(Editor’s note. Sometimes I write ‘em short, and sometimes I can’t shut up. This is one of the latter occasions.)
Several hundred news cycles ago, Samantha Power’s autobiography/memoir The Education of an Idealist was in the news. Well, I am nothing if not slow, so I am just getting caught up with Samantha, who really has a variety of tales to tell—not just “years in power” memoir but a full-fledged autobiography, telling the difficult story of her difficult relationship with her star-crossed Irish dad— “all too Irish,” it seems—who apparently drank himself to death after her mother took Samantha and fled to the U.S. to escape him, as well as her struggles to deal with such an overload of Irish guilt, along with her (successful) struggles to have children and be a mother along with a high-powered career that frequently sent her flying around the world at inopportune times.
I’m not going to write (much) about Samantha’s private life, except to note that much of what she has to say is honest and moving, because I’d much rather take issue with her over policy. As many have pointed out, Power’s title doesn’t really follow through—we don’t get the “education of an idealist”—a painful initiation into the trade-offs one must accept to get any policy accepted and the further limitations inherent in actually implementing that policy, not to mention the dreaded “law” (really, the likelihood) of unintended consequences. Power certainly encountered frustrations in her career, working in then Senator Barack Obama’s office as a foreign policy fellow, and later as a member of the National Security Council and ultimately as ambassador to the United Nations. But in fact she never learns any painful lessons—at least, she never admits to having done so. Her basic policy prescription, honed from the “lessons” she extracted from “history” in her 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, remains unchanged: America must never “look away”, must never refuse to act to avert large-scale human suffering for “politic” reasons. Yet, as my headline suggests, I’m going to accuse her of “looking away” on a variety of occasions, when she finds it convenient to do so.
Power’s story is intriguing, and often impressive, on a number of levels. As I say, I’m not really interested in her personal story, so when I read The Education of an Idealist I skipped ahead to her college years, and the pivotal event in her career if not her life. Power’s book gives us a glimpse into the world of hyper-competitive and hyper-ambitious youth. A gifted athlete and obsessed with sport when young, Power got herself into Yale. But, rather like Bill Clinton at Yale Law, Power didn’t go to Yale to, you know, go to Yale. She tells us almost nothing about her classmates, or courses, or professors, because, frankly, they’re not all that important. The important thing for people like Power about going to a college like Yale is that it gives you access to the “real world”, the world of high-end internships, where you get the opportunity to impress people who are important in the real world, who will then introduce you to even more important people in the real world, giving you the chance to impress them in turn. It’s almost as if what you know is less important than who you know!
The people that Power wanted to impress were in what she calls “sports journalism”, though what she really means is “television.” She was interning at the Atlanta, Ga. CBS affiliate in 1989, taking notes on a Braves baseball game, not in person but at the station via a “feed,” when she saw another feed, from Beijing, and ended up watching the now world-famous “tank man” encounter in real time:
I did not respond to these events by suddenly proclaiming a newfound intention to learn Mandarin and become a human rights lawyer. But while I knew little about the protests before they started, or even about China itself, I could not shake my discomfort at having been contentedly taking notes on a Braves game while students my age were being mowed down by tanks.
For the first time, I reacted as though current events had something to do with me. I felt, in a way that I couldn’t have explained in the moment, that I had a stake in what happened to the lone man with his shopping bags.
The feed ended in the most dramatic way possible, by going dead. This was reality: terrible things were happening, but “truth” could vanish at the touch of an unseen button. Power ended up shifting her gears pretty dramatically, traveling to Europe a year later and taking advantage of the collapse of the Iron Curtain to venture into Central and Eastern Europe instead of making contacts in television:
But before venturing east, we traveled to Amsterdam, where we visited the Anne Frank House. I had read about the Holocaust in high school, but it was during my travels that summer that the horror of Hitler’s crimes hit me deeply. Just as observing Tank Man—a single protester—had helped me see the broader Chinese struggle for human rights, so too did visiting Anne Frank’s hiding place bring to life the enormity of the Nazi slaughter. I learned a lesson that stayed with me: concrete, lived experiences engraved themselves in my psyche far more than abstract historical events.
