This statement smelled fishy to me as there are only 40M or so people in Iraq to begin with, so I Googled around a bit.

Despite politicians and talking heads claiming for years that either Desert Storm, UN sanctions, or both caused half a million child deaths, evidently most studies found that the child mortality rate in Iraq was unchanged throughout the 1990s.

https://psmag.com/news/the-iraq-sanctions-myth-56433

https://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/Iraqi-death-toll-doe...

While this apparently fake statistic has mostly been used to criticize the US and UN, it seems Tony Blair used it to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, claiming the dead kids were Saddam's fault.

I guess this is why I don't read the papers much anymore.

Whether or not there really were so many dead children or not does not change anything in Albright's statement. If it serves the goals of the USA, they are willing to let 500.000 children die.

OK. But if you believed that lie, how many other lies do you believe?

Which lie? I refer only to her statement, which illustrates her character and that of the USA. The correct answer from her would have been, "it's not 500,000, but every dead child is one too many". They didn't care about 500.000 dead Iraqi children, period. If the children really died, is important to the children and their families not for the characterization.