I don’t much care for the strident cynicism of this piece, primarily because it offers nothing whatsoever as an alternative for humanitarian intervention, but it is a good reminder of why the appointment of Samantha Power as the next UN Ambassador is not something to unthinkingly celebrate.
The left needs better thinking than the old knee-jerk anti-imperialism that always seems to cancel out whatever good we do in the world with reference to some crime or outrage we’ve committed. Whether it’s flooding in Pakistan, an earthquake in Haiti, a tsunami in the Indian Ocean, or an impending siege in Benghazi, sometimes the United States is the only organization available to meet or prevent human suffering. However, that this takes place in the context of us having a military presence to more than a hundred countries around the globe is something to think carefully about. We are undoubtedly too entangled in world affairs. In general, we have intervened too much, not too little. But Ms. Power is most famous for arguing the opposite. In her view, we have been too willing to sit idly by while killing on a large scale takes place. She was primarily talking about Rwanda and the Balkans, but the principles can be applied to places like Tibet or Sudan.
We do have to be mindful that we lent support to genocides in Indonesia and Guatemala, as well as countless small skirmishes in Latin America and Africa. Our shameful record in Southeast Asia is well known, and our blind support of Israel is the biggest stain on our international reputation. Plus, Iraq. We do our best to whitewash this history out of existence, but this can help lead us astray. Being blind to our moral and strategic failures can cause us to lack appropriate caution when considering what to do about a problem like Syria.
What we know about Samantha Power is that she is a strong proponent of U.S. intervention to prevent the widespread loss of life. If we read that to mean that she is a strong proponent of human rights even when intervention is not obviously in our national interests, it can sound like a fine and noble thing. But it’s also dangerous. There are circumstances where we, as a country, are literally powerless to solve a problem. There are times when our intervention is likely to compound a problem and when engaging in a conflict is not only not in our national interests but profoundly threatening to our national interests.
In retrospect, how does our liberation of Kuwait look? Problematic, at best, no?
Does anyone think we can intervene in Syria and wind up glad that we did?
I agree with Samantha Power that the U.S. must be an enforcement arm of human rights or the world won’t be able to intervene to stop conflicts, but that seems to me to be a problem in need of fixing rather than a situation that we can live with long-term. Our foreign policy elites like that we’re indispensable because it gives us the right to play by our own rules. But our bridges are collapsing, our veterans’ hospitals are full, and our schools have gone to shit. The strain of sustaining all of this has turned one of our two major political parties into a neo-fascist band of know-nothings who are one election away from seizing the most lethal military arsenal the world has ever seen.
I like and respect Samantha Power, but I worry about her judgment. I want caution at this time, because the biggest threat we face as a country and a world is not a lack of resolve to intervene internationally. It is the prospect that a Republican will become our commander in chief.
I was sort of hoping you would do a post on Rice so we could bet on whether AG would comment or not.
I agree with Samantha Power that the U.S. must be an enforcement arm of human rights or the world won’t be able to intervene to stop conflicts, …
Why? You do realize what our history of foreign intervention is, right? When was the last, and probably only, time we got rid of a right-wing government? Hitler? Why is it that we always help overthrow left-leaning governments? How are we the enforcement arm of human rights when we help dictators murder people in Indonesia(as you mentioned in your piece), Chile and other places?
I don’t know, I suppose Gaddafi was a hero to some on the left but I think he was a nutcase. Would you categorize Noriega, Milosevic or Saddam Hussein as left-wing? I wouldn’t. Didn’t we just sit idly by and watch Mubarak get toppled from power?
You are being very selective in your history.
In any case, sometimes it is possible to stop or prevent massive loss of life through military/diplomatic intervention. Sometimes, it isn’t. Sometimes, the cost is too high or the risks or too great. It depends.
But we have to have the capability to do it. At least, someone or some coalition needs to have the capability.
Would you categorize Noriega, Milosevic or Saddam Hussein as left-wing?
