Albright: Iraq invasion encouraged others [had encouraged Iran and North Korea to push ahead....]

Yahoo ^

[Sub-Driver]

Albright: Iraq invasion encouraged others

By ALEX NICHOLSON, Associated Press Writer 14 minutes ago

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying Monday it had encouraged Iran and North Korea to push ahead with their nuclear programs.

Albright, who served under President Clinton, said "the message out of Iraq is the wrong one."

"The message out of Iraq is that if you don't have nuclear weapons, you get invaded. If you do have nuclear weapons, you don't get invaded," she said after an investors' conference in Moscow.

Albright visited North Korea in October 2000, becoming the highest-level American official ever to travel to the country. The two nations do not have formal diplomatic relations.

Albright also said Russia did not deserve membership in the Group of Eight major industrialized nations because it did not meet all the requirements.

"In terms of some criteria on open society, democracy, there are more and more questions, frankly," said Albright, who is now a business consultant.

[hsalaw]

I thought she and ol' BJ were the ones who gave North Korea the material to make nuclear weapons. That had nothing to do with Iraq and was, in fact, well underway before anything happened with Iraq.

[rightinthemiddle]

Scary...

[daviscupper]

I think you are wrong. Helen Thomas is "absolute" ugliness. The magnitude of some things cannot be exceeded. Like absolute zero, minus 273 degree centigrade, or the speed of light. So therefore it is impossible for anyone to be uglier than Helen.

[Peach]

Wrong, Albright. What encouraged jihadists is the pull out from Somalia.

OBL himself has said that the Black Hawk Down incident proved America didn't have the stomach for body bags.

[Marysecretary]

Notbright and her ilk never remember that modern day methods can trace every word, written or spoken. Are they really that stupid? Do they think....hmm, DO THEY THINK?

[AnnaZ]

Not only is she NotSoBright, she's getting dimmer and dimmer.

[Donna Lee Nardo]

Grinning. You have a point.

[AxelPaulsenJr]

Halfbright reminds me of the old cut we used to use in high school. Every time she opens her mouth, she subtacts from the sum total of human knowledge.

[dighton]

“Madereine herp my dad, the Great Reader, through many ronery nights.”

[Robert A Cook PE]

Gee - I thought the message was: if you attack us, we kick your butt.
EXACTLY!

Let's look at who HAS nuclear weapons, but HAVE NOT attacked the US (recently): I'd include India, UK, French, Israel, South Africa, Russia, China, NK (so far) ....

Gee. Even in Cuba, when Russian Nukes were being moved in (prior to attack) we responded. Well, actually St Kennedy did a terrible job of responding, but we responded.

The only people who HAVE NOT been attacked are those who ..... (dramatic pause) HAVE NOT ATTACKED US.

[GOP_Muzik]

This crazy pathetic woman has done more damage to this country during her tenure than any terrorist could dream of.

It will take at least a decade to clean up the messes made by Albright and Clinton.

[RobbyS]

Like North Korea in 1994.

[winner3000]

How come North Korea worked on Nukes then? We hadn't attacked Iraq yet...

[lwg8tr]

Shows what absolute power hungry socialist whores these people are. They would rather have their fellow countrymen burned up in a mushroom cloud than work together on a constructive process of keeping our enemies in check. This old traitorous hag needs to shut her red diaper doper baby pie hole and worry about her own colon. Nothing like a self hating Jew supporting despotic and anti-Semitic enemies all because the Bush administration isn’t doing all they can money away to pacify what the left secretly things are undesirables. I don’t like Michael Savage but he is right, these people have a mental disorder and need to be removed from the spotlight and taken into intense drug and psychotherapy.

[Continental Soldier]

Why hasn't anyone in the public media (ms or cable) ever pointed out that Albright was probably the worst secretary of state in our county's history? And, more important, why do people in the media keep going to her for her views? Surely, everyone realizes that she was and is an incompetent! I think her most revealing moment came at an international conference at a Swiss hotel when she was mistaken for a chamber maid by the assembled delegates! What more need be said? :)

[avacado]

"Notbright and her ilk never remember that modern day methods can trace every word, written or spoken. Are they really that stupid? Do they think....hmm, DO THEY THINK?"

Someone needs to tell those idiots that we have this new fangled invention called the Internet that has easy access to historical archives.

The Democrats were beating the War Drum long before Bush became President.

See: Dem Quotes on Iraq: 1998

[cake_crumb]

Hey, Madeleine:

1. Nuclear Agreed Framework, Jimmy Carter, 1994.
2. Blood for Oil Vouchers, 1996
3. Arming al Qaeda posing as "ethnic Albanians" 1997
4. Whole mess in Bosnia, which we're still dealing with AFTER SEVEN CHRISTAMASES HAVE COME AND GONE
5. Rwanda (remember Wesley?)
6. Usama bin Laden
7. USS Cole
8. Khobar Towers
9. Embassy bombings, NUMEROUS assassinations, an inability to stop CIA leaks and protect our foreign intelligence agents from execution....

I could go on and on with YOUR foreign policy mistakes, for which we are STILL paying a price in blood.

Madeleine.....STFU, you mentally challenged, genetically defective, two-bit, broomstick riding dyke.

[cake_crumb]

I just caught the most incredible report on what MAY have been ABS News, though it might also have been CBS, considering the content: the media has finally noticed the DPRNK has an ICBM! They can blame BUSH for it!! By having some idiot woman who looks like Albright with a nose job and a weight trainer saying that "Iran has oil so they have their attention. North Korea figures OK, we'll get nukes and WE'LL get their attention" and then the anchor went on at length about Iran, which he kept calling "Iraq" and then...AMAZINGLY, they slid into today's Iraq Quagmire story, which featured our two missing soldiers (prayers for their safety)

And people wonder why I yell at the TV??

