The passing of Madeline Albright has been noted in laudatory obituaries of an impressively accomplished woman.  I was struck, however, in reading the NY Times obit, that no mention was made of Albright’s role in perhaps the most immediately consequential foreign policy pursued by the  administration that she served: the devastating economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. Consequential in terms of human life—hundreds of thousands of Iraqis perished as a result of US policy. I have long felt that the death and suffering inflicted on the people of Iraq by the Clinton administration was one of the ugliest and most under-reported stories of post-Cold War American foreign policy.  So, I’m taking this opportunity to bring it up again. I do so because I think it always bears reminding ourselves, as we confront monsters abroad, that our own leaders are capable of monstrous acts—always, of course, in the service of a righteous cause.   What follows comes from a post, which I have lightly revised, that I did years ago that reviewed two books.  One of them, Joy Gordon’s Invisible War, can be regarded as the definitive work on the US sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s.

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It was very possibly the worst public gaffe ever by a leading American diplomat.  Asked on a 1996 news program about reports that a half million Iraqi children had died as a result of U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iraq, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeline Albright replied that that the American policy was, indeed, “…a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”  Albright herself paid no price for her faux pas: the following year, she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State.  At her confirmation hearing, she pledged to maintain a tough sanctions regime against Iraq (a pledge she kept). Her “price is worth it” assessment didn’t come up in the questioning.

Years later, Albright took it back.  She hadn’t meant it, she said: her remark had been “hasty, clumsy and wrong.”  With more presence of mind, she would have thought to blame Saddam Hussein for the waves of excess mortality that engulfed Iraq in the 1990s, mostly affecting children under 5, mostly resulting from an explosion in waterborne diseases aggravated by poor nutrition and inadequate health care.   “Had Saddam spent Iraq’s money on humanitarian goods, his people’s suffering would have been far less.  Instead, he squandered the country’s assets rebuilding weapons factories and constructing lavish palaces for himself, his family and his cronies.”  This, indeed, had been the U.S. government line: the malnutrition and disease that plagued the Iraqi people was Saddam Hussein’s fault.

Except that it wasn’t.  Saddam Hussein, monster though he certainly was, was not mainly responsible for the burgeoning death rates afflicting his people in the 1990s.  It was American officials, assisted by their British allies, who were the main culprits.  In a meticulously researched and carefully balanced book, Joy Gordon, a philosopher specializing in the ethics of foreign policy, has demonstrated that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died because Iraq was not permitted to import articles it needed to reconstitute essential systems destroyed or degraded during the first Gulf War of 1991. Hospitals, power plants, dams, water purification facilities and agricultural and transportation infrastructure had been obliterated and needed to be re-built and re-equipped.  But the United States and Britain consistently used their veto power on the UN bodies administering the sanctions to bar the imports needed for rebuilding.   Saddam couldn’t “spend Iraq’s money on humanitarian goods” because we wouldn’t let him.

The stated rationale for restricting Iraqi imports was the possibility that items purportedly serving humanitarian needs could serve a “dual use,” that they could also enable Iraq to rebuild its industry and thus its war-making capabilities.   The ascription of dual use potential to individual items often challenged credulity.   At different times, the United States and/or Britain blocked the purchase of salt on grounds that it could be used for salinization of leather, which contributed to Iraqi industry; of chicken eggs and yogurt manufacturing equipment because they could be used to grow viruses for biological weapons; and of laundry detergent containing bleach, because the chlorine could conceivably be extracted for use in chemical weapons. The import of antibiotics and child vaccines met similar objections.  In 2000, the United States and Britain both found various grounds for rejecting a Syrian request to mill flour for Iraq, which was growing wheat but lacked the means to process it.

Was Madeleine Albright in denial when she professed disbelief that her policies had killed large numbers of innocent people? Joy Gordon shows how the structure of foreign policy decision making disperses responsibility and thus facilitates denial.  On the first page of her preface, she notes that the devastation inflicted on Iraq was done “not out of hatred but out of indifference.”  She describes a “diffuse and abstract” policy machinery in which decision making and the information sources on which decisions were based were scattered in multiple bureaucracies: “How do we attribute responsibility, given that decisions were made collectively, or politically, or bureaucratically?  How do we approach the question of the U.S. intent in regard to a policy that was formulated by a complex arrangement of technicians, politicians, and diplomats?”  To put the question differently, how does a monstrous policy emerge from decision making structures composed of people who presumably are not monsters?

During the Vietnam War, two young foreign policy analysts, Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, having recently resigned in protest from the government, described an ideology of foreign policy that excluded any moral consideration of the costs of war, thus producing a “dehumanized pattern of decisionmaking” that celebrated toughness.  There was no place for talk of morality: “Reasonable, decent men ….simply cannot imply that the other fellow, who supports a ‘tougher’ policy, is a heartless murderer.  Subordinates do not wish to tell superiors that they will be acting immorally if they choose the ‘tougher’ option….To talk of suffering is to lose ‘effectiveness,’ almost to lose one’s grip.”

It is reasonable to suppose that much the same ethos of toughness, of cultivated indifference to moral issues, was at work in American policy on Iraqi sanctions.  No segment of the U.S. policy making machinery was entrusted with the task of assessing the effect of the sanctions on the Iraqi people.  U.S. Iraq policy in the 1990s was focused on removing Saddam Hussein from power. The sanctions were a means to that end.  The hope was that the hardships imposed by the sanctions would eventually lead Iraqis–presumably through a coup–-to replace their leader.  The collateral damage wrought by the sanctions–the cost in human life–was simply not a focus of U.S. policy.  Presumably, there was never an explicit decision, anywhere in the American policy making machinery, to kill as many Iraqis as necessary to bring Saddam down.   But there may as well have been, because that in effect was American policy.  The United States government was willing to expunge countless Iraqi lives in the effort to remove Saddam Hussein–-literally countless, because no one in the government was counting.  The “diffuse and abstract” policy making machinery that Gordon describes wasn’t designed to be that way, but neither was it accidental: it reflected a set of priorities in which moral concerns were absent.

Albright, then, should not be let off the hook–-and neither, for that matter, should her boss, Bill Clinton.  By 1996 the deadly toll the sanctions were taking was evident to anyone not willfully blind to that reality.  Practically from the very start of the sanctions regime, a steady stream of reports by UN agencies and other observers abundantly documented its impact on the Iraqi people.   This information was either ignored or actively disparaged by U.S. officials, who insistently clung to the fiction of Saddam Hussein’s culpability.  If the real story didn’t reach Albright, it was because her underlings knew that she wouldn’t want to hear it.

But her “price is worth it” remark does suggest that she had at least a dim awareness of the impact of U.S. policy; if she didn’t have more than that, she certainly had the means to learn more.  If she didn’t it was because she chose not to.  So, yes, she may have been in denial, but denial is just another word for willful ignorance.  Willful ignorance of the consequences of one’s own actions is not quite the same as deliberate agency, but it is far from innocence.