Why did we attack Panama? I don’t remember the reason(s) for that. Did he just become too much of an embarassment? And given Noriega’s history(connections to the CIA & School of the Americas), I have to bet he was right-wing. For Milosevic and Hussein, they did attack other people/countries. See Saddam/Kuwait.
I don’t know, I suppose Gaddafi was a hero to some on the left but I think he was a nutcase.
Who was Gaddafi a hero to? No one that I know of. Unless you think Tony Blair is a leftist.
Didn’t we just sit idly by and watch Mubarak get toppled from power?
And what did we get? A secular(relatively speaking) right-wing asshole got replaced by a religious right-wing asshole.
Oh come on, now you’re totally moving the goalposts. The fact is, Mubarak was an asshole dictator, and the State Department did help the Egyptian people overthrow him. This does undermine your insistence that the United States is always always on the wrong side because our foreign policy is always wrong.
Personally I do know the history of US foreign intervention, and it is shameful. But I’m not interested in replacing the mindless right-wing conviction that the United States can do now wrong with an equally mindless conviction that the United States can do no right.
That’s just another form of exceptionalism, really.
I guess you don’t know much about the anti-colonialism movement. Here’s some reading for you. Qaddafi was admired by many people on the left because he was so stridently opposed to Apartheid and colonialism.
No one knows why we attacked Panama. But it did remove a right-wing dictator.
As for Egypt, your argument was that we never remove (or allow to be removed) right-wingers. That is incorrect.
It’s also untrue to suggest that there is nothing different in that regard between the policies of Nixon and Carter, or Reagan and Obama.
Of course we do. GHWB needed a little war to demonstrate his manliness, Noriega was playing his own games in addition to the one he played with the CIA, and it demonstrated the limits to what the rightwing in this country considered Carter’s giveaway of the Panama Canal. “We” probably killed Torrijos in 1981 and facilitated the rise of Noriega.
Bush’s version of Reagan’s Grenada.
Only in the most superficial way. Grenada is tiny (the population could have fit within the Rose Bowl), but an indigenous communist coup made it ideological for that great anti-communist in the WH.
Noreiga was a thug — a CIA/GHWB thug — but he went a bit rogue. Perhaps skimming too much from the drug deals. Turning friends into foes when convenient seems to be one of the Bush family’s specialties.
I’m not sure it’s superficial. The very heart of both was a need to stomp somebody without cost for the entertainment of the base (in both senses of the word). Neither invasion had anything to do with any real concern over defending the United States.
Or, possibly something to do with foreign investment in the canal. Or money laundering activities.
Who knows?
Noriega was playing both sides in the drug war, if you remember. He was likely helping Pablo Escobar launder his millions.
Qaddafi was admired by many people on the left because he was so stridently opposed to Apartheid and colonialism.
During the UN Protective Mission over Libya, there was virtually no support expressed for Gadhaffi himself in the American liberal media, just like there was none expressed for Saddam during the Iraq War.
However, this was not the case in Europe. I was shocked by many of the comments on Juan Cole’s blog.
Also, the Nation of Islam was a longtime supporter of Gadhaffi.
That was a really pathetic performance, Calvin.
Thanks. It means a lot coming from you!! 😉
You do realize what our history of foreign intervention is, right?
Did you read the post you’re responding to?
When was the last, and probably only, time we got rid of a right-wing government?
The removal of Saleh in Yemen.
How are we the enforcement arm of human rights when we help dictators murder people in Indonesia(as you mentioned in your piece), Chile and other places?.
When we help dictators murder people, we are not the enforcement arm of human rights. When we don’t do that, and prevent dictators from murdering people, we are.
You actually have to pay attention to the facts of different cases. Checking your gut and jamming everything into one beloved narrative is a reality-based way to approach the question.
We removed Saleh? Or did the people of Yemen do that?
Obama and Clinton arranged the deal that transferred power.
If you want to narrow your question to only those cases in which the United States was the one using force to remove a right-wing government from power, the most recent case was the Taliban in 2001.
