Newsweek has a feature called “My Favorite Mistake,” where a famous person talks about something they’ve done wrong.https://fair.org/blog/wp-admin/edit.php
This week (7/24/11) it’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The mistake she cited was when she wore the wrong pin to a meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and then said something critical about his Chechnya policy. (The best mistakes are the most self-serving ones, apparently.)
When I saw the headline, I was half-wondering if she’d talk about her famous defense of killing Iraqi children on 60 Minutes (5/12/96):
Leslie Stahl asks Albright: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
To which Albright replies: “I think this is a very hard choice. But the price–we think the price is worth it.”
Iraq did come up in the Newsweek piece, when Albright wrote, “We had sanctions on Iraq then, and I was instructed to keep saying terrible things about Saddam Hussein.”
I would agree that she said something terrible.
The US has plenty of talented, smart women who understand diplomacy. Why they do not put them in those positions instead of morons like Albright I don’t know. Either that or maybe when anyone out of the US State Dept. speaks about Arab civilians they simply can’t help but make a gaffe.
Either way, Albright’s comments on it being “worth it” to kill thousands of Iraqi children was her greatest gaffe in the time she served as UN Ambassador. And the feeble way she tries to cover her ass by blaming others and then acting like the fact that they said to say horrible things about “Saddam Hussein,” means that what she said about Iraqi children was somehow their fault, is pathetic.