Welcome Back, Power (and with Her, Human Rights)

Thanks for that news Al, it's a wonderful way to end the week and here's hoping it pans out.

I've been wondering if Obama would find a position for her somewhere and I'm glad he has.

I was just celebrating this fact with Constance here, making her listen as I rattled off just how impressive I thought she is. I'm SO glad that they have found a substantial role for her (although I had less concern that she'd be left out after she married Cass Susstein this summer; talk about an Obama power couple!). Anyway, my colleagues who study genocide also speak highly of her work within their domain too as being highly original and groundbreaking. I've always loved her recounting of that conversation she had with Obama that went 4 hours and resulted in her being willing to drop everything and go answer phones for him. Speaks volumes of both of their characters to me.

As you say, it's just so great to have someone unequivocally dedicated to human rights with such a potentially prominent spot.

I'm halfway thru her book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello . . .; it's a fascinating read.  It seems that Sergio and Mr. President had/have alot in common about their personalities.

Thanks for getting this great news out!

Here.

I heard her speak (soon after the "monster" comment) in Chicago to an audience of high school students and adults. A panel of teachers posed questions to her. She was apologetic and is one magnanimous human being besides her brilliance and laser focus on changing the U.S. role in the world.

Wonderful!  I am grateful that Prez. Obama brought Ms. Power into the Administration.  Samantha is someone I trust and tells the truth. 

Thanks for the flash, Al. 

An alternative perspective...just to add to the debate. Thanks!

Richard Holbrooke, Samantha Power, and the 'Worthy-Genocide' Establishment" (Kafka Era Studies Number 5), ZNet, March 24, 2007 By Edward Herman

...The cruise missile left also adheres closely to the party line on genocide, which is why its members thrive in the New York Times and other establishment vehicles. This is true of Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff and David Rieff, but I will focus here on  Samantha Power, whose large volume on genocide, "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide won a Pulitzer prize, and who is currently the expert of choice on the subject in the mainstream media (and even in The Nation and on the Bill Moyers show)...

Cyril - I excerpted your quote from Hermann because it's copyright protected and folks can read the whole thing through the link.

Ed Hermann, it seems to me, is very typical of the tired academic left in the US. He even wrote a column objecting to Howard Zinn's statement that "Samantha Power has done extraordinary work in chronicling the genocides of our time, and in exposing how the Western powers were complicit by their inaction."

I think a lot of his rant seems based on envy (i.e. the crack about her going on the Bill Moyers show: what would be the point of that unless Hermann is thinking, like many academics do, that it should be him invited to such a forum instead?)

Hi Al,

First, the hyperlink doesn't work...sorry, not sure why. Here is the link:

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/8538 (you just have to scroll down to the part in the article dealing directly with Power)

As for the Bill Moyers "crack", it wasn't about her being on Bill Moyers, or featured in The Nation (which he mentioned), rather it was directed at these two progressive media outlets for falling for what he deems is an establishment voice and narrative. I do think that he raises a lot of valid points which should be considered...

Also, I am not trying to be argumentative, just wanted to add to the conversation.

Thanks!

I knew she would be back! It's a big testament to our President's commitment to fight genocide and tackle human rights abuses worldwide. Wonderful, wonderful news.   

The secret dinner with Obama you haven't heard about.

Among those who attended the off-the-record dinner: Iran scholar Haleh Esfandiari; Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid (who had flown in from Lahore); Obama friend and foreign-policy advisor Samantha Power of Harvard University (who accompanied PEOTUS to the meeting); incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel; and a few others. Obama told the group, none of whom reached would discuss the details, that he already felt in the bubble and was trying his best to meet with independent experts.

Shortly before Dr. Power was elevated to a regular faculty gig at the KSG, she proved her mainstream credentials with a hatchetjob review of Chomsky's <em>Hegemony or Survival</em> including little gems like this:

"And since he considers the United States the leading terrorist state, little distinguishes American air strikes in Serbia undertaken at night with high-precision weaponry from World Trade Center attacks timed to maximize the number of office workers who have just sat down with their morning coffee."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/04/books/review/04POWERT.html

The recent collective punishment of Gaza, as well as the shock and awe which destroyed Iraq, were also "undertaken at night with high precision weaponry", so I wonder how Dr. Power feels about those humanitarian interventions, or about the other such campaigns which will show up in her in-tray, now that she's well and truly on the inside.