Kuwait? No, George I did it right there. But Iraq? Disaster!
It sounds like Ms Power is thirsting to engage in Syria. She probably wants to be remembered as John Foster Dulles.
Point really isn’t whether Poppy “did it right.”
The point is that liberating Kuwait led to a string of disasters for the region and for our country.
Letting Hussein keep Kuwait would have led to other problems, but it’s hard to see how they could have been this bad.
Liberating Kuwait from Iraq, and the policies pursued along with and after that action, did not have to be done the way they were, or lead to that string of events.
Driving the Iraqi army out of that country did not require us to pursue everything that followed.
Saddam should have been warned off intervening and Kuwait should have stopped bitching so hard about getting their money. But once the invasion and annexation of Kuwait happened, we were in a very difficult position without good choices.
We were wise to not invade Baghdad but our intelligence was wrong about whether Saddam could remain in power. What followed had a kind of inexorable logic to it.
If you ask me, as painful as it would have been and as bad of a principle as it would have set, it would have been less dangerous to let Saddam keep Kuwait and let him continue to be a buffer against Iran. It would have required vigilance because of the real threat that Saddam would develop nuclear weapons or start thirsting after more land. But it would have avoided the tragedy that unfolded in Iraq as a result of the sanctions and the backlash that gave rise to al-Qaeda and the virulent anti-Americanism we see today.
The most painful part of it would have the damage done to the UN, because nations in good standing, like Kuwait, have the right to believe that they will be allowed to be invaded and annexed. But the truth is, we’ve paid too high a price for that principle.
The theory that bloodthirsty dictators like Saddam will at least provide stability just doesn’t work for me. Sure, if we were to assume that Saddam would have swallowed Kuwait and then gone home to build roads and write his memoirs, maybe the terrible precent would have been worth it – but why would we believe that? He’d already invaded Iran. Then he invaded Kuwait. I’m not even talking about the injustice of it all, but about the likelihood of even more streets running red.
Saddam Hussein, flush with conquest, looking at the Saudi oil fields and grumbling about those traitors in Iraq who sided with Iran during the last war is not going to stay put. Once a dictator has actually taken the step of gobbling up his neighbor, there is no no-war option available.
He didn’t just invade Iran on a whim. He was encouraged to do it and financed by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other emirates. It was primarily Kuwait’s nagging about getting their Iran-war loans paid back that caused Saddam to lose his temper. The diagonal drilling was more like the last straw.
The Bush administration had a ton on their plate at the time with the collapse of the eastern bloc, but they screwed up by allowing things between Iraq and Kuwait to get so out of control.
I understand your discomfort with leaving Saddam in power, especially from a moral point of view. But it’s not an abstract moral question. With the benefit of almost 25 years of hindsight, we can see that we didn’t avoid a huge moral catastrophe by liberating Kuwait. It has no been worth it.
You are probably correct that Saddam would have gained enough power and lucre to destabilize the balance of powers, but that could have been managed.
He was a horrible human being and a terrible leader, but let’s remember that he wasn’t dealing with boy scouts, either at home or in Kuwait or Iran. The situation we have now is not good, and a lot of it is not the result of the son’s idiocy. A lot of it is just fallout from the decision to liberate Kuwait that could have been better mitigated, perhaps, but could not be entirely avoided.
I expressed no discomfort with leaving Saddam in power. I was against removing him in 1991 and again in 2003.
What I said was that I didn’t want to leave Saddam in Kuwait.
With the benefit of almost 25 years of hindsight, we can see that we didn’t avoid a huge moral catastrophe by liberating Kuwait. It has no been worth it.
Again, this is a false argument, a post hoc ergo propter hoc. You are assuming that everything that happened after the decision to liberate Kuwait was caused by the decision to liberate Kuwait. You aren’t even arguing this, just assuming that there were no other option points other than the yes/no decision in 1990.
He was a horrible human being and a terrible leader….
