The Barack Obama campaign is about to pay a very high price for the inopportune words of one of its most distinguished foreign policy advisors. The dazzlingly brilliant journalist, Pulitzer-prize winning author, and Harvard professor, Samantha Power, has been forced to resign from the campaign after she recklessly told a reporter that Hillary Clinton is a "monster."
In the pungently hypocritical game of American politics, this is just something outside the rules. Whether it's true, or not, matters little. Nor does it matter that the object of Power's derision has just finished spending millions on TV ads implying that Obama would be responsible for the countless deaths of millions of American children sleeping at 3 a.m. Tut, tut. Nothing monstrous about that.
Power was rightfully awarded the Pulitzer for her finely written and downright horrifying book "A Problem From Hell" which, in macabre detail, describes the calculated indifference of the Clinton administration when 800,000 Rwandans were being systematically butchered. The red phone rang and rang and rang again. I don't know where Hillary was then. But her husband and his entire experienced foreign policy team - from the brass in the Pentagon to the congenitally feckless Secretary of State Warren Christopher - just let it ring.
And as more than one researcher has amply documented the case, the bloody paralysis of the Clinton administration in the face of the Rwandan genocide owed not at all to a lack of information, but rather to a lack of will. A reviewer of Power's book for The New York Times, perhaps summed it up best, saying that the picture of Clinton that emerges from this reading is that of an "amoral narcissist."
Former Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, who commanded the UN forces in Rwanda at the time of the genocide, tells us a similar story in his own memoir. General Dallaire recounts how, at the height of the Rwandan holocaust, he got a phone call from a Clinton administration staffer who wanted to know how many Rwandans had already died, how many were refugees and how many were internally displaced. Writes Dallaire: "He told me that his estimates indicated that it would take the deaths of 85,000 Rwandans to justify the risking of the life of one American soldier." Eventually, ten times that many would die. And our response? A handful of years later, at a photo-op stopover in Kigali airport, Bill Clinton bit his lip and said he was sorry.
Therein resides the richest and saddest irony of all. Samantha Power has actually lived the sort of life that Hillary Clinton's campaign staff has, for public consumption, invented for its candidate. Though not quite 40 years old, Power has spent no time on any Wal-Mart boards but has rather dedicated her entire adult life rather tirelessly to championing humanitarian causes. She has spoken up when others were silent. She took great personal risks during the Balkan wars to witness and record and denounce the carnage (She reported that Bill Clinton intervened against the Serbs only when he felt he was losing personal credibility as a result of his inaction. "I'm getting creamed," Power quoted the then-President saying as he fretted over global consternation over his own hesitation to act).
We gave Power the Pulitzer for exposing the, well, monstrous indifference of the Clinton administration as it stared unblinkingly and immobile into the face of massive horror. But we give her a kick in the backside and throw her out the door when she has the temerity to publicly restate all that in one impolite word. Monstrous, indeed.
Read more coverage and reaction to Samantha Power's resignation
Interestingly enough Senator Clinton wrote a blog on this very site, touting the founder of the Children's Defense Fund and acting like she is still part of that legacy, in her pitch to claim that child poverty is some kind of burning and genuine concern. The founder of the Children Defense Fund does not support HRC. Here's how Hillary Clinton betrayed the Children's Defense Fund for Political Gain:
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorblog/034
The best thing Clinton did was ignore Rwanda, they got the slaughter out of their system and so horrified by what had happened the Rwandan people united to rebuild the country through their own efforts. They have taken responsibility for themselves, they will never allow it to happen again.
Had the US sent troops, the war would be continuing to this day, millions would have died and there would be no hope for democracy or freedom. They would have ended up worse than Iraq!
Sacrificing soldiers lives to other peoples civil wars on the other side of the world in the name of humanitarianism, may give preening liberals a wonderful sense of moral superiority and a feeling of doing something good, in reality there is no difference between this and Bush with his great 'mission' to spread democracy and freedom. That only happens in the fanatasist's head!
Americans have the silly notion that it does not matter what you do so long as it looks good, makes you feel good about yourself and the intentions can be protrayed as good!
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, foreign intervention is usually disasterous. Especially if you are invading a country whom do not share language, culture, religion and ethnicity.
"...jump right in her face on the foreign policy front. She claims she was integrally involved in the release of Kosovo refugees and the Irish peace talks. Fine. So demand to know why if she was so involved in foreign policy, the Clinton administration failed in Rwanda and had a horrible plan on Somalia? There were clear international failures during the eight years of President Bill Clinton, and she needs to be forced to say what she did and didn't do. Obama has used the cherry picking argument, but has been weak in selling it. Nail it to try to nail her."
Obama needs to remember that when he has to fight - not for himself and self glory, as HRC runs - but to really make a difference for all of us...perhaps that reminder will make him less reluctant to take punches against HRC.
re Anthony Lake: "He does not understand how, after 800,000 people were killed, he could have felt angry but not at all responsible. "What's so strange is that this didn't become a 'how did we screw this up?' issue until a couple years later," he says. "The humanitarian-aid mission did not feel like a guilt mission."