I think the above-dissed Ed Hermann, like Noam Chomsky, is quite right to question the paradigm of humanitarian invasion on the grounds that it rests on a notoriously instrumental distinction between official bad guys (Milosevic, post-Reagan era Saddam) and unofficial ones (who are useful to U.S. geopolitical strategy, humanitarianism be damned). The queen of this distinction among official political scientists was the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who glorified Pinochet while recycling the Huntington Doctrine that "our" authoritarians are cool.

I just can't get too enthusiastic about any professor of political science who, instead of using reason to address this issue --which has been THE CORE of U.S. foreign policy, especially after the Cold War put unilateralism back in play -- prefers taking the grandstand of a NYT book review to bury it in emotive b.s., as in the quoted excerpt of the hatchet job review. (Read the whole thing, if you have a strong stomach for propaganda.)

Dr. Power was not the only liberal whose inner foreign policy hawk came out after 9/11, but Obama didn't fall for it, so I think he deserves better advice than he's gonna get from her.

I hope someone has the presence of mind to play The Monster Mash the first time Clinton and Powers meet up.

I wouldn't want to stand by everything Ed Herman writes by any means, but I noticed that Al only responded by attacking him and not his arguments.

The problem I have with Samantha Power is that her genocide book was actually quite timid in its approach.  She mostly criticizes the US for its sins of omission in not intervening when it should have, rather than focusing on cases where we were completely and totally in the corner of dictators who actually committed genocide themselves. There is no chapter on East Timor, for instance, just a few lines, and no chapter on Guatemala, and it's inconceivable that any truly honest attempt at writing a history of US foreign policy and genocide would not have hundreds of pages on those two cases.  But  this tactfulness is exactly why she is honored so much in the mainstream.  I don't own the book, so I can't cite it, but in the introduction she summarizes her findings by saying (and this is almost a quote) that American statesmen tend to be too innocent and naive and well-intentioned to understand the amount of evil in the world.   Uh, yeah, that would certainly explain why we trained torturers and murderers and carpet bombed Cambodia and supported Indonesia's invasion of East Timor...

Speaking of which, she is friends with Richard Holbrooke, the man who was in charge of policy for that part of the world during the Carter Administration, when we continued to arm Indonesia as they were slaughtering the Timorese.  I think she chose which topics she wouldn't cover in depth in her book very carefully.

So bash Herman all you want--his faults, real or imagined, are irrelevant.   I agree that Power is probably about as good as it gets in the foreign policy mainstream when it comes to human rights, but in her own way she's a political operator.  I suppose you could argue (and this is probably how she argues inside the privacy of her own conscience) that she couldn't rise to any position of power and do any good if she weren't willing to make compromises the way politicians do.  That's the charitable view.  

But she's still an imperialist.

Here is Chomsky's response to Power's hatchet-job on him:

http://www.zmag.org/blog/view/1012

I don't think, incidentally, that it would be fair to criticize Power for her extraordinary services to state violence and terror.  I am sure she is a decent and honorable person, and sincerely believes that she really is condemning the US leadership and political culture.  From a desk at the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Kennedy School at Harvard, that's doubtless how it looks.  Insufficient attention has been paid to Orwell's observations on how in free England, unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force.  One factor, he proposed, is a good education.  When you have been through the best schools, finally Oxford and Cambridge, you simply have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things "it wouldn't do to say" -- and we may add, even to think.

Power on how she wants President Obama to "patrol the commons" http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16640

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/16946

Power, a strong supporter of the 1999 US bombing of Serbia, referred to Chavez's domestic policies as "very problematic" in a recent interview, and implied that Obama would be looking for a change in Venezuelan policies.

"If...Chavez continues to deviate from what Obama thinks are international norms that should be adhered to domestically, then that's a problem," said Power. [8]

Power went on to say that the Obama administration would focus on "what Chavez does badly from the standpoint of the Venezuelan people."  This begs the obvious question: isn't it the job of the Venezuelan people to decide that?

