Worth It

“We have heard that a half a million children have died. I mean… that’s more children than died when, when uh,-in Hiroshima. And, and… you know. Is the price worth it?”

“I think this is a very hard choice. But the price, we think the price is worth it. It is a moral question but the moral question is even a larger one-don’t we owe to the American people and to the American military and to the other countries in the region that this man not be a threat.”

Interview by Leslie Stahl of former Secretary of State Madelaine Albright on 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996.

The former secretary of state was answering a question based on the claim that the US sanctions and wars against Iraq had resulted in the deaths of half a million Iraqi children. She has since claimed that she was bated and taken out of context. And others have claimed that the records do not show a sizable increase in child deaths during that tragic time.

But the cavalier attitude is not disputed. 500,000 may not be accurate, strictly speaking. Not a number in an accountant’s ledger. Nor is it supposed to be. It is a symbolic number. Like the millions who died in WWII death camps, the number is mythological. Six million Jews, three million Gypsies, homosexuals, communists, the mentally and physically handicapped and several other groups targeted by the Nazis in WWII, one million starved to death in Leningrad, over half a million men, women, and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Three million Armenians in WWI, half a million Iraqi children in the Gulf war. Well, one of them, anyway. Cambodia, Palestine, Yemen, in every age and on every continent save Antarctica… The list goes on, refusing to be tabulated.

These numbers all come from the dream time of human misery. They are meant to convey a truth beyond counting. These numbers impress upon us the magnitude of the atrocity, not an actuarial tabulation. We are not counting machines, we are sensing souls.

Beyond a certain limit the human mind cannot comprehend a number so vast. It defies comprehension and becomes meaningless, so we digest the truth in symbolic terms. In visceral terms. In terms that do not pique the intellect but prick the skin. It becomes a vast amount. A huge amount. An atrocious amount. Even then we do not comprehend. We need a way to absorb such numbers and fathom the unfathomable.

Someday a monument may stand in Baghdad. May I humbly suggest a design? Two children, a boy and a girl, one wearing a hijab and an embroidered thobe and one a keffiyeh and a dishdasha. They kneel in the dust and play with dolls similarly dressed, unaware of their surroundings. Just two children at play. Above looms a cloud that leans over them, a dark, sprouting mushroom of black iron and marble, bristling with lightning bolts and gun barrels, cluster bombs, horrid drones, and desert storms.

On it are inscribed names in different styles and fonts, haphazard and crayon like, without order. Much like a child’s life. They are the names of five hundred thousand children who were consumed by that whirlwind. Five hundred thousand children whose worth was not allowed to grow.

“It’s a moral question,” she said. 

What will it profit a man, or a Secretary of State, if she gain the whole world and lose her soul? 

I wonder if Madam Albright’s fate in hell will be to face the souls of those Iraqi children one at a time, over and over again, and answer each one’s moral question:

“Worth what?”