Samantha Power is the architect of Obama’s Libyan “war” policy. Which is at odds with her previous views considering she is a huge fan of Noam Chomsky, who talks incessantly about America’s hegemonic attitude towards the world. In a review of one of Chomsky’s books, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project), where she states that,
With the United States increasingly suspect around the world — a recent Gallup poll found that 55 percent of citizens in Britain thought the United States ”posed a threat to peace,” while a June BBC survey found that 60 percent of Indonesians, 71 percent of Jordanians and even 25 percent of Canadians viewed the United States as a greater threat than Al Qaeda…. ‘Hegemony or Survival” is a raging and often meandering assault on United States foreign policy and the elites who shape it. Drawing upon case after historical case of violent meddling (Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Kosovo, etc.), Chomsky argues that the Bush administration’s war on terrorism builds upon a long tradition of foreign interventions carried out in the name of ”liberation” or ”counterterror,” of special interests run amok and of disdain for international institutions that dare to challenge American hegemony.
It is interesting that Chomsky and other leftists (like Samantha) do not want the U.S. to be involved in world affairs for natyional security reasons like terror or energy, rather — as Stanley Kurtz explains — these leftists expect to dabble in world affairs for the following reason:
Superficially, Power’s chief concern is to put a stop to genocide and “crimes against humanity.” More deeply, her goal is to use our shared horror at the worst that human beings can do in order to institute an ever-broadening regime of redistributive transnational governance.
What a sentence! “Fundamentally, our Libyan operation is a humanitarian action, with no clear or inevitable military-strategic purpose beyond that.” Powers is known by the Belt-Way writers to be the architect:
Liberal foreign-policy expert Steve Clemons actually calls Power “the primary architect” of our Libyan intervention. The New York Times has gone so far as to characterize our humanitarian action as “something of a personal triumph” for Power.
How can these elitists say one thing and then change their tune in just a couple of years. It seems that the major difference between Republicans and Democrats in their foreign policy is that Republicans act militarily and as a leader in regards to national security (Constitutional). Democrats seem to act only with humanitarian offenses happen while giving away command and control to other nations and bodies (not Constitutional). In regards to this humanitarian intervention, she says that we must “must forswear up front . . . commercial or strategic interests in the region.” While we do not get much oil from Libya, our coalition does, which leads Kurtz to point out that:
Arguments that Power developed to support past interventions are proving a poor fit for our Libyan operation. She dismissed claims that the Rwandan genocide was merely a case of “civil war” or “tribal violence.” Now her critics argue that Libya is not a Rwanda-style genocide, and that Power’s eagerness for a humanitarian showcase has led us to intervene in what really is a tribal civil war.
And what of her stringent conditions? In practice, she seems to have stretched her own standards of “large-scale crimes against humanity” to produce a specimen case, in an effort to entrench her favored doctrines in international law. Who knows if more people will now be casualties in the extended civil war enabled by our intervention than would have been killed in Benghazi last month? Power worried just after 9/11 that an America soon to be militarily overstretched might give up on humanitarian interventions. Now she has helped to entangle us in an expensive and open-ended adventure at a time when we truly are at our limits — and at a time when dangers continue to spread in countries far more strategically significant than Libya.
And why should we be scared to death of Powers?
A long conversation with Power in 2003 convinced 1960s revolutionary Tom Hayden that she was a fellow-traveler of sorts, even if Power was not as systematically suspicious of American military force as a true Sixties-vintage radical would be. In Hayden’s assessment, Power’s originality was “to see war as an instrument to achieving her liberal, even radical, values.” Hayden was right. The important thing about Power is not that she favors humanitarian intervention, but that she seeks to use such military actions to transform America by undoing its sovereignty and immobilizing it, Gulliver-style, in an unfriendly international system.
Power’s aforementioned second book, Chasing the Flame, celebrates the life of a United Nations diplomat, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who died in a terrorist attack in Iraq in 2003. Vieira de Mello was a Sixties radical of international scope. Hailing from Brazil, he became a committed Marxist while studying at the Sorbonne. He was among the violent protesters arrested during the student uprising in Paris in 1968. His first published work was a defense of his actions.
Vieira de Mello went from student radicalism straight to a job with the U.N. in 1969, and brought his intense anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism with him. Later he became a bitter critic of Israel. A United Nations “patriot,” he carried around a well-worn copy of the U.N. Charter the way an American senator or Supreme Court justice might take a copy of the U.S. Constitution wherever he went. Vieira de Mello’s colleagues used to say that his blood ran U.N. blue. As the U.N.’s most charismatic and effective diplomat (said to be “a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy”), Vieira de Mello is the hero around whom Power attempts to build a following for her ideals of global governance.
Power explains that Vieira de Mello never really surrendered his Sixties ideals, even as he transformed himself from a passionate ideologue into a “ruthless pragmatist.” The young America-hating Vieira de Mello grew into a mature diplomat who could charm Pres. George W. Bush, even while lecturing the commander-in-chief on the follies of Guantanamo Bay. In other words, Vieira de Mello learned to manage his public persona, appealing to American leaders with arguments (allegedly) based on American national interest.
This is clearly Power’s ideal for herself. In fact, she tells us in her acknowledgments that the point of the book is also “the point of my career.” Power even cites the uncanny resemblance between Vieira de Mello and Obama. Of course, Obama’s Alinskyite training stressed the need for community organizers to advance their quietly held leftist ideological goals through “pragmatic” appeals to the public’s “self-interest.” (For more on that, see my study of Obama.)
I highly recommend Kurtz’s article, it is a must read! Andf if any of this concerns you, remember, she was hired by our Commander n’ Chief.