Spare me. I said explicitly that I’m not talking about the injustice of it all, but about the practical outcomes. I said in very clear terms that if we could assume stability afterwards, I would have been willing to even let him gobble up Kuwait.
Here’s what I am assuming.
Once we made the decision to liberate Kuwait and the decision not to forcibly remove Saddam from power, we were in a position where we felt compelled to protect the Kurds and the Shiites from brutal reprisals. The no-fly zones were basically necessary. Before long, France bowed out of that project.
The sanctions are a little fuzzier. Certainly they could have been designed differently, but it’s hard to see how some punitive actions could be avoided.
We could have anticipated the unpopularity of permanently basing troops in Saudi Arabia and made the deals with Qatar and Bahrain earlier, but they had to be somewhere on the peninsula.
So, basically, I think we were stuck with an unsolvable problem that made us deeply unpopular and at least partially responsible for a huge death toll.
And that’s before we decided to invade the country.
I acknowledge your League of Nations argument and the likelihood that there were would have been negative consequences of abandoning Kuwait. I just don’t believe those consequences could possibly have been this bad. And I don’t think we’d be in all that better a situation if Gore had been president. It was the situation created by Kuwait that put us on a path to catastrophe. For me, that one decision was the biggest factor in what has happened since then in the region, and better leaders would have done only marginally better at mitigating the problem.
Don’t forget that Powell was working on reforming the sanctions, and Cheney cut him off at the knees at the first opportunity.
But even setting that aside, it was not inevitable that we start another war with Iraq, even given the status quo in 2002. Nor was it inevitable that any war we did start would be so recklessly planned and implemented.
I think there was quite a bit more than a narrow margin for improvement in how we conducted our Iraq policy.
I give you this. A second war with Iraq was not inevitable nor did it have to be botched so badly.
However, I still think we would have gone to war with Iraq by now even if Gore had been president. Unless Saddam dropped dead or was toppled, we were in an untenable situation, and with the way our elites think on both sides of the aisle, confrontation was far preferable to humiliation. Remember, too, that Gore would have been listening to Lieberman every day of his presidency. Drum. Drum. Drum. Drum. Drum.
It wasn’t just Cheney who cut Powell off at the knees, either. By 2001, there was no appetite remaining in the region for sanctions. All of the non-Anglo Security Council members had arranged to develop the oil fields once the sanctions were lifted. We were checkmated.
The reason we went to war with Iraq is that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy“. So you’re in effect assuming that a Gore administration would have been as duplicitous as the Bush II administration. What a strange thing for a committed Democrat to think.
The Bush II administration was unusually stupid, because it was in the sway of the neocons. Obama hasn’t invaded Syria or Iran yet, and probably is not going to. There is no reason to believe Gore would have acted any differently with respect to Iraq.
Also, it’s very possible that a Gore administration, being aware of the threat of terrorism (which the Bush II administration dismissed just to be different from Clinton), would have prevented 9/11, which would have precluded the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Actually, one of the nifty things about the neo-cons is that they didn’t let 9/11 distract them from the bipartisan obsession to get us the hell out of our deteriorating Saddam-containment problem.
Had 9/11 never happened, Saddam would have been even more likely to be subject to “fixed intelligence” which had already assured that “everyone” knew he was building a cauldron of toxins and nuclear materials. Clinton/Gore made sure of that with the help of CIA directors like James Woolsey and George Tenet.
Throughout the entirety of Clinton’s presidency, Saddam was uncommonly vilified as part as a basic maintenance of hostility program that allowed them to maintain domestic and foreign support for an incredibly unpopular and deadly sanctions regime.
That Saddam was a terrible man is beside the point. He didn’t have any WMD and he was basically contained. The problem is that the bastard wasn’t going anywhere and (aside from some domestic opponents of the regime) the only people dying were innocent civilians who couldn’t get infant formula or basic medicine.
