Obama’s Curious Foreign Policy Advisor
- 01.06.2008 - 4:05 PMToday on Fox News, Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisor Samantha Power stated that Obama is the only candidate who’s got Iraq right. Ms. Power’s own paper trail of mixed messages on Iraq, along with Obama’s stated Iraq stance, makes this claim quite a head-scratcher.
A Los Angeles Times opinion piece on March 5, 2007 finds Power hopeless on the prospect of a troop surge success. In her plea for the U.S. to withdraw, she writes:
It would be nice to think the surge of troops to Baghdad would help to staunch the flow. But with only one-third of the new troops on duty at any given time in a city of 6 million people, they will have no more success deterring the militias intent on carving out homogeneous Shiite or Sunni neighborhoods than U.S. forces have had to date.
She was wrong. Which she may have realized by July 29, when the New York Times ran her admiring review of the Petraeus-driven U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. In her recognition of the fact that the U.S. must dig in, She writes:
Sewall [author of the book’s introduction] rightly calls for the “risks and costs of counterinsurgency” to be spread across the American government, but notes this is not an overnight job.
[…]
The manual shows that the demands of counterinsurgency are greater than those the American public has yet been asked to bear. Sewall is skeptical that the public — now feeling burned by Iraq — will muster the will. . .
Now, as advisor to a candidate who deems any counter-insurgency cost too high, and who’s vowed to ask the American public to bear nothing in the way of the burden, Power says her boss has it right.
This “change” thing is getting out of hand.
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January 6th, 2008 at 8:58 PM
Practical people change their minds when a situation warrants it. Unprincipled ideologues and mercenaries flip flop whenever they can profit from it.
It’s no mystery what kind of person Mz Power is.
January 7th, 2008 at 8:42 AM
Miss Power is far more of a BDS-addled leftie than is acknowledged here. Her screeds against the administration in various op-eds over the past few years are filled with harsh invective with nothing to back it up. In the same book review Abe mentions in the post, here is but one of many examples: “…in Bush’s view, wartime demanded a strong commander in chief, and he would be far more effective prosecuting the war if he could free himself of the meddlesome legislative, judicial and even interagency checks fashionable in peacetime.” Right — her ability to peer into the mind of the commander-in-chief is perhaps one reason Obama likes her. This is the kind of sneering, insufferable, and of course never-backed-up-with-a-single-fact nonsense that works so well at Harvard but falls flat among any serious observer who isn’t a hyper-partisan Democrat.
It should be noted that in her review of the Counter-Insurgency field manual’s introduction, she is doing little more than sucking up to her titular boss (Sewell is the director of the Carr Center at Harvard, where Power is a worker bee). Being a human rights/genocide watcher, in normal times it would be bizarre that the Times would pick her to write such a review, but it hasn’t been normal times at the paper of record for a long, long time. The substance of the strange introduction by Sewell is another matter, one worthy of a post in itself, but I won’t digress.
In short, Abe is way too kind to Obama’s top foreign policy advisor.
January 7th, 2008 at 8:59 AM
Samantha Power is an intellectual mediocrity who holds a position at Harvard University only because of her gender. She is supposedly proof of its so-called successful “diversity” program. Power apparently places her wet finger into the air to see which way the leftist zeitgeist is blowing. The woman should not be taken seriously. She is definitely not another Jeane Kirkpatrick.
January 7th, 2008 at 10:40 AM
I think people like Obama are the ones who got Iraq WRONG. Their vote not to go to war speak volumes and shows their true sentiments towards the role of the US in the world. I am troubled by this man and hope he wouldn’t be the democratic nominee.
January 7th, 2008 at 3:35 PM
“I am troubled by this man and hope he wouldn’t be the democratic nominee.”
Nobody can possibly win the Democratic Party nomination unless they are dishonest pacifists. Tacitly, the consensus view within the Democratic Party is that the United States causes most of the trouble in the world. It is ultimately our fault if the victims of American policy wish to murder us. George McGovern won the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Democrats.
February 28th, 2008 at 12:54 AM
Winston has it wrong. Obama did not vote not to go to war. That vote took place in our Congress in 2002. Obama was at that time a member of the Illinois legislature. He spoke out against the war, but not being in a national office at the time, his opinion mattered not at all in Washington, D.C. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in the fall of 2004 and took his seat in January of 2005. You have every right to be troubled about the possibliity of this man becoming the nominee of the Democratic Party.