. That's because they define patriotism as the unconditional loyal support of a nation's national-security establishment.

We saw this phenomenon especially after the 9/11 attacks when defenders of U.S. interventionism, militarism, and empire were saying that the attacks were motivated by hatred for America's "freedom and values," acting as though the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children had nothing to do with it, and attacking us libertarians for pointing out that the attacks were the direct retaliatory consequence of U.S. interventionism in the Middle East.

One of the reasons the sanctions were so deadly related to how the Pentagon decided to wage war on Iraq in the Persian Gulf War. The Pentagon had conducted a study over what the consequences would be if U.S. bombers were to destroy Iraq's water and sewage treatment plants. The study concluded that doing so would produce massive loss of life from people drinking sewage-infested water. So, the Pentagon delivered the order to its bombers: Destroy the plants, an order that U.S. pilots dutifully obeyed.

Then, the sanctions prevented the Iraqis, year and year, from acquiring the parts and equipment to repair those water-and-sewage treatment plants, which thereby confirmed the validity of the Pentagon study. When Albright told "Sixty Minutes" that the deaths of those half-a-million Iraqi children were "worth it," that was in 1996. The sanctions remained in place for another five years.

Next Page  1  |  2

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).

Must Read 2   Well Said 2   Supported 1  
Rate It | View Ratings

Jacob Hornberger Social Media Pages: Facebook page url on login Profile not filled in       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He (more...)
 

Go To Commenting
The views expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
Writers Guidelines

 
Contact AuthorContact Author Contact EditorContact Editor Author PageView Authors' Articles
Support OpEdNews

OpEdNews depends upon can't survive without your help.

If you value this article and the work of OpEdNews, please either Donate or Purchase a premium membership.

STAY IN THE KNOW
If you've enjoyed this, sign up for our daily or weekly newsletter to get lots of great progressive content.
Daily Weekly     OpEd News Newsletter
Name
Email
   (Opens new browser window)
 

Most Popular Articles by this Author:     (View All Most Popular Articles by this Author)

Why Won't The CIA Release Its Joannides Files?

Brent Taylor Did Not Die For God, Family, And Country

Russia: Friend or Foe?

The Pentagon's Destruction of the Bill of Rights

Two More U.S. Deaths for Nothing in Afghanistan

Trump's Self-Painted Corner on Iran

To View Comments or Join the Conversation:

Tell A Friend