By David Brooks on March 28, 2022
Madeleine Albright, “the cost was worth it”
Joe Biden promised that “America is back”, and well, we must recognize that promises have been kept: the United States is back, and back, and back again.
The first stop on a return trip, full of nostalgia: the return to the Cold War. The Russians have resumed their role as the bad guys in the movie, Washington is back as the world’s guardian of democracy; alas, it’s all just like old times. Oh, and at the same time, the good old days of regime change are back.
In his speech in Poland, crafted to be immediately proclaimed “historic”, compared to JFK’s speech in Berlin and Reagan’s speech on the wall (the great speeches of the great cold war), Biden culminated with the phrase, in reference to Putin: “this man must not remain in power”. The White House broadcast the speech with the grandiose and nostalgic title: United Efforts of the Free World in Support of the People of Ukraine.
Shortly thereafter, senior White House officials humorlessly clarified to media that the president was not proposing “regime change” when he said Putin “should not remain in power.” Apparently they still don’t have a new phrase to differentiate what the American said after Washington accused the Russian of having that same goal in Ukraine. But the U.S. is back with a practice it has used for more than a century although, mind you, always “in the name of democracy.”
“Politicians like Biden, who accept no responsibility for our well-documented war crimes, burnish their moral credentials by demonizing their adversaries. They know the chances of Putin facing justice is zero. And they know the chances of them facing justice themselves is zero,” says journalist and author Chris Hedges on Scheerpost.com. The Americans have never been held accountable, even in cases where they were charged with waging “criminal wars of aggression” under post-Nuremburg laws – the very same charge they are now making against Russia. Hedges explains that “our war crimes don’t count, and neither do the victims of our war crimes. And this hypocrisy makes a rules-based world, one that complies with international law, impossible.”
The passing of Madeleine Albright, America’s first female foreign minister, last week also provoked nostalgic eulogies for the US and its sacred mission as “leader of the free world”. Hardly anyone in the official circuits remembered that in 1996, she officially justified, in an interview with CBS News, the death of half a million children due to US sanctions against Iraq by declaring that “the cost was worth it” (although she later insisted that it was a “stupid” statement).
Nor has it been remembered that during Clinton’s presidency in 1999, Albright was the chief hawk in the U.S.-led NATO-led war against Serbia – without U.N. authorization – in which entire civilian areas in Belgrade and elsewhere were bombed for 78 days.
A few years later, then Senator Biden would vote in favor of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, another war not authorized by the UN, not provoked. In other words, much the same as Moscow is now accused of.
But for much of the political establishment, this return to Cold War times is welcome. They can dust off the old, well-rehearsed rhetoric, including warnings about the nuclear threat posed by the enemies of the “free world.”
There is one small problem: the Russians are no longer “communists” or “Marxists”; so they have to remove those terms from the official narrative, but apparently not everyone in this country has noticed: as a protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the University of Florida removed Karl Marx’s name from one of its lecture halls. Apparently no one informed them that Marx was German, not Russian.
America has regressed… or has it just backtracked?
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English