It might be time that I downgraded my opinion of Samantha Power from someone who I believe holds naive and mischievous opinions on the Middle East to someone who for the most part simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She gave a must-read interview yesterday to Salon.com.
What is the biggest foreign policy challenge for the next president?
The next president is really going to have to walk and chew gum at the same time, because no long-term peace in the Middle East is possible until we get some kind of modus vivendi in the Arab-Israeli situation.
Remarkable. Neither the Iraq war, nor the Iranian nuclear program, nor North Korean nuclear proliferation, nor the situation in Pakistan, nor the ascendant Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas axis, in Power’s assessment, is comparable to “the Arab-Israeli situation.” This is, of course, the view of the world one gets from watching too many Christiane Amanpour specials on CNN; but it is also one that has virtually no currency among serious people.
You recently wrote in Time magazine that the U.S. needs to “rethink Iran.” What did you mean?
…To neutralize the support Ahmadinejad has domestically, we need to stop threatening and to get in a room with him — if only to convey grave displeasure about his tactics regionally and internationally — and then try to build international support for measures to prevent him from supporting terrorism and pursuing a nuclear program. If we’re ever going to actually put in place multilateral measures to contain Iran, the only way we’re going to do that is if we do it in a more united way with our allies.
To this, one can only reply: “Donny, you’re out of your element.” For starters, Ahmadinejad essentially has no domestic popularity in Iran. He is aggressively detested by everyone in the country with a reformist cast of mind, and he is widely blamed for crippling the Iranian economy through his imposition of some of the most half-baked centralized planning that exists in the world today. This Washington Post piece delves into Ahamadinejad’s domestic unpopularity; this piece from the Asia Times discusses his abysmal poll ratings. If Power thinks that we’re going to get anywhere with Iran by undermining Ahmadinejad’s “domestic support,” let me be the first to inform her: he doesn’t have any domestic support to begin with.
But that’s just a nitpick. The real swindle here is Power’s implication that the U.S. has yet to pursue a multilateral strategy for dealing with the Iranian nuclear program, a fascinating rewriting of history. Between 2002 and 2006, the Bush administration delegated Iran diplomacy to the EU-3 (France, Germany, and the UK), specifically in pursuit of the cultivation of an international consensus against Iran’s nuclear program. The EU-3, working extensively through the IAEA — another of those international bodies that Power believes has been sidelined by the Bush administration — demonstrated nothing more than the ease with which it could be repeatedly manipulated and thwarted.
By the summer of 2006, the matter was handed over to the UN Security Council, another multilateral lever. The Security Council has since then produced a series of wrist-slaps on Iran. Power’s complaint — that the U.S. hasn’t acted multilaterally — is a fantasy. The real problem with the past six years of Iran diplomacy is that the multilateral channels through which our diplomacy has found expression have proven themselves utterly incapable of dealing with the problem. But I suppose it’s much easier to give interviews to credulous Salon reporters and pretend that we never tried, rather than confront the much thornier problem — that we have been trying, and failing.
Samantha Power believes that people like me, who raise perfectly legitimate questions about her judgment and knowledge of the Middle East, are trafficking in “fabrications” and a “smear campaign” against her and the Obama campaign. In everything I’ve written about her, including this post, I have always linked to what Power herself has said, so that readers could judge for themselves whether I’ve treated her fairly. Is it a smear to accuse someone of a smear, when none has been committed?
UPDATE: Michael Young weighs in here: “the egghead smells a foreign policy post.“
“Peres well remembers that in the long history of his own people there have been times, from Masada to Warsaw, when stubborn men deemed it better to resist against hopeless odds rather than accept subjugation.”
Where to begin…How about with the question of exactly what it is the “stubborn men” of Hamas are fighting to “resist”? Could it be Israel’s 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza? No?
Or perhaps they’re trying to resist facing the fact that they don’t have anything to resist anymore and thus have to go around killing women and children in order to start fights with a much stronger neighbor that is doing exactly zero to “oppress” them. So that they can get their own women and children killed. So then they’ll have something to “resist” again.
The media Useful Idiot Brigade marches on. Glad to hear that even the lefties in Israel aren’t that stupid. Maybe there is hope for the world after all.
Mr. Tobin:
You have elegantly posed the question, but have not answered it. See Ephraim Karsh’s recent article posted on the Daily Alert, as well as Golda Meir’s bitter statement: “Half the world hates us (Jews) and the other half wants to kill us.” A year ago I would have been repelled by this analysis, based on the reaction to the Gaza incursion by the mainstream western media and the liberal elites, it is inescapable.
