Not one single U.S. official, from Bill Clinton, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to the CIA, publicly denounced or condemned Albright's statement to "Sixty Minutes." That's undoubtedly because they agreed with her. As far as people in the Middle East, including Muslims, were concerned, Albright was stating the official position of the U.S. government and, indirectly, of the American people.
When Albright said "worth it," what did she mean by "it"? She meant regime change, one of the principal longtime objectives of the U.S. national-security establishment. After President George H.W. Bush's army easily defeated Saddam's forces in the Persian Gulf War, he decided not to send them to Baghdad to effect regime change. He undoubtedly figured that sanctions could force Saddam from power without losing American soldiers in a fight for Baghdad.
When Bill Clinton defeated Bush in 1992, he continued where Bush had left off, thinking that Saddam would ultimately have to step down -- or be forced out by his own national-security establishment, especially given the rising death toll among Iraqi children. It didn't work, just as the decades-long sanctions against Cuba didn't succeed in effecting regime change there either. Despite the fact that thousands of Iraqi children were dying on a weekly basis, Saddam steadfastly refused to step down.
It wasn't until President George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq that the sanctions were finally lifted. But that was only because the U.S. national-security state had finally achieved the regime change that it had sought for more than 10 years, only by a military invasion and not by sanctions.
People like Hillary Clinton and her husband never bothered to question whether George W. Bush and the national-security establishment were lying about their reasons for invading Iraq. Like Bush II, her husband, Bush I, and the Washington establishment, they just wanted get rid of Saddam and install a pro-U.S. dictatorship in his stead. So what if the American people had to be misled into supporting a war of aggression against a nation that had never attacked the United States. So what if hundreds of thousands of more Iraqis had to be bombed, incarcerated, tortured, destroyed, killed, or injured. So what if Iraq is now in the throes of a brutal civil war. All that matters is regime change, one that installed an ostensibly pro-U.S. regime into power but in actuality owes its primary allegiance to Iran, a rival or enemy of the U.S. Empire. But it was all "worth it," including the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children.
Even today, as everyone knows, every presidential candidate in the race, Democrat and Republican, are foaming at the mouth at the opportunity to use the America's armed might to drop even more bombs on Iraq and wreak even more death and destruction on that country. ISIS! ISIS! ISIS! It's the same refrain we heard throughout the 1990s: Saddam! Saddam! Saddam!
Unfortunately for Clinton, she didn't stop with bringing Albright into her campaign. Obviously increasingly desperate over the possibility that she could lose the race and thereby be prevented from becoming a commander-in-chief, she doubled down in Thursday's debate by saying that she "was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better -- better than anyone had run it in a long time."
Kissinger, of course, was "national-security adviser" in the administration of conservative Republican President Richard Nixon, the crook who was thrown out of office as a result of Watergate. During his term in office, Kissinger played a major role in the regime-change operation in Chile in the early 1970s, the one that ousted the democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende from power and replaced him with the brutal military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet was the man whose national-security forces rounded up tens of thousands of innocent people -- people whose only "crime" was believing in or supporting socialism or communism -- and incarcerated, tortured, raped, or killed them.
It's obvious that Hillary Clinton not only has good friends on Wall Street who pay her handsome speaking fees but also close friends who share her interventionist, militarist, imperialist vision for the future direction of America. There is an old Spanish saying, "Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are."
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