Debate between Power and the outstanding journalist Jeremy Scahill http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/22/samantha_power_v_jeremy_scahill_a

I think that Chomsky lost most moral authority and legitimacy as a political commentor decades ago when he provided the Khmer Rouge with ideological cover while it committed some of the most henious crimes since the holocaust.

Although he's a sacred cow to the tired academic left, any commentator on the history of genocide should criticize Chomsky- he's shown that as long as the bullets are wrapped in shallow proclamations of anti-imperialism, he'll defend any criminal.

The casual epithet "imperialist" leveled at Power sounds a remarkably sad and hollow note given the work Power has done to move the word "genocide" beyond its Clinton/Bush era association with school trips to the US Holocaust Museum just off the Mall. [Clinton's intonation of "Never Again" at the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in they year before Rwanda speaks to the real need for Obama's seriousness matched with Power's passion in the White House.] The "imperialist" charge from behind the cloak of anonymity is rather facile as it implies an unstated binary term that obviously applies to the writer. (I suggest "righteous.") Of course, what makes her an imperialist is her proximity to power, namely Obama. Ironically, this was an issue many of us seriously thought through and discussed actively on this site as we began to work in our discrete communities for the election of President Obama: what does it mean to put aside for a season the cynicism of academic posturing, as comfortable as such righteous and theoretical if not downright ideological self-fashioning is? Power fails the keyboard-revolutionary's litmus test. So, be it. 

But, it might be helpful to recall where her book "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide comes from: Power was a journalist covering the war in Bosnia (from inside Bosnia for over two years beginning in 1993). She comes to her subject not from the theorist's perspective, valuable as that is, but from the journalist's.  Like Chris Hedges or Philip Gourevitch, Power bore literal witness to atrocity. And for those who have literally seen atrocity or its residue in a recently traumatized society (I am speaking here from my own encounters with the Mayan highlands of Guatemala a few years after its civil war supposedly ended), the notion of using American resources to prevent or stop genocide is compelling despite the necessary though equally dangerously self-indulgent academic wrangling about state inviolability. 

The criticism of her book as focused on America's sins of omission instead of commission is certainly appropriate, though the book that focused on both might be the above poster's (Donald Johnson). Power concludes her introduction saying: "this country's consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide offers sad testimony not to a broken American political system but to one that is ruthlessly effective. The system, as it stands now, is working. No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence.  It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on" (xxi). The prospect that the current U.S. president might take this statement seriously--given America's sins of both omission and commission--is extraordinary. 

While I would like to see Power's book address both East Timor and Guatemala--a genuinely lamentable omission--what she says about East Timor and the context of the genocide there is illuminating. Power says that "in 1975, when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the United States looked away" (146-7). This indifference is read as a hypocritical American choice to "selectively" apply (or not) the principle of "deterring cross-boarder aggression" (146). She describes such "rational, interest-based calculations" as leading the Carter Administration to side with the Khmer Rouge, who had been ousted forcibly after the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and thereby stopped the Khmer Rouge's genocide of over 2 million Cambodians. Thus, "in choosing between a genocidal state [Cambodia] and a country hostile to the United States [Vietnam], the Carter administration chose what it thought to be the lesser evil, though there could hardly have been a greater one" (147). Call it naive, but what Power is arguing for in this book is not the casual deployment of the U.S. military but the recognition of a moral and political limit drawn at the crime of genocide--and this in the face of the fact that virtually no signatory to the UN Convention Against Genocide has ever taken its own signature seriously. That American force--political, cultural, economic, and military--might be marshaled under the Obama administration in the prevention or cessation of genocide would be no small accomplishment. If Power's work and now voice in the President's ear assists in reminding the "establishment" of its moral and legal responsibilities in an extremely violent world, such an "imperialist" may prove to be a better "comrade" than any righteous theorist.

The last poster just told a lie. Chomsky never defended the Khmer Rouge. 

Brenda - The United States is guilty of genoicide in Puerto Rico, Guam, and the entire country. I await the marshaling of US power to liberate the said people. Clean up your own damn backyard first then you can talk about stopping genocide in other places. The world rightfully does not trust this country nor should it ever given its and past and current ongoing genocides. I'll gladly argue definitions of which I will include cultural genocide as seperate category just to make things easier.

