Secretary of State Madeleine Albright delivers a speech at Georgetown University in which she argues that sanctions likely will not end until Saddam is replaced. This no normalization without regime change is the policy adopted by two administrations and the roots of the second Gulf War.
A year earlier, the Center for Economic and Social Rights took Lesley Stahl and “60 Minutes” to Iraq to show them the effects that years of sanctions had had on the Iraqi civilian population. There had been multiple surveys concluding that up to 500,000 additional child deaths had occurred since Desert Storm. Stahl questioned Albright about whether she thought the cost of Iraq’s dead children, “more than died in Hiroshima,” was worth the price of sanctions. Albright said: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”
The “it” referred to Saddam’s supposed WMD and to have continued rule. But a little understood impact was also that Osama bin Laden noticed, and by 2001, spoke of the death of a million Iraqis as one of his indictments of the United States.
Day: March 26, 2021