Madeleine Albright

Madeleine Albright is presented as a senior U.S. policymaker whose record links the language used to defend state violence with the legal administration of counterterrorism. The book invokes her both for an answer accepting the estimated deaths of Iraqi children as the price of a difficult policy choice and for her role in creating and maintaining the United States' official list of foreign terrorist organizations. Together, these appearances place her at the intersection of public justification and executive authority: one passage exposes the moral terms in which civilian harm was accepted, while another traces the rules and recurring decisions through which organizations were officially designated.

Public Justification and Civilian Cost

In discussing criticism of U.S.-supported Israeli actions and of American policy toward Iraq, Noam Chomsky cites a televised interview in which Albright, then secretary of state, was asked about an estimate that half a million Iraqi children had died as a result of sanctions. The book reports that she acknowledged that consequences of this kind were the price of a difficult choice for her administration, then stated that the administration believed the price was worth paying. The significance of the exchange in the argument is not simply that a senior official addressed the estimate: the answer, as presented, recognizes the human cost while affirming the policy that imposed it.

Chomsky brings up the interview while challenging the way public debate treats political violence. He argues that criticism of Israeli actions and of U.S. policy toward Iraq is dismissed by some commentators as distorted, while the civilian consequences of policies supported by the United States are treated as routine or defensible. Albright's answer supplies a concentrated example of that asymmetry: the suffering is not denied in the cited account, but is placed within a calculus in which the administration accepts it as a price. The episode therefore serves the book's wider insistence that the consequences of state policy be examined alongside the reasons offered for it.

The Executive Role in Foreign Terrorist Designations

The book also records Albright's administrative role in the U.S. system for designating foreign terrorist organizations. The procedure, as described, assigns the secretary of state responsibility for establishing the official list jointly with the attorney general and the secretary of the treasury. Designations are made under the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended by the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. A designation lasts two years; it expires automatically unless affirmatively renewed, and renewal requires the secretary of state to demonstrate that the organization has continued terrorist activity and still meets the statutory criteria.

In October 1997, Albright approved the first list, containing thirty groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations. The list was therefore not merely an inherited register in the account: its initial official form was established during her tenure as secretary of state. The book does not supply her personal reasoning for approving the thirty designations, but it identifies the institutional authority she exercised and the legal process through which that authority operated.

In October 1999, Albright renewed the designations of twenty-seven of the original groups and authorized the removal of three because they had ceased terrorist activity and no longer met the stated criteria. The changes illustrate the list's intended periodic review: designations were not described as permanent, and cessation of activity could lead to removal. In the same year, Albright designated Al-Qaeda as a new foreign terrorist organization; in 2000, she designated the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Her actions thus included maintaining existing entries, removing groups whose circumstances no longer met the test, and adding new organizations.

Continuity, Criteria, and Significance

The 2001 history in the book provides a point of comparison after Albright's tenure. Secretary of State Colin Powell renewed the designation of twenty-six of the twenty-eight listed organizations and combined two groups previously designated under separate names, Kahane Chai and Kach. The sequence situates Albright's decisions within an ongoing executive process rather than presenting the first list as a one-time act: designation, renewal, removal, and consolidation recur under successive secretaries of state.

The statutory criteria further define the authority Albright exercised. An organization must be foreign, must engage in terrorist activity as defined by the Immigration and Nationality Act, and must pose a threat to the security of U.S. nationals or to U.S. national security, including defense, foreign relations, or economic interests. The designation system consequently joins a classification of conduct to a judgment about security, with the secretary of state responsible for initial designation and for demonstrating continued eligibility at renewal. The book's account documents that mechanism and Albright's role in it; it does not claim that the listing process itself resolves the broader political disputes over how terrorism is defined or state violence judged.

Read together, the two strands of Albright's appearance carry a deliberate contrast. In the Iraq sanctions passage, the emphasis falls on an official's acceptance of a grave civilian toll as a policy cost. In the designation history, the emphasis falls on an executive system that formalizes judgments about foreign organizations and subjects them to periodic review. The book offers no personal biography or account of Albright's private motives; its portrait is institutional and argumentative. She appears through consequential public acts and statements, which allow the text to examine both how U.S. policy represents its costs and how the state gives legal form to its security classifications.