It’s a mistake to think our excellent adventure in Iraq was something that only neo-cons could conceive. The alternative was to basically watch our containment policy collapse and our country suffer total humiliation and for, eventually, Iraq to give all its oil fields over to the Chinese, the Russians, and the French.
No, once the sanctions started to collapse, war was almost inevitable. The idea that we would stand by and watch other countries make Saddam rich and powerful again while we were cut out of the loot is a ridiculous idea that Joe Lieberman certainly wouldn’t have countenanced. And if Al Gore was willing to see that happen, he would have been a one-term president and his opponent would have done the job.
9/11 made it possible to actually ignore our problems in Iraq and maybe even patch them up for another decade of containment. Perhaps Gore would have taken advantage of the opportunity, and (small consolation that that would have been) I like to think that he would have.
But this is counterfactual history and speculation.
There might have been pressure on the U.S. (and also Britain) to save face with respect to the sanctions, but for a putative democracy to launch a war of aggression is no easy feat. (Even Hitler had to claim, when Germany invaded Poland, “wir schiessen zurück” (“we shot back”), pretending that the invasion was a defensive action against Polish aggression.) There were at least two hurdles that the US needed to overcome to invade Iraq. (1) Finding a pretext for starting a major war. As we know, the neocons had to set up a shadow intelligence agency in the basement of the Pentagon to come up with such pretexts. It’s not clear to me at all that Gore would have stooped so low. (2) Many generals did not think that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be a cakewalk. Being reality based, it’s not clear to me that Gore would have ignored the opinion of his generals, the way Bush and Cheney did.
Then Gore would have been replaced by the neo-cons.
It’s really very simple. We were totally fucked in Iraq the day before 9/11. In fact, there’s almost no way 9/11 would have even happened if not for us being fucked in Iraq. 9/11 was really just a manifestation of us being fucked in Iraq.
Al-Qaeda arose in response to the Persian Gulf War and our subsequent permanent bases in Saudi Arabia. It was fueled by Arab outrage at both our Israeli policy and our sanctions on Iraq, which were almost uniformly believed in the Arab world to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Support for the sanctions had utterly collapsed, with regional players sick of the economic hit they were taking, and global powers arranging for oil contracts once the sanctions were lifted.
We were about to see the world defy the sanctions and we’d either have to consent to see them lifted or witness their de facto nullification. And we weren’t getting of the oil contracts after having taken responsibility for liberating Kuwait and patrolling the country for a decade.
That shit was never going to happen. Never.
If Al Gore didn’t deal with it in his first term, he would have been gone and the Iraq War would have taken place two years later.
I’m completely sincere in believing this. I think I know my country, and people who didn’t know us decided to try to screw us in ways that we were never going to consent to be screwed.
Good god, not even the Bush administration went that far in assigning blame for 9/11 to Iraq and Saddam.
Really screwed up the plan that there weren’t any Iraqis hijackers on those planes. And Iranians would have been so much better for the neo-cons.
And 25 years of hindsight don’t tell us anything at all about what would have happened if the United Nations had followed the League of Nations’ precedent and done nothing when a regional power tried to colonize another country.
If the message had gone out loud and clear that countries would not be stopped from annexing their neighbors, that probably would have had undesirable consequences, too.
“She probably wants to be remembered as John Foster Dulles.” Can a woman be an SOB?
And there was also this:
https://twitter.com/peterfhart/status/342369908958568448
Seems like she was all for invading Iraq.
Nothing to see here. Just swapping roles so both appointees can double punch positions on their resumes. Builds the Democratic foreign policy bench for future administrations.
And means—more confirmation hearings. Hearings that will carefully avoid any real consideration of the direction of US foreign and national security policy.
Three judges, now two foreign policy positions–what confirmation with the White House next queue up?
Susan Rice will be a special advisor to the President and needs no confirmation.
So he’s only throwing Power to the questioning wolves. That should toughen her up. 🙂
Thanks for the correction, btw.
I guess that means that Susan Rice gets a little respite from the media. Special advisors can defer to other folks.
