Honoring Madeleine Albright at Georgetown University

A suspect campaign based on a spectacular lie tries to bully university leaders from doing what they know is right

A political squall is brewing on the campus of the Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

The university leadership has been giving serious consideration to renaming the school after one of its most illustrious professors, the late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the first woman to ever hold that post in U.S. history. At the last minute, a group has presented a petition with 1300 signatures opposing the name change.

While respecting due process and the rights of academic dissent, the university should unquestionably move ahead. Its leaders should not be intimidated by a small group with questionable school ties whose petition is based on bad history and false claims.

I have a stake in this fight. I taught at the school for 12 years, and earlier earned my masters of science there in 1983. It was where I met Madeleine Albright when she was a young professor fresh from Bill Clinton’s National Security Council staff and I was an older grad student rebooting my career. She became a mentor to me, including many dinners at her Georgetown townhouse over the years, ending only with her death early this year.

Teaching and friendship would often combine. Secretary Albright met with my seminar grad students for one of my last classes there in 2018. They later told me that meeting her was the highlight of their two years at the school. I was not surprised. She was a magnificent teacher, even while giving just one lecture.

She graciously spoke one year to the Ploughshares Fund board of directors when I was its president. They adored her. So did my grown children when we stopped by her consulting firm to watch the 2016 presidential election returns. Even in defeat, she was resolute.

The petition makes a mockery of her outstanding career. It is unclear how many of those signing are actually from the school. The tweet from the professor who initiated the petition has garnered only 17 likes and five retweets — only four of these come from anyone with a connection to Georgetown University.

The petition claims that “as US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright supported some of the US government’s most devastating interventions in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and South Eastern Europe.” It says that her support for the consensus US policy in these regions amounts to “gross human rights violations.”

The only evidence presented for these claims is one quote, given in one interview. It is a statement that Secretary Albright herself said was a mistake she immediately regretted.

The petition says:

When asked many years later to comment on the half a million Iraqi children who died as a consequence of the drastic sanctions imposed on Iraq during her tenure, Madeleine Albright’s answer was ‘the price was worth it.’

Because of this, the petitioners claim that renaming the school after her “would be met with considerable unease and opposition in the School.” 

Because this particular quote is used so often by those who oppose U.S. interventions around the world, it is worth going into. It turns out the the accusation is false - and that Albright deeply regretted the way she responded to it.

It all happened during a 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl in May 1996. "We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima," Stahl said. "And, you know, is the price worth it?”

"I think that is a very hard choice," Albright answered, "but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

This quote has been hung around her neck ever since. On her death this March, for example, the Libertarian Party of Minnesota wrote, "Madeline Albright, another butcher of the Middle East has joined John McCain in hell…Don’t forget the 500k Iraqi dead she deemed worth it to die.”

Similarly, Daniel Larson blasts her on the Quincy Institute website after her death, alleging that “her answer laid bare the cruelty at the heart of broad sanctions.” He sees her as the chief Democratic proponent of U.S. interventions, scorching her for advocating military actions to stop the genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo.

These are the sentiments behind the petition. Here is the truth.

Albright apologized for the remark in her memoir and in an interview with The New York Times in 2020. She said bluntly: "I do not think the sanctions were worth any children’s lives, frankly, because I don’t believe in that. The sanctions weren’t supposed to be against them.”

With her typical candor, she was ruthlessly self-critical. "What I said was totally stupid. I use it in my class as an example of how thinking through what you’re going to say is important. I regret it. I have apologized for it I can’t tell you how many times.”

The context is critical. At the time, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was waging brutal campaigns against large parts of the Iraqi population, including mass slaughter of the Kurds. He killed hundreds of thousands of innocents, wiping out entire villages. Sanctions voted through the UN Security Council were seen as a way to punish him and deter him from continue his pogroms. They were the only alternative to doing nothing or going to war.

“But we learned in many ways that comprehensive sanctions often hurt the people of the country and don’t really accomplish what is wanted in order to change the behavior of the country being sanctioned,” Albright explained to the Times, “So we began to look at something called ‘smart sanctions’ or ‘targeted sanctions.’”

You can argue whether or not the sanctions the US now uses are smart or dumb. But here is something we now know to be true but Albright’s critics either do not know or consciously choose not to acknowledge: The sanctions did not “kill 500,000 children.”

That figure was fabricated by Saddam’s government. A London School of Economics study in 2017 called the figure “a spectacular lie.” While it found that too many children were dying in war-torn Iraq, there was no substantial increase in child mortality during the 1990s, the period of intense sanctions.

“The government of Iraq cleverly manipulated survey data to fool the international community,” the report said, describing the figure of 500,000 deaths as “a massive fraud.”  The peer-reviewed study concluded “There has been no substantial reduction in child mortality in the period since 2003 [after the US invasion, the fall of Saddam and the end of sanctions.].” Some totals included Kurdish children killed by Saddam among the supposed sanctions victims. The investigators described the figure of 500,000 deaths as “a massive fraud.” The United Nations withdrew the original report that cited that figure.

That is, the petition is based on “a spectacular lie.”

I am critical of many U.S. military policies, including some Secretary Albright favored. She and I could agree, as she often stated, that the wars in Vietnam and Iraq were disasters. But we would disagree on the extent and purpose of the global U.S. military presence.

If we only named schools after those with whom we completely agreed, there wouldn’t be any names on any schools.

Moreover, none of Albright’s positions come close to the horrifying positions staked out by Edmund A. Walsh, the Jesuit founder of the school and its current namesake. He favored preemptive nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union and supported the tactics of Sen. Joseph McCarthy against fellow Americans, as the school newspaper, The Hoya, reported in 2003. The petitioners do not seem to have any issue with Walsh’s national security positions.

Georgetown University would be well served by renaming the school after a champion of human rights, self-determination and democracy. A fierce opponent of authoritarianism and fascism, she is the perfect symbol for all the University values.

The Madeleine Albright School of Foreign Service would be the only leading foreign policy school in the nation named after a woman.

A fitting tribute to the diversity and equality she strove to bring to the national security process.