Brendan Corcoran--

The point I was making about Samantha Power is this--if she had wanted to write a truly honest book about US foreign policy and genocide she would not have left out East Timor and Guatemala.  The few sentences she does write about East Timor are in themselves dishonest--we didn't just look away from what was happening, we actively sided with Indonesia and this policy continued from Ford through Clinton until 1999.  And given that Richard Holbrooke was running that policy during its most brutal years, I think I know one reason why she is so vague.  Holbrooke is her friend and he comes out quite well in the book.  If she had been thorough in her coverage and meticulously honest, she wouldn't have a single friend left in the foreign policy establishment--she'd be one of those "righteous theorists", I suppose.  She chose to "look away" from the details of our East Timorese policy and from Guatemala, and so she retained her political viability.  

On balance I am glad Power is in this Administration and there may be extreme circumstances (Rwanda, for one) where US military intervention is the lesser of two evils, but there are still problems here.  For one thing, most of our interventions overseas are already justified (at least in part) in humanitarian terms.  Is she going to stand up for principle and threaten to resign if Obama's policies are unfair (to Palestinians, for example) or brutal or will she do what she did in her genocide book and look away when it is convenient?  

I am really surprised by this endorsement of Samantha Power especially with her repeatedly proven track record in supporting the doctrine of "humanitarian intervention" and conveniently glossing over the war crimes and overwhelming evidence of genocide by the U.S. and their ilk...Just look at Wikipedia... "This work and related writings have been criticized by the historian Howard Zinn for downplaying the importance of "unintended" and "collateral" civilian deaths that could be classified as genocidal^[1]; and by Edward S. Herman for systematically ignoring genocidal projects sponsored by the United States in Guatemala, in East Timor, and Southeast Asia."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Power

Below is a link to Amazon's search function for the word "Holbrooke" in her genocide book.  He appears quite often, but not in connection with anything he ever said or did about East Timor.  I have a different link for that.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0060541644/ref=sib_dp_ptu#

A link to Stephen Zunes's post about Holbrooke.  Again, the point is that Power, who is friends with Holbrooke, could have justly shown him to be one of the architects of US support for mass murder in East Timor and a rather dubious and inconsistent friend of human rights, but she does not.   For that matter, if I recall correctly, Ray Bonner paints an unflattering portrait of Holbrooke and human rights in his book about Marcos "Waltzing with a Dictator".   Zunes is an academic and I suppose a "righteous theorist"--Bonner was an honest NYT reporter during the war in El Salvador.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/30-3

Donald Johnson - I understand all your points but they don't make me any less pleased that Power will be in the White House. I think the "academic left" in the US - which, I'm sorry, is so very different and more upper class than the "organizing left" that I grew up in - uses McCarthyist tactics of guilt-by-association (i.e. Power is friendly with Holbrooke, therefore Power = bad), sanctifies its heroes too much (i.e. anybody that criticizes St. Noam = bad), and gets pretty absurd a lot (i.e. "she didn't devote chapters to two things, so she's bad because of what she didn't write!")

I think most of those voices come out of the 1960s left and the politically correct and factional tendencies it sprouted in the 70s, when another generation of us came up and devoted ourselves to grassroots organizing (in my case, with the anti nuclear movement). And we've long found a lot of these kinds of critiques tiresome and reflective of a kind of do-nothing-ism (or an errant belief that writing academic essays is by itself enough to classify one as "of the Left").

My generation and I don't generally find Z Magazine all that interesting: it's style is more opaque, as if in a bubble of people trained in the same hegelian dialectics all preaching at each other while trying to tear down anybody that does anything. We, the organizers, never were supported by that crowd (with very few exceptions, Abbie Hoffman in his older ages being one of them, Andrew Kopkind being another).

I personally think Chomsky over-shoots a lot and don't find his writing style compelling. I don't mind if others do, but he is not a Gospel writer setting fundamentalist political "line" for me or most of the organizers I work with in the way he seems to be for a large tendency in the academic left.

My view is, frankly, that if someone isn't out there organizing everyday people, he can't possibly know anything about politics or change. (Which is why, living and working in Boston for years, I found Howard Zinn's commentary much more compelling than Chomsky's or Z Magazine's because Zinn, bless him, was out there with the tenants' groups and anti-development battles and on the labor picket lines whereas Chomsky was merely issuing communiques from his tower somewhere.)