Power is an Irish immigrant with a child under 1 years old. If the old white men in the confirmation hearing want to toughen her up…bring it on.
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The last building stone to change US policy in the Middle East and reset relations with Russia to find a political solution to the sectarian and civil war in Syria. Bravo Obama. I wasn’t happy with the tandem Clinton-Rice especially as related to African and Middle-east policy. From BooMan’s take on Samantha Power, we can expect more of the same?!
As I predicted with the changes in his foreign policy team … Susan Rice moves on!
That’s not unlike dismissing and complaining about a critic of a nuclear weapons scientist for not presenting how the US can maintain world military dominance without nuclear weapons.
Samantha Power is much like Susan Rice — they both carry around the “we should have intervened in Rwanda” placard which gives them their credentials as “humanitarians.” Professional do-gooders that mainly do good for themselves and their corporate/academic sponsors. Haiti is awash in NGOs and has a UN presence and the same people suffer today that were suffering before the NGOs began arriving.
Why not appoint a writer and real humanitarian that actually has accomplished something positive for real human beings. Someone like Eve Ensler.
I don’t see it that way. I see it as kind of necessary to explain how we can have an effective United Nations with the ability to intervene to stop human rights violations without a corresponding military power. If not us, then who? Or what?
To lazily conflate all humanitarian intervention with an effort at global domination is kind of exactly what Power’s argument is meant to defeat. She’s saying that we need to intervene even when it has nothing to do with our national interests because it’s the right thing to do. The article ignores that because the author is so cynical that he doesn’t think disinterested intervention is possible, let alone worthy. But where does that leave us?
A bit of history during the Bush years, the UN needed to be clipped and brother Jeb would spearhead relief efforts. What a laugh! Jeb Bush was to organize a “Core Group” of nations in Australia/Asia outside of UN Relief coordination.
Response of the U.S. Government and the International System to the Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunamis
http://2001-2009.state.gov/e/rm/2005/42173.htm
http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa98206.000/hfa98206_0.htm
Exactly where in the world are there no US interests? After over half a century of fighting wars, supplying and funding proxy wars, facilitating the manufacture and distributions of weapons to all parts of the world as well as providing US aid to purchase some of them, and sucking up a disproportionate amount of natural resources from outside the US, disinterested humanitarian intervention on our part is a story we tell ourselves to avoid the truth.
Well, on some level, we have interests in almost every country on earth. But that doesn’t translate to a national interest in some genocide being carried out in Rwanda or even the imminent slaughter of civilians in Benghazi. We definitely have keen interests in Syria, but no solutions.
We could have left the Balkans to duke it out in perpetuity without it hurting one American family or costing one American job or it endangering us in any way.
So, I mean, if you want to expand the argument until it no longer has any boundaries, we have economic connections almost everywhere, and we generally wish we had them where we don’t. But that is not the same as saying he have a national interest in intervening in any civil disturbance.
Exactly where in the world are there no US interests?
Rwanda.
You want to talk about hard truths? OK, let’s do that.
I think the issue is not some absolutist argument about to ever intervene or not. The real problem is the US record of stupidity and/or mendacity and/or military/industrial self dealing in pretty much every major intervention we’ve committed since WWII. There is no record to support faith in the nation’s ability or motivation to unselfishly do good in the world.
The United States has some credibility issues to deal with before intervening in other countries. We’ve been in the wrong so many times in the last 60 years for a lot of different reasons, that we come off sounding like Lady Gaga on personal modesty or Charlie Sheen on balance in living. People in other countries are going to be too preoccupied with our filthy hands to consider whether our intervention is to their advantage or not.
We really need to pile up a few Operation Vittles to retrieve our standing as defender or guarantor of humanitarian interests.
“People in other countries are going to be too preoccupied with our filthy hands to consider whether our intervention is to their advantage or not.”
The Libyans didn’t.