So all these ignorant ptople of Britian, USA, France & others would have rockets fired into their country and never resist or fight back. IF THIS is really true then Muslim terrorist have already won, no wonder Osamastill sends his messages mocking free nations. They use their women & choldren as shields and libs condemn not them but those who protect their own? No matter what country you live in, tou are clueless and a step away from disaster, I wouldn’t really care at my age for me but my children and grandchildren I will fight to the death for. Better their poor helpless children than mine. Once their children have been indovtrinated into that kind of hatred, it is very hard to change them and once a child has been indoctrinated with liberal ignorance that too is hard to change. IT WILL TAKE BULLETS FLYING AT THEM BEFORE THEY drop their shield of ignorance.
>>…the Gaza counter-offensive, which the Guardian feels “could well merit future investigation as possible war crimes.”<<
Maybe they have, I don’t know, but has anyone “investigated” the Gazan government’s attacks on Israeli population centers as possible war crimes?
Has there been any call from the Guardian for the Gazans’ actions to be investigated? There’s certainly been enough time for it.
does anyone anywhere really think that the editors of the guardian care about either dead jews or dead israelis…?
if so, let’s see the evidence….
the perverse irony, of course, is that israel takes what the palestinians say more seriously than the guardian does…
how do we know this? let’s see those guardian editorials about the hamas charter and the hams putsch in gaza…really, let’s see them…
Every time someone blathers abouit Israel’s “attrocities” they should be confronted with the question, “What happens if Hamas simply stops shooting rockets into Israel?” Hammer them with this and don’t accept equivocations or evasions until they finally admit that if Hamas stopped shooting at Israel, Israel would stop shooting back.
Some will rave that Israel wouldn’t stop the attack and really intends to destroy Gaza: Press them for evidence that doesn’t involve Israel’s legitimate right of self defense. Eventually they always get pushed into a corner where they either start screaming incoherently to drown you out or admit they just hate Jews.
First of all, anyone who has read GIBBON (written in the 1700′s, no less), KNOWS FULL WELL THAT ROME DECLINED AND FELL. All you can tell from history is that Israel tried to get out from under the Roman yoke. God, over his time table, took care of the rest.
Americans, too, have NOT chosen academics to be their “intelligencia.” Instead, most Amerians don’t give a hoot for college credentials. And, when they’ve chosen heroes, they’ve gone for the LONER.
Hollywood’s heyday made a mint when they represented these lonesome heroes. From Gary Cooper, to John Wayne. To Clint Eastwood, whose GRAN TORINO is about a 78 year old man, acting like DIRTY HARRY, but this time his name is Walt Kowalski.
Nah, the hollywood crowd won’t give Eastwood an academy award. But don’t get fooled. Eastwood talks to the heart of the American Soul.
Personally, I don’t know why everyone thinks Obama will be a ZERO. He seems to want to fashion himself against LINCOLN, and FDR. When FDR got down to business, after he was sworn in, in 1933; he spent time IGNORING the europeans. Most Americans were isolationist, too.
I think things are similar.
I think Bush tossed away opportunity after opportunity, following 9/11. I think Bush climbed into the saudi’s boat; and proclaimed “Not the sauds! Look for a man in a cave.” Go ahead. Believe what you like. But history won’t be all that friendly to Dubya.
Obama? I’ll take a pass “and wait and see.” While rumors that the sauds are again gonna fund a “big day” in the USA, with at least death and destruction coming up in five cities. (Well, it worked for them, before. Not that Dubya delivered Irak, or syria, or anything much else to the saudi real estate grab.)
As to Israel, FIRST the president here would have to get “cooperation” there. Where it looks like Bibi may pull out the bigger win?
Again, I don’t know the future.
But Obama as a tool for the arabs? Gee. I’d be surprised. And, even more surprised if the saud’s get away with it! Given how the anger, here, rose, when oil went to $100 a barrel.
Saud’s like to take people over barrels, huh?
In the mind of the Guardian, Hamas is justified in defending itself against Israel’s withdraw and the obligation to run a stable government.
What would a Palestinian government actually do without an occupying power? How would Hamas be able to fight the imperial powers if they had to focus on day-to-day affairs of their voters? What if that very population wants to be shielded from abuse of power, rather than be used as shields to protect the power?