As for Power, the White House foreign policy without her would be much worse than it will be with her. If you can't see that, look harder.

Brendan--

I hope you're right and you certainly have much more real world experience than I have.  But I'm not defending the honor of Chomsky or Herman--I echo them when I think they're right on a given issue.   But I'm making a distinction here which you don't seem to catch, because you're too busy establishing the superiority of your style of leftism and your generation to the theoretical purist ravings of Z magazine contributors.

Here's the distinction---Samantha Power as a bureaucrat working in the hallways of power (no pun intended) is probably, on balance, a good thing.  I've said that twice already, and this makes it three times, and you don't catch it because you have me pegged in some category and it's easier to argue with strawpeople.   I don't think we should turn cartwheels, because she is sometimes economical with the truth.  But she's almost certain to be better than anyone else who would rise that high in foreign policymaking circles.  So one and a half cheers for Samantha Power.

But Samantha Power as a writer and someone who speaks the truth about human rights is, to be blunt, a hypocrite, for the reasons I've gone through above.  You are mostly using your real world experience as a way to club me down,  Fine.  But when someone writes a book that professes to be an account of US foreign policy and genocide, I want to read someone who doesn't leave out crucial examples for careerist reasons.  Samantha Power is  the "genocide chic" precisely because she knows how far she can go.

But it's all the same person, so maybe one can be glad she's in the Obama administration and still not trust her.

BTW, though I read Chomsky online from time to time, it's been years since I've read any of his books.  There are plenty of bloggers, some with firsthand journalistic experience (like Allan Nairn) and online human rights organizations that I can read.  Chomsky was extremely valuable in the pre-Internet era, in part because of all his footnotes.  He opened up a world of information excluded by most of the MSM.  But one doesn't need him for that anymore.  The same for Z magazine.  I can read HRW reports and Amnesty International and B'Tselem and Etan and the foreign press (or the English language portions anyway) online, not to mention various bloggers, some of them very smart and with real world experience.

Oh, sorry, I got Al Giordano mixed up with Brendan Corcoran.

Most of what I just sent off I'd still write, but there's probably a line or two that shows that confusion.

Sorry if this is too many comments, but I will admit I'm not at all sure you're wrong.  Maybe Obama will turn out to be great in the human rights area and Samantha Power will play an important role in making this happen.  But until that happens (and even after) I think people should be aware of the kinds of things that Herman and Zunes and Chomsky and Nairn (and even me) point out.

First of all, Donald Johnson, your book review criticism of Power's book on genocide and American political and social failure in responding to genocide is appropriate, and my comment affirmed that, if you read what I actually said. Indeed, if you have a bibliography of books on American policy and genocide that are more captious, in the sense of covering ALL the relevant episodes of this crime of crimes (I'd also like to see 20c Australian policy towards its indigenous population covered), I'd be most grateful. However, for all of Power's book's flaws, it succeeded where other books have clearly failed--it got something done in the sense of assisting in the movement of the word genocide out of the reified pattern of Holocaust remembrance and into a broader popular recognition of the failure of ALL signatories to the Convention Against Genocide, most notably the US, to do anything to address genocide. If you agree that no administration has ever taken genocide seriously, then the fact that this administration suggests that it will consider the limit situation of genocide is valuable. I might also add that the other key component to Power's critique of US policy is the failure of the US public to take genocide seriously, again, despite the inscription of the Holocaust into American HS and college curricula. Blame for this catastrophic communication failure needs to appropriately shared by critics of American power on the so-called left as well as manipulators of American power on the so-called right.  

Finally, I find it fascinating that talk of genocide prevention elicits such ire from good liberals. It seems that such anger risks the production of a dangerous, surely unwanted, and simplistic caricature of such partisans: better the systematic annihilation of a group or people than the use of moral, political, cultural, economic, or even military power to prevent another state or entity from obliterating thousands or even millions of actual persons. Debates about "humanitarian intervention" are, of course, valuable, but the foreclosure of the possibility of any actual response to genocide bespeaks a remarkably "callous complaisance," as Siegfried Sassoon puts it. 

with Power.  She is very selective in what genocides are worthy of attention.... and US run genocides get ignored.

