A Faithful Servant

by IAN WILLIAMS
マデリーン・オルブライトの回想録"Madam Secretary"の書評。
[from the February 23, 2004 issue]

A noticeable aspect of her memoirs is the convenient lacunae whenever she tries to cover her own rear and secondly Bill Clinton's--and she does often. But her prejudices come through loud and clear. As the child of Czech refugees, she had more justification than most for her reflexive anti-Communism and perhaps even for her Eurocentrism, which accounts for her enthusiasm for intervention in the Balkans and her absolute (and carefully skirted) scuppering of any intervention in, say, Rwanda.

It is true, as Albright has argued, that sometimes the American liberal school of foreign policy really does forget the big stick that Teddy Roosevelt advised should accompany soft talk. One need only look at Jimmy Carter's redemptive embrace of every bloodthirsty tyrant as soon as an ultimatum matures. But the other wing of Democratic foreign policy, the Scoop Jackson school, is based on a visceral anti-Communism, often tinged with uncritical support for Israel. Its difference from the official Republican version of the same has been that it is more cosmopolitan and less isolationist--and often more ideological. A pragmatic Republican like Bob Dole saw no reason for Kansas grain farmers to suffer because some of the East Coast policy-makers had a feud with Moscow and wanted sanctions.

Madeleine Albright's problem was that she was working with the wrong President. Her ideological roots made her strident and tough-talking, but Clintonian caution meant that her tough talk was usually backed up by only the tiniest and most detumescent of sticks. Ironically, Albright tried to spur Colin Powell into committing the US military and met far more resistance from him than he has offered to the hawks in the Pentagon since he succeeded to her position.

But then Powell told her, with unwitting prescience, "we do deserts," not mountains. In fact, it is during the Clinton Administration that we saw the consolidation of the present Pentagon lock on American foreign policy. Luckily, the actual generals were aggressive only about their budgets then--and even now it is the civilians in the Pentagon who are the militarists. But you will search in vain for Albright's explanations for Clinton's opposition to the treaties on landmines, child combatants and the International Criminal Court, and its countenancing abrogation of the ABM treaty and investment in Star Wars, all motivated by its preparedness to throw overboard its liberal principles to feed the conservative crocodiles in the Pentagon and Congress.

In any case, a lot of dead people in the Balkans and Rwanda could legitimately question the way the shared enthusiasm of Clinton and Albright worked. "In Somalia we tried to do too much. In Rwanda we did too little. In Haiti and Bosnia, after false starts, we eventually got it right."

As she herself admits, in Somalia the United States ignored UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's advice to disarm the warlords and conducted a military operation without even telling local UN commanders, who then had to rescue them. Of course, Boutros-Ghali suffered the fate of those who have the temerity to emulate the little boy who tells the emperor how his wardrobe really looks. As we see now with Iraq, being proven entirely correct does not provide an amnesty from imperial displeasure.

In Haiti and Bosnia, untold thousands died and suffered while the Clinton Administration dithered. In the former Yugoslavia, the US-imposed solution left the génocidaires in control of lands they had ethnically cleansed. And in Rwanda, Albright herself stopped the Security Council from reinforcing in any way the beleaguered peacekeeping force. Admittedly, many other members were happy to hide behind her callous invocation of Presidential Decision Directive 25.

She disingenuously explains this as "establishing criteria" to make UN peacekeeping "more successful abroad and supportable at home." This is not simply evasion; it is blatant falsification. In the interpretation that she used over Rwanda, PDD-25 committed the United States to using its veto against any UN peacekeeping force that did not positively advance US interests. The document, still officially secret, was more about pandering to the Jesse Helms brigade in Washington than a sober consideration of Washington's multilateral responsibilities. As Wisconsin Congressman David Obey said at the time, PDD-25's restrictions were intended to meet the American need for "zero degree of involvement, and zero degree of risk, and zero degree of pain and confusion," which could almost be a definition of Clintonian triangulation as applied to external affairs.

Since PDD-25 did have to cope with reality, it allowed that occasionally US troops may come under foreign control, so it failed on the pandering front, and the loony right still sees it as an instrument of surrender of US sovereignty. It was thus in its way archetypically Clintonian, in that the President pandered himself into a policy pillory where his domestic enemies could still throw garbage at him.

Similarly, when she discusses Kosovo, Albright misses the inherently self-defeating stupidity of Clinton and the Administration in ruling out the one option that Milosevic feared--ground troops. The war is presented as if it were won by the long, messy and almost counterproductive high-altitude bombing missions that caused so many unnecessary casualties and did so much to erode international support for it.

Albright omits the crucial turning point, when Blair, Gen. Wesley Clark and the Europeans won their argument with a reluctant Clinton to prepare for a ground offensive. Although she quotes military historian John Keegan's description of Kosovo as the first war won by airpower, what finally impelled Milosevic to run up the white flag was the decision to prepare a ground invasion before the winter. But that decision negated the previous three months of Clintonian reliance on bombing as a quick fix. Once again, "collateral" civilian deaths caused by high-altitude bombing was "worth it" to avoid the domestic political repercussions that US casualties would have brought.

On the whole, one cannot help wondering whether Madeleine Albright would not have been happier working with Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush than with Clinton. Her interventionist approach and rebarbative diplomatic style would be much more in harmony with them than Colin Powell's, even if she does share the latter's realist appreciation of the need for allies and multilateral support when possible.

Indeed, apropos Iraq, she has opposed the timing of the war, but she was "nod[ding] in agreement" with Bush's speech to the UN on September 12, 2002, when to anyone with any feeling for subtext the speech had a strong one of impending war. When asked by Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes about the alleged death of half a million Iraqi children as a result of sanctions, Albright said calmly, "We think the price is worth it." However, while she now admits that her answer was a political mistake, she does not seem disturbed by the level of casualties inflicted by the sanctions, nor does she seem aware that the sanctions are a major reason neither the United States nor the UN has received a warm welcome in Iraq, even among Saddam's Shiite opponents.

And that is where there is an essential identity and continuity between the Bush and Clinton foreign policies. The latter, by pandering to the dark forces of American reaction, paved the way for them to consolidate their hold on this White House. If fate had not landed her in the Clinton White House, Albright would have made a fine soulmate for the neoconservatives whom Christopher Hitchens admiringly calls "the Pentagon intellectuals."