All of this is too much for Hamas, Arab governments, and Western journalists. In their eyes, Hamas is permitted to fire rockets at the Imperial force of Israel, and Israel must accept the abuse. The bottom line — Centuries of European colonialism and failed Arab leadership is easily transferred to the Jews, to bear the guilt and punishment. It is so transparent.
Ruth Skidmore – So all these ignorant ptople of Britian, USA, France & others would have rockets fired into their country and never resist or fight back.
For these moral superiors to Israel, it is not a matter of what they would do in the same situation, we all know that, especially the French, would have no hesitation in leveling their enemies. But there is a world double standard for Israel which the West understands but the Islamists don’t.
The Islamists see the West as Dar ur Harb that includes Israel. They make no distinction between the US and Israel. This luls the Islamists into thinking that what they get away with against Israel they can get away with against the West.
Can you imagine if instead of the WTC, Al Qaeda flew planes into the Azraeli tower in Tel Aviv, and in retaliation Israel would have attacked the Taliban and bombed caves in Tora Bora. Of course the world would howl and the evil Israelis who have no right to attack another country. Of course, US did attack and was perfectly justified in doing so. Even the defeatist party in this country considered Afghanistan to the be good war.
In short, Islamists will always win the battle for public opinion against Israel, because the world – including the US administration and beurocacy – likes them better than the Jews, but the Islamists read this as a sign of surrender in general at their own peril.
Israel may not be allowed to defend itself, but you can be damned sure the other countries are going to defend themselves – especially the Europeans who really know how to kill when they want.
H.D.S. Greenway: “No doubt Hamas is stubborn, even unreasonable, but Peres well remembers that in the long history of his own people there have been times, from Masada to Warsaw, when stubborn men deemed it better to resist against hopeless odds rather than accept subjugation.”
Greeway writes as if the Jews at Masada were intent on obliterating the Roman Empire when all they wanted was Jewish sovereignty over Roman occupied Palestine. By contrast, Hamas already has sovereignty over Gaza but stubbornly (even “unreasonabl[y]“) wants to obliterate Israel. These are analagous situations? What a moron.
If I were capable of lowering my IQ by 40 points, could I become a Boston Globe columnist too?
Everyone knew in advance which direction “international opinion” was going to go. This is a concrete fact of this conflict; that Hamas could anticipate that the media and international community was going to side with them because it always does no matter what they did. However that international opinion is is worthless is also a concrete fact of this conflict.
Having said that, I would be interested to know if the Guardian and the BBC’s opinion, to take two examples, reflects the opinion of the majority. Although that may be a redundant question given that opinions that diverge with the opinion of media and government panjandrums in certain nations aren’t even recognized as such.
You have to understand that Europeans have convinced themselves that any armed struggle against Islamist terrorists is ultimately self-defeating. They believe that killing one breeds a hundred more. It’s not clear why they actually believe this, but placating their large and growing domestic Islamic radical population is likely part of this. If you can’t fight them, all that’s left is to talk to them. This has led to the second European belief: that talking can solve all problems. This quasi-religious belief in diplomacy generally seems to involve only one side (the Jews or the West) providing concessions.
So, on the basis of the two above beliefs, Europeans believe that any action from Israel that involved violence is ultimately self-defeating, not only for them, but perhaps more importantly in their minds, for their own radical Muslim population. The notion that Israel’s response must be proportional seems all about not riling up Europe’s Muslims (after all, if violence is counter-productive, then why not make it proportional?). Add to this the notion that if Jews are now like Nazis, then what happened in Europe in those pre-enlightened days isn’t so bad, see it could happen to anyone, Europeans weren’t rotten to put Jews in ovens, there’s nothing to feel guilty about. If Jews can be Nazis then we’re really all alike, and violence against Islam is self-defeating, and talking cures everything.
My God! Can the liberals be that far gone they have established a moral equivalency between Jews resisting being murdered by the millions and Palestinians resisting Jews leaving them alone and letting them have their own country. Hammas is a band of murdering savages, repugnant even to their own kind throught the Middle East. No nation on ePlanet Earth would tolerate a terrorist organization hurling rocket propelled explosives across their border murdering their citizens. Yet, the liberal minds, so twisted with elitist arrogance and relativism can’t make the distinction between a democratic state defending itself and an Islmaic fundamentalist terror based autocracy commiting international murder. I have to come to the conclusion that liberals are just a pure expression of evil on Earth.
