Roaming Charges: Both Ends Burning

by Jeffrey St. Clair

March 25, 2022

Image: Kenneth J. Schubert.

“I was born near Ypres in 1917 on the western front. The first thing I really remember about my father was him waking up screaming in the middle of the night, having one of his recurring nightmares about the war.”

– John Berger

+ The tributes to Madeleine Albright, who died this week at 84, are sickening to read. The lede for her obituary should read very simply: Chief architect of a sanction regime that killed 500,000 Iraqi children, whose deaths she said were “worth it.”

(https://youtu.be/1gJfiKoKDs0)

+ In our identity-obsessed political culture, Madeleine Albright finally proved that American woman (the Israelis and Brits had demonstrated this quality decades earlier) are fully capable of supervising mass death without flinching or showing the tiniest twinge of regret or remorse.

+ It is the ultimate moral crime to target for misery, pain and death those least responsible for the offenses of their tyrannical rulers. Yet this is the very policy Madeleine Albright made Standard Operating Procedure for US diplomacy.

+ The “soft power” of economic sanctions don’t prevent war. After Ms. Albright’s sanctions on Iraq killed 1 million civilians, half of them children, the US still invaded Iraq, toppled their government, occupied their country for the next 17 years and continues to bomb it at will.

+ Albright may be dead. But her policy of “hands-off” killing through sanctions continues to function as the most lethal weapon in the US arsenal. Look no further than Afghanistan where upwards of 175 newborns are dying every day as a consequence of crippling sanctions. The moral stench of her policies is made more ghoulish by the fact that Albright justified the deaths of children, women, the old, the infirm and the destitute on humanitarian grounds. Few people in history have overseen the deaths of so many civilians they claimed they were acting to protect.

+ Although the first line in Albright’s obituary should be her shocking lack of conscience about consigning 500,000 Iraqi kids to death, her lifelong obsession was not the Middle East but Russia. She never stopped pushing for NATO expansion right to Russia’s borders, sparking an antagonism that has only intensified ever since.

+ Given the black hole opening in Ukraine, threatening to suck all the major European powers into it, it’s instructive to recall that it was Bill Clinton, NATO Supremo Wesley Clark and Madeleine Albright’s failure to negotiate in good faith with Milošević that led to the Kosovo War–a war all of the above desperately wanted and got–heedless of the still convulsing consequences.

+ Jason Motz: “She’ll be greatly missed…at The Hague.”

+ And by the press…

Full article here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/25/roaming-charges-both-ends-burning/