======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
(I have to laugh at the knuckleheads at MRZine, WSWS.org, Global
Research et al ad nauseam who have been warning for the past 2 years
about Syria turning into the next Iraq. If there's anybody who
symbolizes "humanitarian intervention" better than Samantha Powers, I
can't think of them. These ferkakte "anti-imperialists" refuse to take
the bourgeoisie at its word. It has zero interest in dispensing
anti-aircraft weaponry into the hands of a guerrilla force whose
"moderate leader" says things like "The facts have proven beyond any
doubt that the claws of international politics are tainted and that the
world’s super powers are seeking, through the distribution of roles in
the open and behind closed doors, to undermine the legitimate interests
of the peoples of the world and trade in them by inciting sectarian
sentiments, and the examples are plenty: from Syria and the Middle East,
to Sudan and Rwanda, to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan." When will these
idiots wake the fuck up?)
NY Times June 5, 2013
Politics | News Analysis
Two Liberal Voices for Intervention, but Not in Syrian War
By MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON — In naming Susan E. Rice and Samantha Power to key national
security posts, President Obama has turned to two prominent advocates of
liberal interventionism, a foreign-policy credo that calls for the
United States to act aggressively to defend human rights – by military
means, if necessary.
Both are veterans of his 2008 campaign and have strong personal
relationships with Mr. Obama. But they will be working for a president
who has consistently resisted intervening in the most dire human-rights
calamity of the day, the civil war in Syria. Given Mr. Obama’s fixed
views, it is not clear whether even Ms. Rice and Ms. Power could prod
him into action.
Ms. Rice, who is becoming national security adviser, and Ms. Power, who
is replacing Ms. Rice as American ambassador to the United Nations,
teamed up in 2011, along with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton,
to persuade Mr. Obama to back a NATO-led intervention in Libya that was
designed to head off a slaughter of the rebels in Benghazi.
In her new role, Ms. Rice in particular will be able to exert even more
influence, occupying a West Wing office down the hall from a president
who has already concentrated foreign policy decision-making in the White
House.
But as Mr. Obama and his aides have long argued, Libya is no Syria. The
first was a clear-cut case in which air power could prevent Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi from killing thousands of rebels in their stronghold; the
second, a sectarian struggle, pits a regime with sophisticated air
defenses against rebels scattered throughout the country.
Neither Ms. Rice nor Ms. Power has spoken out publicly in favor of a
more aggressive American response to the blood bath in Syria, which is
perhaps not surprising, given Mr. Obama’s well-known views and their own
roles as rising stars in his administration.
Administration officials said that in the debate last summer about
whether to supply the rebels with arms – a proposal pushed by the
then-director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David H. Petraeus –
Ms. Rice sided with those who opposed it. Over time, however, officials
said, she has become more open to lethal aid, given the stalemate in the
civil war.
Gary Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at
Princeton University, said that in formulating its Syria policy, the
administration would have to answer a basic question.
“Do you think of Syria as being a Rwanda or a Bosnia, where human rights
concerns trumped everything?” he said. “Or do you see it as more like
Iraq, where it’s not clear there’s a good side to get behind?”
There are other voices for stronger action, including Secretary of State
John Kerry. He may find common cause with Ms. Rice on Syria even as he
struggles to carve out an influential role in an administration where
decision-making resides at the White House.
Ms. Power and Ms. Rice, who are friends, each bring their long,
sometimes painful histories to this issue.
For Ms. Power, who made her name as a journalist covering the wars in
the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia was a formative experience. In her book “A
Problem from Hell,” she presented a history of genocide in the 20th
century and a withering critique of the failure of the United States and
other countries to respond to them.
For Ms. Rice, who began her career in the National Security Council
during the Clinton administration, Rwanda was a crucible. President Bill
Clinton’s inaction in the face of genocide there fueled many of the
people who worked for him, including Ms. Rice, not to allow a repeat.
Years later, she told Ms. Power, who was then a journalist writing about
the episode, that “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis
again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in
flames if that was required.”
With the death toll in Syria surpassing 80,000, little sign that the
violence is ebbing, and the growing threat of a regional proxy war, Ms.
Rice and Ms. Power may face that reckoning again soon.
________________________________________________
Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu
Set your options at:
http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