Brendan--

No bibliography off the top of my head.  I've got one book--"The History and Sociology of Genocide", which is pretty good and doesn't seem to have any nefarious axes to grind, but it's not about America's connection in particular.  And there are various books by various authors on this or that US policy (Chomsky included), but nothing outside of Power that is specifically about the US and genocide, to my knowledge.

The leftist allergy to talk of US military intervention as genocide prevention is a reaction to all the cynical use of humanitarian motives to justify US intervention.   That's what people can learn from the Chomskyites.  But even Noam, I think, admitted that Britain's intervention in Sierra Leone might have done some good, though I don't have a reference.   So yes, people can go too far in the anti-intervention direction.  I once had an unpleasant argument at a lefty blog where I generally hang out because I said that US intervention in extreme cases like Rwanda would have been justifiable, if all other options failed.  But I understand where the opposition comes from--it comes from Vietnam and Iraq, among other places, where we were supposedly doing good and in the case of Iraq, I think the rightwingers and possibly the liberal interventionists who supported going into Iraq have now convinced themselves that the glorious surge has made it all worthwhile.  So when Samantha Power comes out with a book arguing that we need to intervene in more places and that our big sin has been our lack of willingness to intervene, lefties start worrying, with good reason, that this is like offering an alcoholic a morally justifiable reason for swigging down another bottle.   I don't trust a government with people like Richard Holbrooke  in it, and that's because of the things Holbrooke has done--this ain't theory.  And guilt by association or not, there's Samantha Power portraying him as a good guy, when his real record is a bit more complex.

But I've made this point a few times now and we'll all get to see how Obama actually does.  Hopefully you and Al will be more right than wrong.  I gotta take time out from saving the world by arguing on the internet and wash the kitchen floor.

Many differing opinions have been aired on this thread. Obviously, I don't agree with all of them. But they've been well stated and, I think, constructive to the conversation

A few comments didn't get approved, and one "anonymous" whose comment didn't make the audition claimed to me he or she had been "censored." That's childish, because as other comments here demonstrate, one doesn't have to nod in agreement to comment here. All anonymous comments do have to meet the standards set forth in words that are disclosed above the comment box. I'll paste them in here, again:

Our Policy on Comment Submissions: Co-publishers of Narco News (which includes The Narcosphere and The Field) may post comments without moderation. All co-publishers comment under their real name, have contributed resources or volunteer labor to this project, have filled out this application and agreed to some simple guidelines about commenting.

Narco News has recently opened its comments section for submissions to moderated comments (that’s this box, here) by everybody else. More than 95 percent of all submitted comments are typically approved, because they are on-topic, coherent, don’t spread false claims or rumors, don’t gratuitously insult other commenters, and don’t engage in commerce, spam or otherwise hijack the thread. Narco News reserves the right to reject any comment for any reason, so, especially if you choose to comment anonymously, the burden is on you to make your comment interesting and relevant. That said, as you can see, hundreds of comments are approved each week here. Good luck in your comment submission!

So, if your comment didn't get approved, it has nothing to do with your opinion stated or whether I agreed with it, but, rather, that obviously you stated it in ways that didn't fit our policy (even though you were clearly explained the policy in advance). That's your problem, not ours, if you can't or won't abide by the instructions.

To the those whose comments were in the 90-plus percent that did make the cut, thank you, and welcome.

To that (or those, not clear if it's more than one) person whose comments did not make the cut, I suggest you start your own website and do the heavy lifting of bringing the public there, rather than trying to coast on the work of years of labor of others.

As the policy states: Copublishers comment without moderation. All other comments are submissions. Think of them as auditions. And congrats to all that regularly make the cut!