[John Lenin]

---

Forwarded message

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Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 11:40:42 -0400 (EDT)

The following lies, threats, racist imagery, etc. are from Albright's
OpEd piece in yesterday's New York Times. Letters to the editor are
critically needed (letters@nytimes.com).

---

August 17, 1998


The U.S. Will Stand Firm on Iraq, No
Matter What

By MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT

At the end of gulf war, conventional wisdom had it that
Saddam Hussein would not last six months. Unfortunately, conventional
wisdom was wrong and we have had to live and deal with the
consequences ever since. For seven years, we have successfully
contained Saddam by maintaining the toughest multilateral sanctions in
history, while the United Nations special commission on arms
inspections, or Unscom, has managed to find and destroy many of
Saddam's missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

Periodically, Saddam rattles his cage, hoping that by
provoking a crisis he can wear away at the will of the international
community while we either stop paying attention or end up spending our
precious defense dollars dispatching and recalling our forces. We will
keep our eye on the ball: the threat to our national interests posed
by Iraq. We will decide how and when to respond to Iraq's actions,
based on the threat they pose to Iraq's neighbors, to regional
security and to U.S. vital interests.

Our assessment will include Saddam's capacity to
reconstitute, use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In
considering our response, we have ruled nothing out, including the use
of force. We have reconfigured our forces in the gulf so that we can
react swifly and forcefully when necessary.

In the meantime, Saddam's decision to suspend cooperation
with the International Atomic Energy Agency and U.N. special
commission violates the agreement he reached with Secretary General
Kofi Annan less than six months ago and represents a direct challenge
to Security Council authority. This is a confrontation between Iraq
and the United Nations. It is therefore up to Mr. Annan and the
Security Council to make sure that Saddam reverses course and
cooperates with Unscom. And if they fail to persuade him to back down,
we will have laid the foundation for taking our own decisive action.

Supporting Unscom is at the heart of our efforts to prevent
Saddam Hussein from threatening his neighborhood, and the United
States has always been its strongest backer. Because the U.N. special
commission has been so effective in disarming Iraq, despite Iraq's
elaborate efforts to hide and lie about its weapons of mass
destruction programs, Saddam has sought to discredit the organization.
Unfortunately, while this is patently untrue, some in the Security
Council have lent support to this effort.

We have taken the opposite approach, staunchly defending
Unscom and its chairman, Richard Butler. We have supported his conduct
of intrusive inspections while seeking to insure that Saddam was not
able to exploit this effort to the disadvantage of the U.N. inspection
team in the Security Council. Since the last crisis, Unscom has in fact
been very effective. It has carried out a range of inspection
activities, some of which turned up very serious evidence that Saddam
has still not accounted for many undeclared chemical warheads. Other
evidence demonstrated that Iraq had weaponized deadly VX gas, directly
contradicting Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz's claims to have fully
disclosed Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.

This month, Unscom had intended to follow up with some
particularly intrusive inspections, which he supported. However, when
Iraq suspended all inspections on Aug. 4, it was clear to us that
Saddam Hussein had done something which even his backers in the
Security Council could not defend. It was in that context that I
consulted with Mr. Butler who came to his own conclusion that it was
wiser to keep the focus on Iraq's open defiance of the Security
Council. Had Unscom gone ahead with the intrusive inspections, they
would have been blocked anyway, but that would have allowed some in
the Security Council to muddy the waters by claiming again that
Unscom had provoked Iraq.

Our purpose now is to get the Security Council to face up to
its responsibilities to the U.N. special commission and the
International Atomic Energy Agency. These organizations have been
clearly mandated by the Council to carry out the necessary measures to
disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction and missile delivery
systems. If the Council fails to persuade Saddam to resume
cooperation, then we will have a free hand to use other means to
support Unscom's mandate.

Let's be clear: what Saddam Hussein really wants is to have
sanctions lifted while retaining his residual
weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities. We will not allow him to
achieve these objectives. As long as Saddam refuses to comply with the
Security Council resolutions, the comprehensive sanctions on Iraq will
remain in place.

This denies Saddam one of his most urgent objectives: to
regain control of Iraq's revenues so he can reconstitute his ability
to threaten his neighbors. His lack of cooperation with Unscom may
delay the day when Iraq is fully disarmed. But this same lack of
cooperation will also help us insure that the sanctions are
maintained, thereby doing much to prevent Saddam from rearming Iraq.

Some will argue, as they did in the last crisis, that this
imposes an inhumane burden on the Iraqi people who are not to blame
for Saddam's behavior. But this time, Iraqis are benefiting from the
expansion of the "oil for food" arrangements which are now insuring
that every Iraqi receives a daily ration basket equivalent to the
recommended caloric intake of the average American.

Under this arrangement, however, Saddam is denied access to
the oil revenues. Instead, the money is escrowed in a U.N. account,
and released only for supplies approved by the U.N. sanctions
committee.

In short, Saddam may be rattling his cage again, but he has
no way to break out of it. Through his latest actions he has thrown
away the key and only helped us to keep his cage in place. One way or
the other, his latest effort to blackmail the international community
into accepting his false claims of compliance will not be allowed to
succeed.

Madeleine K. Albright is the Secretary of State.




--

[Explorer24]

It amazes me that anyone would listen to anyone from Clinton's admin, the UN, and/or Blix. During these people's tenure: Libya acquired WMDs, Pakistan's AQ Khan passed along secrets to anyone who was interested, Iran and NK progressed along towards the bomb while Bill's hand was up Monica's skirt and Almostbright was crying on television "they lied to us."