This passage encapsulates Power’s thinking: immediate emotion is truth. It is the standard by which she measures all things. Anyone with some sense of European history and knows Anne Frank’s story, who sees her pathetic hiding place, the sad, desperate refuge of gentle people facing an inhuman reality, will be overwhelmed by the hopeless desire to change what cannot be changed, what has already happened. “If I could only go back in time.” For Power, this overwhelming emotion cannot be “refuted” or explained away. Any attempt at “explanation” is an attempt at exoneration, a betrayal of the truth that one feels. Throughout both A Problem From Hell and The Education of an Idealist, Power relies constantly and naively on the limitless power of hindsight: since we know what happened, the people at the time should have known what was going to happen and are responsible for having failed to stop it. As a sort of “corollary” to this way of thinking, whatever terrible things should have been prevented could have been prevented. There is no such thing as an “acceptable” excuse.
To expiate her sense of guilt and helplessness, after graduating from Yale Power took a job at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonprofit think tank then ensconced in Washington, DC’s then less than fashionable West End,1 where she soon got to know and admire the president, Morton Abramowitz, who had formerly held a number of distinguished positions with the State Department, including the ambassadorship to Turkey. She was also quite struck by a frequent visitor, Jeane Kirkpatrick: “As I watched from the back of the room, I was struck by her bluntness, which seemed to puncture the otherwise clubby, polite atmosphere. Men usually dominated the proceedings, but she was a notable exception.”2
But sitting behind a desk and attending staff meetings doesn’t save Anne Frank. Through Abramowitz, Power got to know Fred Cuny, a swaggering do-gooder who, though she doesn’t say so explicitly, surely must have reminded her of her bad-boy father. Both Mort and Fred were following events in the collapsing state of Yugoslavia, particularly in the province of Bosnia, which had the most ethnically mixed population and where, in early 1992, atrocities were already taking place. In his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton had compared conditions in Bosnia to the Holocaust and promised to “stop the slaughter of civilians”, though once in office he was markedly slow in getting around to it. Power, writing articles and making contacts, hustled her way into becoming a “foreign correspondent” (her words) headed for Bosnia, sneaking into the office of Foreign Policy magazine after hours in a display of DC-style chutzpah to forge a letter denoting her as such so that she could get a press pass from the UN.
Power spent several years in what had been Yugoslavia, leading the usually unglamorous life of a foreign correspondent, and facing real danger on occasions, though, as she described it, the most harrowing incident during her stay was a wild car ride down a mountain with someone else at the wheel. Scary, yeah, but when she went back to the States and enrolled in Harvard Law, she put a 40-mm shell on her mantle as a conversation piece. Poser much, honey?
According to Power, she went to Harvard both for the prestige and her interest in international law, though she doesn’t say specifically if she was already familiar with the efforts of Raphael Lemkin to craft an international mechanism that would mandate international intervention to prevent genocidal incidents like those in Bosnia. In fact, she tells us almost nothing about her time at Harvard, other than that she found the law deadly dull and that she did not always excel in the sort of classroom cut and thrust so cherished by Ivy League law professors.
After she graduated from Harvard Law, Power set to work on the book that would put her seriously on the map, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, describing America’s repeated failures, as she saw it, to intervene in repeated instances of genocide throughout the Twentieth Century.
In her account of her relationship with Morton Abramowitz, Power says that she felt he was a man who could teach her how the world works. It is “interesting” that in both The Education of an Idealist and A Problem From Hell, she displays, often unconsciously, both shrewd understanding and continued ignorance.
In The Education of an Idealist, Power describes her struggle to get her book published, losing her original, “big” publisher—Random House—which forces her to resort to Marty Peretz, then owner and publisher of the New Republic, who had published a number of Power’s articles from Bosnia and had wanted to publish an earlier version of the book. Peretz agrees to take on A Problem From Hell and then promptly disappears from Power’s narrative. This is a bit much.
Peretz may be all but forgotten now, but back in 2002, when the book was published, Marty was intensely “controversial”, the acknowledged leader of a now all but extinct band, the liberal neocons. Peretz was a secular, assimilated Jew whose emotional life clearly revolved around Israel. The New Republic, now as forgotten as Marty, was a still legendary liberal publication, which, thanks to Marty, many liberals regarded as intensely illiberal. Peretz was immensely receptive to Power’s basic argument, that genocide, as “pure evil”, creates an absolute moral demand on “everyone” to intervene, regardless of cost, though the United States, as the most powerful nation in the world, must inevitably take the lead in every instance. The past repeated failures of the U.S. to do so create a staggering load of guilt that should impel us forward with even greater moral urgency.
