I think this is a very hard choice, but the price? We think the price is worth it. -- Madeleine Albright on CBS Television, 1996

THE PRICE

 Was It Really Worth It, Mrs. Albright?

By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

WHAT moved those kamikaze Muslims to embark, so many months ago on the training that they knew would culminate in their deaths as well of those (they must have hoped) of thousands upon thousands of innocent people?

Was it the Koran plus a tape from Osama bin Laden? The dream of a world in which all men wear untrimmed beards and women have to stay at home or go outside only when enveloped in blue tents? I doubt it.

If I had to cite what steeled their resolve the list would surely include the exchange on CBS in 1996 between Madeleine Albright and then US ambassador to the United Nations and Lesley Stahl. Albright was maintaining that sanctions had yielded important concessions from Saddam Hussein.

Stahl: "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?"

Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price? We think the price is worth it."

They read that exchange in the Middle East. It was infamous all over the Arab world. I'll bet the September 11 kamikazes knew it well enough, just as they could tell you the crimes wrought against the Palestinians. So would it be unfair today to take Madeleine Albright down to the ruins of the Trade Towers, remind her of that exchange, and point out that the price turned out also to include that awful mortuary. Was that price worth it too, Mrs. Albright?

Well, the typists and messenger boys and back-office staffs throughout the Trade Center didn't know that history. There's a lot of other relevant history they probably didn't know but which those men on the attack planes did. How could those people in the Towers have known, when US political and journalistic culture is a conspiracy to perpetuate their ignorance?

Those people on the Towers were innocent portions of the price that Albright insisted, in just one of its applications, as being worth it. It would honor their memory to insist that in future our press offers a better accounting of how America's wars for Freedom are fought and what the actual price might include. CP

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