IPFS News Link • Police State
IPFS News Link • Police State
“If we have to use force, it is because we
are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further
into the future.”
This panegyric to what is commonly called
“American Exceptionalism” could have been composed by any of a number of
GOP-aligned media figures, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, or
their legions of local imitators. Those words were actually spoken by Madeleine Albright in 1998, when she was the Clinton administration’s Secretary of State. She was defending the U.S. role in enforcing
an embargo on Iraq in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991.
Albright had memorably addressed that issue in a different fashion three years earlier during an interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes.
“We have heard that a half million children have died,”
observed interviewer Leslie Stahl. “I mean, that's more children than died in
Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”
Without challenging the statistics, or displaying even a
tremor of remorse, Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but
the price--we think the price is worth it.”