A comment on the Madeleine Albright statement of regret because it’s not what it seems. MEMO writers have a knack for misconstruing what people say because they are experts at disinformation and they believe that anything is allowed when it supports your cause. Stephen Colbert labelled this “truthiness”.
In one of her autobiographies, “Madame Secretary” she reviews the incident and explains that she was “sandbagged” by Leslie Stahl who asked the original question as the figure of 500,000 child deaths was entirely bogus, Rather the figure was based on a number of projected births in Iraq had there been no war vs actual births. And much of the problem was Saddam Hussein and the Oil for Food program. Apparently no one in the UN was smart enough to figure out that Saddam would subvert the program by funneling most of the benefits to his clan in Tikrit, to the detriment of the rest of the country.
In other words, if a Yazidi woman died of hunger while Saddam’s relatives feasted, the 5 children she might have had but didn’t were supposedly killed by the Americans.