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Posted on 10/07/2003 10:56:04 PM PDT by Destro
Madam Secretary
Reviewed by Christopher Caldwell NYT
Wednesday, October 8, 2003
Nonfiction. By Madeleine Albright With Bill Woodward Illustrated. 562 pages. $27.95. Miramax Books.
Madeleine Albright remembers nodding in agreement last year as President George W. Bush made the case before the United Nations for disarming Saddam Hussein. "It was, after all, similar," she writes, "to speeches I had made time and again during my years as UN ambassador and secretary of state."
The Bush foreign policy, often derided as arrogant and arbitrary, differs little, in fact, from the Clinton administration's, which was seen at the time as compassionate and bold. Albright did not invent "assertive multilateralism," as the Clinton modus operandi came to be called, but she can justly claim to have set its tone. "Madam Secretary," her straight-shooting but occasionally blinkered memoir, bills itself as "a personal account, not a history of the Clinton administration foreign policy." But in Albright's flamboyant and hectoring diplomacy, it can be hard to pinpoint where the personal leaves off and the political picks up.
Albright was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937. Her father, Josef Korbel, was a diplomat in the government that was plowed under by the Nazis the following year. (Not until 1997, Albright writes, would she discover that she was of Jewish descent, and that three of her grandparents had perished in death camps.) The family fled to London. By the time Madeleine was 12, Stalin was finishing his subversion of Czechoslovak democracy. Korbel, who had become ambassador in Belgrade after the war, moved the family to Colorado, where he taught international relations. From her student years to her tenure as the first woman to serve as secretary of state, Albright's otherwise straightforward Democratic liberalism has been marked by anti-Communism and impatience of anything that smacked of "appeasement."
Madeleine was unapologetically ambitious. She had an elaborate system of binding color-coded classroom notes alongside her reading notes, and then taking notes on those. Much of this book consists of pre-emptive disavowals of any such canniness in her personal life. Fresh out of Wellesley, she married Joseph Albright, scion of three newspaper-owning families. Joe was being groomed to become publisher of Newsday, then owned by his uncle and aunt - Harry Guggenheim and his wife, Alicia Patterson Guggenheim - although Bill Moyers would beat him out for that job.
The Albrights moved from New York to Washington and had three daughters. She settled into a dual life as mother and socialite: chairman of the board of the Beauvoir School, fund-raiser for Senator Edmund Muskie and other Democrats, and bridge partner of Katharine Graham, later publisher of The Washington Post. She may be the only senior Democratic foreign-policy thinker who can cover her contemporaneous reflections on the Vietnam War in under a paragraph.
She was almost 40 when she got her doctorate and took her first government job, as legislative assistant to Muskie. Her former professor Zbigniew Brzezinski had become President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, and he lured her to the Carter White House.
She became a professor at Georgetown and advised the Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis presidential campaigns. She began holding Democratic soirees in hopes of fostering party consensus on avoiding those campaigns' foreign policy pitfalls.
Albright belongs to the transitional feminist generation that stretches roughly from Pamela Harriman to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, women who rose through their husbands and struck out on their own only well into adulthood.
She is fascinated by those who choose to stand and fight, rather than fleeing, like the Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi or the former Czech President Vaclav Havel, who has become her close friend. She is frank, assertive and simplistic, tending to present her lack of nuance as a surfeit of principle.
For her, every conflict is a replay of the Munich conference of 1938, with a camp of the "farsighted" on one hand and a bunch of "appeasers" on the other. So she treated her role within the Clinton administration as the one who would "implant some spine." That she did. Albright generally negotiates as if she believes there is no such thing as good and bad judgment, or judicious and injudicious policy - only morally pure actors and morally corrupt ones.
After the 2000 Camp David negotiations, which failed to produce an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, she consoled herself that Israel's prime minister, Ehud Barak, "had once again moved the debate's center of gravity."
"Israelis were now conditioned to yield significantly more than they had previously contemplated in return for a definitive end to the conflict," she writes. It would not occur to Albright to ask whether this new and higher price of peace might have left the situation more dangerous than it was before she got involved.
Albright also lobbied persuasively, abroad and in the White House, for the 1999 Kosovo war, which NATO won only after a 77-day bombing campaign. The conflict so reflects her style of diplomacy that Time magazine called it "Madeleine's War." The unambiguous autocracy of the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, did not make the war unambiguously justifiable, and Albright sought to force a consensus by erasing the distinction between excesses in Serbia's antiterrorist operation and the worst political crimes ever committed.
This blurring of distinctions has subsequently proved useful to people of ill will - first against Israel, and after Sept. 11, against the United States. Another question that Albright did not consider was whether the first aerial bombardment of European cities since World War II would make Europeans more or less likely to rally to America when it next sought their aid - this time in its own self-defense.
The New York Times
This has to be read again:
The unambiguous autocracy of the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, did not make the war unambiguously justifiable, and Albright sought to force a consensus by erasing the distinction between excesses in Serbia's antiterrorist operation and the worst political crimes ever committed.
This blurring of distinctions has subsequently proved useful to people of ill will - first against Israel, and after Sept. 11, against the United States. Another question that Albright did not consider was whether the first aerial bombardment of European cities since World War II would make Europeans more or less likely to rally to America when it next sought their aid - this time in its own self-defense.
Amen!!!
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