- Al

I'll take a look at the book you recommend.  Your concerns about Holbrooke are salient and I share them, though this starts to also get into the earlier discussions around here about the degree to which Obama's people or Clinton's people would be running the foreign policy establishment. It appears to me that Obama has finessed this in very interesting ways, using what the Clinton people like Holbrooke have to offer and backstopping or monitoring situations with his own people.  My final thought about Power is that her relative youth also adds benefits and risks, just as her origin in journalism and law is a different career path than that taken by many in the foreign policy arena. Her perspectives are not determined by Vietnam and this is good.  You are very right that the effect of Iraq on US foreign policy in the Obama Administration is pending and will be interesting to monitor.  But the fact is that despite the bloated size and power of the US military, Cold War interpretations of its ultimate global power (reach is something else, of course) may be overstated. That is not to say it can't do extraordinary damage, of course. Thus, the multi-lateral aspect of Power's position appears to be both forward-looking and realistic if not disconcertingly honest in terms of the need to engage the world differently--politically, culturally, economically, and militarily.  The proof will be in the pudding, but these discussions across the web or dinner table serve to keep us all, at a minimum, vigilant and focused. 

As I said, Power is better than most. I'm not upset at all about her appointment. Relatively speaking in the sick apparatus of US foreign policy, it's probably a good thing. She has said some good things on Israel/Palestine. However, her rhetoric against Venezuela and desire for the US president to "patrol the commons" is clearly imperialist, as was her support for the illegal bombing of Serbia. She wants the US to police the world in contravention of international law.

Let me also say, I do not accuse her of willfully covering up genocide. I tend to agree with Chomsky's take that she is a nice and decent person who is uninformed and naive. That's why she's dangerous - she doesn't seem to understand the full history and real nature of the power and force she advocates be deployed.

But great to see Power get a post. I was pretty concerned as it would be a very bad sign if Obama didn't put her in the administration.

My impression (I haven't read much of her stuff) is that Power might be a bit too interventionist for my taste.  But my hope is that Obama will balance liberal human right sorts (like Power) with realists (such as Gates and others from the sane - NOT neo-con -  part of the Republican foreign policy establishment) to create a US foreign policy that is morally responcible but also modest and realistic about what can be accomplished. 

Whatever her flaws, Power is likely to be miles better than most other foreign policy "experts" that might be considered.

Some of the academics arguing for ideal response to genocide ought to get out in the real world and meet the people who are perpetrating the genocide.

Shortly after the Kosovo conflict I spent a week in the same house with a large Serbian refugee family. There were children who no doubt were victims of the bombing campaign. There was also a medical doctor who worked in the government and a Dean of a University who spouted vile racist rubbish against the Kosovars, and right there in France openly advocated the ethnic cleansing the bombing addressed. Their point was that the bombing was un-necessary, they intended to stop after a little clean-up of Kosovar society. Eventually liberal glasses of vodka allowed a reasonable dialog other members of the family at dinners but these two never relented. I have no doubt that the hatred they displayed was only stopped by an intervention.

On the flip side while in China one guide started a racist tirade against Tibetans once too often and I couldn't hold my tongue. The liberal academics in the tour and the other guides cleared the room quickly, and even the guide I was responding to tried to run out. It was over without further incident but there was never another anti-Tibetan tirade at dinner. The point I am making here is more complicated. If I recall rightly when the attacks on Tibetaqns occurred last year one of the Democrats responded with a self-righteous condemnation of the Chinese. I could only imagine the smile on the Chinese president's face as he took his translator earpiece out and laid it on the table. In contrast Barack started to talk about some of China's African interests and the debate changed immediately.

The uni-dimensional academic mind can not concieve of multiple responses to unpleasant problems. For this reason I have never been a reader of the Chomsky et al critiques.

Powers is excellent and will be inside the Whitehouse...She is the one who has the hands on knowledge of the MiddleEast and can advise the President and edit the BS that will come out of Foggy Bottom...

She is a truth to power person and told the trruth about Ms. clinton!

Why do U.S. officials so rarely resign in protest over government policy? I hope for the best from every single person who goes into the Obama administration, like Samantha Power. But I am also interested in what it takes to get people to come OUT of an administration. The lure of access to power is a great temptation: as a child, I was always deeply moved by the New Testament story in Luke of the Devil offering Jesus power over all the nations of the world:

4:5 And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.

4:6 And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it.

4:7 If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.

4:8 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

Jesus was able to turn his back on this seductive offer. But very very few American officials have been able to give up power when faced with morally unacceptible policies, like the invasion of Iraq: it is far too easy to tell oneself that one should stay in place in the hopes of influencing policy in the future.