All of this is exactly what Peretz wanted to hear. He did not want to argue that the U.S. had a unique moral duty to ensure the survival and indeed the flourishing of Israel—even though he surely believed it to be true. He wanted to argue that the U.S. had such a duty for every beleaguered people. He wanted to argue that American foreign policy must have a moral base, rather than a Bismarckian calculation of “interest”, because, if the U.S. ever did approach foreign policy amorally, as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger often seemed to do, Israel would be toast. “Israel is a millstone around our necks,” intoned that great Presbyterian John Foster Dulles,3 and in terms of interest that was surely true. Power’s book, which argued passionately to the contrary, putting the whole focus on genocide as, in effect, the question for our time, made Peretz’s argument more powerfully than he ever could.
Power’s craft in omitting all this “inside baseball” from her book hardly ends there. Here’s how she describes the moment when she learned she had won the Pulitzer Prize:
A month after the US invasion [of Iraq], my publisher [i.e., Marty “No Name” Peretz] called and informed me that A Problem from Hell had won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.
“Are you sure?” I said, my knees buckling beneath me.
Now, winning a Pulitzer is, if anything, more politicized than winning an Oscar. Peretz had surely been plotting this as soon as Power came to him with the book, pulling in chits from every stop on the Acela’s route and all points in between. Yet Power tells it as if she didn’t even know she’d been nominated. Just a babe in the woods!
Reading A Problem From Hell—a term used by a Clinton aide expressing frustration that it was impossible to “finesse” the terrible images of human suffering occurring in Bosnia—one is a little amazed that the insistent moral passion of Power’s repeated narratives of 20th century horrors blinded critics to the manifest impossibility of the “solutions” that Power urges in the book. Despite being a history major at Yale—if she was ever there except to accept prizes—she has no historical sense at all.
Though it comes up over and over again, this failing is most manifest in her first chapter, on the massacre of the Armenian people by the Ottoman Empire in World War II. Power uses the same strategy in her first chapter, on the Armenian genocide, that she will employ throughout the rest of the book: an enormous tragedy begins to take shape, so enormous that most will not believe it, but one lone, brave individual realizes what is happening, is determined to publicize the horror and hold the world accountable. Often, he fails, at least in real time, and the tragedy rolls on unimpeded. But at least he raised his voice, and, eventually, his efforts receive the recognition they deserve, even if, as is all too often the case, only posterity profits from his efforts, and the not the people he hoped to save. (Michael Lewis’s upper-middle-class intellectual thrillers follow a similar pattern.)
I think it’s too harsh to say that Power is simply writing about herself, about her efforts to prevent the mass murders in Bosnia, but it is fair, I think, to say that she unconsciously adopts the “60 Minutes” approach to history, casting every event as a black and white struggle of good against evil. Over and over again, she “thinks” in television—whatever provokes an “instinctive” emotional reaction is true. For example, she prints a letter that Senate staffer Peter Galbraith wrote to his children before going on a dangerous fact-finding tour of Iraq to report on Saddam Hussein’s brutal oppression of the Kurds and a letter of her own to her newly born son when venturing to Iraq during the Obama administration. No doubt both letters were sincerely meant but it is absurd to distribute such letters beyond their intended audience. Does anyone expect such letters to be “true”, to prove that the authors are telling the truth? Of course not. Parading private emotions to make a point about public policy is ridiculous.
Power’s hero for her Armenian chapter is Henry Morgenthau Sr., a German-born Jew whom Woodrow Wilson appointed as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.4 In May of 1915, the Triple Entente—Great Britain, France, and Russia—already at war with Turkey, publicly condemned the Ottomans for “crimes against humanity and civilization.” According to Power, “The United States, determined to maintain its neutrality in the war, refused to join the Allied declaration. President Woodrow Wilson chose not to pressure either the Turks or their German backers. It was better not to draw attention to the atrocities, lest U.S. public opinion get stirred up and begin demanding U.S. involvement. Because the Turks had not violated the rights of Americans, Wilson did not formally protest.”