In a situation that would warrant a humanitarian intervention, you’re going to have people begging for help, like the rebels in Benghazi were in March 2011.
Some Syrians are also eager for the U.S. to intervene, going so far as to invite Sen. McCain over for a meet-and-greet. Trouble is, it appears that some of the Syrians oppressed by the government might not be the most savory characters, either.
I think we need to expand our range of choices from “do nothing and watch people die horribly” and “rush in, guns blazing and missiles falling.” There really are other alternatives, but for some reason, we seem loath to explore them.
That’s what makes the Libya operation so unique.
We didn’t lead it, politically or militarily.
We weren’t the driving force behind a military action in which our forces took place.
We acted as a drag on France and Britain, limiting the scope of the mission and, the opposite of rushing in with gun ablating, made them slow down and think things through.
The Obama administration has done some things that are quite out of character for the United States in world affairs.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/natalie-gyte/one-billion-rising-why-i-wont-support_b_2684595.html
Eve is guilty of the same neocolonial attitudes.
Was speaking of this part:
The critic-writer of that piece objects to Ensler’s promotion of a massive collective of women demanding an end to violence against women and celebrating and feeling good about their bodies. The critic seems not to appreciate that Ensler is an artist first and it’s through her art that she empowered herself enough to do some good work. That beauty and fun aren’t unnecessary frills to surviving but are critical to it. That’s why it became known as the Bread and Roses Strike and not the bread strike:
Women must have medical treatment for the injuries suffered from the brutality of rapists, but they must also sing and dance and celebrate being alive once their bodies have healed.
Rwanda-guilt does haunt that generation of Democratic policy-makers.
To your “why not” question, the answer is that the move is not as much about policy as about plumping the resumes of two loyal Obama advisers.
The job of the Ambassador to the UN involves a lot of backroom diplomacy and diplomatic corps jockeying. Anyone who has not already been involved in that world winds up depending of the staff to suss out what is going on. And that staff is from the same career-path mold as Powers and Rice.
A lot of NGO problems in countries, including the US btw, have to do with host country (or in the US host jurisdiction) relationships. Local politicos don’t want to upset local balances of power or expose local scandals to outsiders. Moreover, not a few see NGO funds as a source of personal revenue, either through bribes or extortion.
No doubt you think Ensler has that kind of hard-nosed experience.
Do UN ambassadors really have any significant power to worry about? The impression, from Adlai Stevenson to Colin Powell, is that they are little more than sometimes agonized spokescreatures for the administration, state dept, CIA, NSA, whichever bunch holds the balance of power at the moment. They have a bully pulpit, to some degree, but their only real independent power is to resign.
They have as much power, as much influence, as the President and Secretary of State give them.
That is why it is notable that Obama has appointed someone from his innermost circle of advisors, and has taken the current UN Ambassador and made her his top national security advisor. That suggests that this particular President really does take that office seriously.
As opposed to appointing someone with star power.
Professional do-gooders that mainly do good for themselves and their corporate/academic sponsors.
I used to spend a lot of time reading libertarian web sites.
It’s interesting to me how closely the arguments that so-called-anti-imperialists make about international affairs echo the laissez-faire, anti-liberal, anti-state rhetoric with which libertarians discuss social welfare programs.
The piece is an attempt to define out of the existence the discussion about when and whether force can achieve humanitarians ends, by drowning it in an overwrought pose of cynicism.
I think your caution has merit.
But perhaps that’s why she right for the position of Ambassador to the UN – where her job will be to rally global support when intervention is necessary – instead of National Security Adviser.
I guess that’s the core of the doubt: will she be committed to working honestly through the UN, or will she prefer to swagger into the scene, guns blazing, and then try to bully allies into forming a “coalition”?
Think back to how the White House handled alliance politics during the Libya operation. “Leading from behind,” except with out the leading part.
More like, being dragged along and determined to hold up our end.
I can’t see anyone in that team acting like John Bolton.
Your guess has absolutely zero connection to the core of my doubt.