Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has yet another Bush-bashing and self-serving column out in today's New York Times. She blames the Iraq War for the  junta in Myanmar's refusal to allow emergency relief supplies to reach its people. Albright claims that the Iraq War has had such repercussions that the concept of national sovereignty is now being used as a bar to shield nations led by dictators from outside intervention.

She fails to recognize that Burma for many years-including during the Clinton years-had sealed itself off from the rest of the world. She also fails to see that throughout history nations have shielded themselves from outside intervention-despite occasional natural (or man-made) disasters. How about Albania during the decades after World War Two? How about the nations behind the Iron Curtain? How about China under Mao? How about North Korea (which has made itself into a modern Hermit Kingdom) whose people suffered from mass starvation while she celebrated the rule of its malevolent Kim Jon II? She was unable to pierce that border.  

Sometimes nations just want to be "left alone" by the rest of the world and sometimes there is just very little the world can do to penetrate these borders.   How about the claims that she trumpets? Intervention in Haiti to force the island nation to accept Jean-Bertrand Aristide as its leader. He certainly didn't work out very well. Apparently she was embarrassed to mention his name. In the column she merely uses this innocuous sounding claim:  "the Clinton administration returned an elected leader to power in Haiti".

She ignored the Clinton's Administration (and her own) failure to intervene in Rwanda; she ignored the failures during the Clinton years in Somalia - a disaster that resulted in grievous harm not only to American and UN peacekeeping forces but to the Somalis themselves through the ineptitude and failures in leadership of the Administration she served.

How about the Clinton Administration's failure to monitor the Oil-For-Food program where fraud and dishonesty played a role in harming Iraqi civilians?  

All flushed down the memory hole. 

As improper as it is for former Presidents (think Jimmy Carter) to besmirch their successors, it is also undiplomatic at best for former Secretary of States to feel free to dishonestly burnish their own records while disparaging the record of current Administration's foreign policy approaches.