Samantha Power: the Salon Interview
- 02.19.2008 - 12:27 PMIt 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.“
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February 19th, 2008 at 12:50 PM
Great Post, Mr. Pollak!!!
February 19th, 2008 at 12:58 PM
Naive and inexperienced candidates like Jimmy Carter brought us disasters 30 years ago that are not forgotten yet. Hussein Obama and Hillary Clinton are of the same category of candidates… Expect disasters if either of them gets elected in 08.
February 19th, 2008 at 1:07 PM
According to her Harvard faculty profile (http://ksgfaculty.harvard.edu/samantha_power), she spent 2005 to 2006 working in Senator Barack Obama’s office. More today at American Thinker in “Samantha Power and Obama’s Foreign Policy Team” (http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/02/samantha_power_and_obamas_fore_1.html)
February 19th, 2008 at 3:03 PM
“…to someone who for the most part simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
I long ago realized that Samantha Power is something of an idiot. Something tells me that her Harvard University credentials earlier impressed Noah Pollack. Sigh, one can hope that he soon learns that there are numerous second-rate “scholars” associated with this vastly overrated school. If nothing else, Power can take advantage of Harvard’s affirmative action policies.
Oh by the way, what does Marty Peretz have to say about Power? The last time I checked he was pretending that there was nothing to worry about. Is this still the case?
February 19th, 2008 at 3:21 PM
It seems to me that so many Democrats are “surface” thinkers, if you will. They think and suggest policy that doesn’t scratch that surface. Samantha Power is writing about how she thinks things are (or ought to be) and doesn’t do (or more likely, care about) the minimal research needed to get to the facts in this case. She has her world view and that’s that.
The same “surface” thinking pertains to things like Iraq too. They see difficulty now and suggest we get out. There’s no discussion of the (now) quite possible benefits down the line - a democratic Iraq in the ancient caliphate. Which would likely turn out to be a mortal blow to militant Islam.
If I may continue, same goes for taxes. They want the government to raise money (typically for entitlement programs) and default to the obvious and tax the rich to get that money. They don’t seem to understand or care that by lowering taxes you expand the tax base and thus generate MORE revenues for the govt (as the Bush tax cuts proved).
I love the reference to The Big Lebowski. Priceless. I believe there’s a Big Lebowski convention in Chicago in March. The Dude abides…
February 19th, 2008 at 4:42 PM
Mr. Pollack needs to develop reading comprehension skills.
His first point utterly misanalyzes Power’s answer. Power says the next U.S. president “must be able to walk and chew gum at the same time” because no single foreign policy challenge can be called the greatest. Her claim that no long-term peace can be achieved in the Middle East without Arab-Israeli rapprochement must be viewed in this regard.
One can disagree with this claim (although I happen to agree with it), but it is not the argument Pollack attempts to assign her. Simply, Power is not saying that’s the single most important foreign policy issue. She’s saying the next president must be able to handle more than one issue.
Pollack’s treatment of the Ahmadinejad also wrenches Power’s argument out of context. Power’s argument, which exists just above the passage he quotes, is that the U.S. must engage with Iran to blunt international perception that the U.S. rather than the Islamic Republic is the intransigent party. Pollack’s claim that the U.S. has tried multilateral activity (which is a half-truth at best) does not address this argument, so he fails to quote it.
It’s much easier to attack straw arguments. In this case, I’m glad I always click the links.
February 19th, 2008 at 4:55 PM
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.
Would it were true. Unfortunately, unless you are excluding from the list of “serious people” like James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Lee Hamilton, Tony Blair and Condi Rice, I think you severely underestimate the primacy of the “Arab-Israeli” situation to the thinking of many in the corridors of diplomatic power. There is a large sector of the foreign policy establishment that believes that Israeli surrender is the key to a utopia. Samatha Power fits right in with this ignoble group.
February 19th, 2008 at 5:22 PM
Jeff, I’ll happily defend my reading comprehension skills (speaking of which, my last name is spelled “Pollak,” not “Pollack”).