Implicitly, Power is assuming that the U.S. had the same international heft in 1915 that it had in the year 2000. But it did not. There was no way to “pressure” either the Ottomans or the Germans. Both empires were fighting for their very existence—and, of course, both would fall into the dustbin of history in a few short years. As for “lest U.S. public opinion get stirred up and begin demanding U.S. involvement,” that was ridiculous. The U.S. had a “great fleet”, but virtually no army. Yet Power speaks as though a roused public opinion might force Wilson to create a million-man army, a huge arms industry, and an enormous merchant marine to ferry it across the sea and supply it. In 1915 the federal budget was about $0.75 billion (in 1915 dollars). In 1918 it was close to $13 billion. Does Power really think that public opinion would demand the largest war in American history, whose expense would increase the federal budget by more than a thousand percent, put over a million men into military service, cost tens of thousands of lives and twice that number of casualties, to be fought thousands of miles away against a crumbling empire that posed no threat to us, which was already under attack at the hands of three powerful European empires, merely to save the lives of a small people utterly unknown to us, regardless of their suffering?
Clearly, Power considered none of these issues. She assumes without thinking that the U.S. possessed the same military and economic dominance in 1915 as it possesses today, which is an utterly grotesque assumption to make. She also makes the extremely convenient assumption, throughout the book, that “pressure” short of military action can halt brutal massacres, even though, in all the incidents she records in her book, “pressure” did not work. Throughout the post-Cold War era, in fact, the U.S. has tried endless “pressure” on “rogue governments”—principally Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—and has never achieved the desired results. In the great set piece of her book, Bosnia, where she was personally involved, the moment of triumph comes when the U.S. abandons “pressure” and uses military force instead.
Power devotes three chapters to what is for many the defining horror of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler’s genocidal assault upon Europe’s Jews. Much of her narrative is built about the now famous struggle of Raphael Lemkin to define the crime of genocide and create effective international means of preventing it, achieving the first part of his goal when the General Assembly of the United Nations approved the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide shortly before his death.
In her autobiography, Power discusses her historical interest in the Holocaust and the books she read about the Nazis monstrous perversion of humanity, books arguing that the Allies could and should have done more, at least, if nothing else, bombing the railroad tracks that led to the death camps. But she doesn’t mention William Rubinstein’s 1997 study, The Myth of Rescue, and it would be interesting to know what she thought of it if she had read it. It is “obvious” that the U.S. could and should have had a more relaxed immigration policy following World War I than it did. About half of Germany’s estimated 600,000 Jews escaped from Nazi Germany, and more surely could have if the U.S. had been willing to accept them. But it’s important to remember that there were millions of people in post World War I Europe who would have been more than happy to escape that battered continent if they only could, and giving Jews priority would have been politically impossible, and, in fact, unreasonable, considering that before World War II mass murders were occurring not in Germany but the Soviet Union. Furthermore, Rubinstein claims in his book that many Jews could have escaped from Germany, but waited until it was too late. (Walter Laqueur provides a hostile review, which I did not consider convincing, for Rubinstein’s book here.)5
In The Myth of Rescue, Rubinstein devotes a full chapter to refuting the charge that Power, along with so many others, assumes is irrefutable, that the Allies should have bombed the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz, or indeed Auschwitz itself, pointing out that Allied bombers couldn’t even have reached Auschwitz prior to late 1943, and that by the time Jewish groups had proposed that the U.S. act, the war was drawing to a close. Auschwitz, according to Rubinstein, was effectively shut down before the elaborate planning necessary for an effective bombing campaign could have been completed. (And, in fact, the massive bombing raids, even at well-established targets, were often minimally effective.) But Power isn’t interested in this sort of historical detail. Since the U.S. successfully bombed targets in Bosnia without the loss of a single American life in 1995, they could have done so in 1944.
Power devotes a significant portion of the book to Lemkin’s struggle, carried on by others after his death, to both define genocide and establish an international agreement forbidding it. His definition, however, has provided significant problems. Lemkin defined “genocide” as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: 1) Killing members of the group; 2) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; 3) Deliberately inflicting on the group the conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 4) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; 5) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Lemkin’s definition reflects what has come to be called “19th century nationalism”, when it was assumed that the “modern” nation state constituted the highest form of civilization. Power, who presumably went to law school specifically for a career spent in international law seeking to enforce the convention, doesn’t seem to really understand this. If she did, she might have wondered the extent to which the convention’s strictures applied to the U.S. treatment of both African slaves and American Indians. Didn’t the U.S. government authorize, allow, or itself commit any number of acts against these peoples “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such”? Is it “surprising” that the U.S. condoned genocidal behavior by other nations when it had so frequently engaged in such acts itself?