Since senior officials in the U.S. government hadn't felt responsible when the killings were actually happening, it should not be altogether surprising that most didn't feel responsible after the fact. With the potential for an American military presence dismissed out of hand, Rwanda policy was formulated and debated heatedly by U.S. officials further down the chain. Because Lake never took control of the policy, the sense of responsibility he eventually acquired, although genuine, seems superimposed. He has an academic understanding that under the principle of command responsibility, those at the top must answer even for policies they do not remember consciously crafting. But lurking at the margins of Lake's consciousness seems to be an awareness that in light of press coverage at the time, he must have simply chosen to look away. "
Something tells me you haven't even read the book:
DESCRIPTIOM OF A PROBLEM FROM HELL BY SAMANTHA POWER
http://www.politicos.co.uk/books/25184/Samantha-Power/A-Problem-from-Hell/
"This is a shattering history of the last hundred years of genocide that itemizes in authoritative, persuasive manner exactly what the West knew when and what it chose to do, and what not to do, in the light of that knowledge. The United States has never in its history intervened to stop genocide and has in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred. In this interrogation of the last century of American history and foreign policy, Samantha Power draws upon declassified documents, private papers, unprecedented interviews and her own reporting from the modern killing fields to tell the story of American indifference and American courage in the face of man's inhumanity to man. Tackling the argument that successive US leaders from Wilson to Bush were unaware of genocidal horrors as they were occurring - against Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Kurds, Rwandans, Bosnians - during the past century, Samantha Power seeks to establish precisely how much was known and when, and proposes that much human misery and tragedy could readily have been averted. It becomes clear that the failure to intervene was usually caused not by ignorance or impotence, but by considered political inaction. Several heroic figures did work to oppose and expose ethnic cleansing as it took place, but the quiet majority of American politicians chose to do nothing, as did the American public. The author aims to make a powerful case for why America, as both sole superpower and global citizen, must make such indifference a thing of the past. "
It is regrettable that action was not taken, yes. That is indisputable, but many at the time didn't find it worth concerning themselves with but do now because they don't want Senator Clinton to win the election.
HRC supported NAFTA; she said so clearly in her own writing (not a speech, but in her own published work). She then lied about her unwavering NAFTA support to win votes in Ohio -- and had the audacity to accuse Senator Obama of great shamefulness when he pointed out the truth.
I say that kind of duplicitous behavior is monstrous.
Early reports of the SCALE of the atrocoties were (wrongly, as it turns out) greeted with skepticism in the European, and American press and councils-of-state.
American public opinion was (understandably)..... firmly opposed to the U.S. becoming involved in that nation's tragic civil war......coming not long after the "Blackhawk Down" debacle in Mougadishiu, Somalia....in which U.S. Marines and Airborne Rangers were cut off, and overwhelmed, thier burned and mutilated corpses dragged through the streets by cheering crowds while being broadcast live on international television.
Former President Clinton has since publicly apologized for his failure to act.
He has further stated that he should have ignored public opinion,........ and expressed his belief that , had he sent a force of only 5000........... as many as half a million innocent lives could have been saved........and called his failure to do so "the greatest single regret of my Presidency"
Regards........................................................................................................................
There were two sides to the "good war" in Bosnia led by NATO. There were no mass graves found afterwards.
In his recent book "Unholy Terror, Bosnia, Al-Qa'ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad, " John R. Schindler who served for nearly a decade with the National Security Agency much of that time in Bosnia and with the Allied Command, makes the case that Bill Clinton illegally aided jihadists, misrepresented the Bosnian conflict using the MSM, covering up the aid illegally provided to jihadists, aided bin Laden by providing his organization a base of operations in Bosnia which furthered the 9-11 plot, and provided millions of dollars of weapons and training to the mujahadin.
John R. Schlindler is a professor of strategy in the Naval College and a former NSA intelligent analyst working on the scene.
The question is why did Bill Clinton secretly aid these terrorists and circumvent the United Nations setting a bad precedent? He could have aided in stopping the slaughter in Rawanda and elsewhere.
NATO needed to be "saved." But millions of people did not. We supported the Afghanistan mujahidin and the Bosnian mujahidin and bin Laden capitalized on that support. Two of the 9-11 pilot hijackers were experienced in the Bosnia conflict as was Khalid Sheikh Muhamammad, the mastermind of 9-11.
I ask: "What's up with that?" Wes Clark is not to blame for setting the policy. Washington used the global jihad movement to fight a dubious war in Bosnia, in collaboration with unlikely allies in Tehran. Instead of using diplomatic and perhaps military means to end the conflict, the Clinton Administration aggressively backed the Bosnian Muslims, ensuring the war's outcome and the victory of anti-Western forces along with the worst of the Izerbegovic government, according to Schindler