# 14-How do you break something that doesn’t exist? Because if international law means no more than the ad hoc determination of international bureacrats and functionaries to be elastically applied not in accordance with any consistent principle or precedent but instead on the merest ideological whim, what possible meaning can it have? International law is not something that can be vaguely raise only when we don’t like a given international act or actor but ignore when we do and reasonably expect the concept to retain any validity. Because then it is no law at all, but a vehicle for arbitrary and moral bankrupt condemnation, and frankly, just a sophmoric epithet. To have so breathlessly reduced a lofty concept to a mere epithet that people are conditioned to ignore is quite an achievement.
The only “International law” that applies is this one:
“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.”
- United Nations Charter.
and
“The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favor or impede military operations. The Parties to the conflict shall not direct the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military operations. ”
- Geneva Convention, Protocol 1, as amended in 1977.
Again, if Hamas stopped shooting at Israel, Israel would stop shooting back. There’s absolutely no justification for their insane attacks on Israeli civilians.
David Mamet’s comparison of the medieval blood libel to the West’s cynical condemnation of Israel’s right to defend itself is to the point: “The world was told Jews used this blood in the performance of religious ceremonies. Now, it seems, Jews do not require the blood for baking purposes, they merely delight to spill it on the ground.”
Ian, in comment #11, says “I would be interested to know if the Guardian and the BBC’s opinion, to take two examples, reflects the opinion of the majority.”
The Guardian and the BBC are leftist outfits. A few years ago Frederick Forsyth, the novelist, described the British Left as “a pimple that periodically erupts on the buttock of a rather good country.” At least that’s the way I remember the quote. I can’t find it on the web for some reason.
I found the quote at
http://www.pajamasmedia.com/instapundit-archive/archives/012585.php
” The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. ”
The whole passage is very much worth reading.
For the past 5000 years civilization have been at odds with the forces of barbarism, and luckily for us over time the former has proven stronger than the latter. In this current Israeli-Hamas struggle it seems fairly clear what each side represents. Using your women and children as shields and parading their dead bodies before the cameras are not marks of a civilized people, nor is visiting hospitals to shoot your injured political opponents. The political left and the leftist “international community” along with their media mouthpieces in Europe and the US must have a totally warped set of values to side with radical Islam in this and try to create the false impression that Israel is in the wrong when in actual reality, not the faux reality the left-wing media has tried to create, Israel is fully justified in retaliating. Although they should not let up until Hamas is completely annihilated, they probably will because they are after all a civilized people. Little mercy could be expected, however, if the situation were ever reversed.
After 60 years of conflict in the Midddle East you are either a fool or liar if your tell people that Israel has great intentions of not targeting civilians.
If Israel genuinely targets only terrorists, the civilians would be much much much lower.
In 1948 he Arabs were terrorized to leave their homes. Today, its the same except that the TV cameras are always rolling, so Israel has to say, “well, we hit that UN sanctuary by mistake’. Instilling fear in the natives is an old tradition.
To John M.
To your line “Little mercy could be expected, however, if the situation were ever reversed.”
What are you say??? There is NO mercy from the Israelis at Gaza and so you are saying that the other side can have less than NO mercy?
I have read interviews of Yassar Arafat. If somehow the Arabs out gun the Jews, there will be NO genocide. It’s a myth spread by people like you. They take a phase, such as “wipe Israel off the map” to mean genocide. That has been explained as similar to the fall of the Soviet Unions. No genocide occurred during that fall. According to my understanding, if Israel loses, the country will be renamed, the Law of Return for Jews will be nullified, some homes will be returned to their original owners, but the Jews are allowed to stay except for the real trouble makers who will be expelled to whence they came.
If after 60 years of very clear history you are still saying that Israel is the good guy and the Arabs are uncivilized savages as you just did, then I think that you are either a fool or a liar.
To Jimbo,
Referring to your quote “No nation on ePlanet Earth would tolerate a terrorist organization hurling rocket propelled explosives across their border murdering their citizens.”
Well, would any nation not react if another nation puts a total blockade on you and starves you on food, fuel and medicine ??? Or will you take that laying down ??? I guess you would.
Hamas gave Israel 6 months of ceasefire expecting that Israel would grant some relief from the blockade. Israel gave NOTHING in return for the ceasefire! Instead it was planning for a massive invasion and baited Hama to fire more toy rockets. Hams was stupid enough to do that and we see the result. All this is to instill fear in the natives. Israel has never been interested in peace and has always provoked the other side when peace seems to be getting close.
The West Bank has given up on fighting Israel and what do they get? More and expanded settlements !
You are a fool or a liar if after all these years you are still confused as to who are the invaders and who are the defenders.