Power was asked a question about what she thinks the “biggest” foreign policy challenge facing the next president will be. Her reply was that peace will not be possible in the Middle East until a “modus viveni” is reached between Israel and the Arabs. She is thus staking the entirety of our Middle East policy on our ability to resolve the Israel-Arab situation. This reading seems indisputably clear, to me at least.
And indisputably foolish, for a few major reasons: 1) as much as Americans and Europeans who have a superficial knowledge of the region enjoy declaring that Israel is the lodestar of the Middle East, it’s just not the case. The region is unfortunately a lot more complicated than that, and is riven by a set of contests, rivalries, and hatreds that have nothing to do with the Jews. 2) Saying that Israel indeed is the key to all mythologies in the region is playing into the hands of the Middle East’s worst regimes, for whom the perpetuation of the war against Israel serves as a vital diversion. 3) And because (2) remains such a pernicious dynamic, the region’s tyrannies have always made the insolubility of the conflict one of their primary objectives, which is why these regimes fund Palestinian terrorism, provide terrorists safe haven within their borders, and do everything they can to ratchet up anti-Semitic hysteria in their societies. The upshot is that when naive American commentators say things like, “the Israeli-Arab conflict must be resolved before anything else,” what they really are saying is: we would like to embark on a project that any number of regimes and terror groups in the Middle East may scuttle if they so choose. This has been a longstanding, real-life phenomenon — please read a little bit of history if you don’t believe me. That’s why statements like Power’s lead me to believe that, as I said in my post, she is hopelessly naive.
February 19th, 2008 at 9:56 PM
Consider the scenario as related in the interview and think about whether there is anything odd about it - a successful academic ditches their Ivy-League uni career to jump onto the staff of a 1st year US Senator the first time she meets them because he read her book, agreed with what she had written and met her in person.
Sounds to me that a little intellectual flattery went a long way in this case.
February 20th, 2008 at 12:38 PM
Noah, I don’t much like any of the three major candidates today: Obama, Clinton, or McCain. But I think that Obama is the most dangerous because he is a superb demagogue, the most skillful at demagoguery of all three. Since his advisors include Zbig B & Samantha the not-so-cuddly kitty cat and a host of other unsavory folks, one reasonably concludes that Obama’s foreign policy will give us more of Zbig destructive foreign policy, following his disastrous performance as Carter’s national insecurity advisor. Under Zbig & Carter Egypt was made an ally of the USA, receiving about $$2 M per year, as I recall, while Sadat’s pro-Nazi sympathies as expressed in his book, Revolt on the Nile [ca. 1955], were ignored or minimized. Also, Khomeini was helped by Zbig to take over Iran. Bin Laden got his start as a jihadist fighting the Russians, with Zbig’s help. Meanwhile, Zbig did nothing positive to stop the Lebanese civil war and get Syria to end its occupation of most of Lebanon and to end the PLO’s use of Lebanon for its war on Israel.
Since Arab-Muslims in Israel, Egypt, Iraq, etc. had oppressed Jews for more than a thousand years in the status of dhimmi [along with Christians and other non-Muslim subjects of Muslim states], and since such dhimmi peoples had been severely persecuted at times, such as the Armenians, etc. [which Samantha seems not to know much about], then it is not reasonable for an informed person, much less a “human rights” advocate as Samantha claims to be, to place the causative burden of all of the Middle East’s conflicts at Israel’s door. After all, Sunnis & Shiites hated each other before Israel’s rebirth in 1948, likewise Middle Eastern Muslims hated and oppressed ME Christians [not only Armenians but Copts, Maronites, etc] and Jews long before 1948. Insofar as Obama as president might be advised by Zbig, Samantha, et Cie, then the world would be in for very dangerous shocks during his term.
McCain too has his drawbacks since James Baker, whose law firm, Baker Botts LLP, is a paid representative of Saudi Arabia in the USA, is one of those whom McCain admires. Hilary needs no comment.