Power’s own gloss on the convention is as follows:
What mattered was that one set of individuals intended to destroy the members of a group not because of anything they did but because of who they were. If the General Assembly passed the convention, nobody would be immune from punishment—not leaders, public officials, nor private citizens. The treaty would enshrine a new reality: States would no longer have the legal right to be left alone. Interfering in a genocidal state’s internal affairs as Morgenthau had tried to do was not only authorized but required by the convention.
Never does Power address the great, the overwhelming flaw in Lemkin’s plan: that invasions of another country are inevitably political decisions—and incredibly dangerous and disruptive ones at that—that never should be, and never can be, undertaken on the basis of objective “facts”, which, in any case are always subject to endless dispute. It is absurd to think that written agreements can tie the hands of governments and force them to undertake immensely costly, potentially disastrous, actions, when the interests of their own populations are not threatened, merely because it is “right” to do so. In her catalogue of missed opportunities, Power omits the greatest peacetime bloodbaths of all time, occurring in Mao Zedong’s China, because of course no one could imagine invading China, and no one would today, even though China’s treatment of “dissidents” certainly borders on Lemkin’s definition of genocide.
Later on in the book, Power expresses repeated frustration with countries, like the U.S., that seek to avoid their responsibilities under the convention on the grounds that the acts complained of, though brutal, do not constitute “genocide”—even though Lamkin’s goal was to define a “unique” crime, uniquely horrible, not “just” murder, or even “just” mass murder, which would create an inescapable moral/legal duty on the part of all nations—all nations party to the genocide treaty,6 that is—to intervene to prevent it. In fact, when Power actually held an important role in the U.S. government during the Obama Administration, she was noticeably unpicky in playing the genocide card in order to justify intervention. “Genocide” as Lemkin had carefully defined it was not taking place—nor was there any danger of it taking place—in either Libya or Syria, where both Power and Obama advocated intervention, or in Afghanistan, where they both insisted on maintaining it. They rely on written documents to justify what are necessarily political decisions, and, when the written word no longer suffices, appeal to higher, unwritten moral law to justify what are, of course, simply more political decisions, and poorly thought out ones that.
I have frequently berated Power—and I will again—for her complete contempt for any “realist”, not to mention “realpolitik”, considerations when dealing with mass murders or genocide. But there is one chapter in A Problem From Hell in which Power does picture the U.S. and other countries as struggling to find the “least bad” course of action when all of them are ugly, the chapter devoted to monstrous Pol Pot regime that took power in Cambodia in 1975 following the withdrawal of U.S. troops—and U.S. support—from Vietnam. Although certainly not a “leftist”, with her pronounced preference for U.S. intervention overseas, Power certainly is a liberal, and as such it’s really not possible for her to suggest that we should have “stayed the course” in Vietnam. But if we were “wrong” not to invade Cambodia and halt the communists’ bloodthirsty rampage that left over 1.5 million dead out of a population of less than 8 million—and this is what Power says, implicitly if not explicitly—why were we “right” to leave Vietnam? Although the communists killed “only” about 15,000 “landlords” and other bad people when they took over in North Vietnam, about 600,000 Catholics had fled to the south, and the communist “record” for mass murder in Russia, China, and North Korea was hardly reassuring.
Eventually, of course, it was the Vietnamese who “solved” the Cambodian crisis by invading that country and putting an end to the killing. The Vietnamese intervention was not particularly costly, an embarrassment to those in the U.S. who claimed that invading Cambodia would be “another Vietnam.” Power quotes without comment a number of people saying things both before and after the massacres began that they perhaps wish they hadn’t said—both George McGovern and Noam Chomsky pooh-poohing concerns about what the communists would do when they took power in 1975, McGovern saying that he expected the new regime to be “run by some of the best-educated, most able intellectuals in Cambodia,” while Chomsky wrote an article applauding a study that supposedly “proved” that no mass executions were taking place, even though mass executions always take place after a communist takeover.
As Power explains, the Vietnamese action was particularly difficult for the U.S., and other countries, to “assess.” The U.S. wanted the killing in Cambodia to stop, but Communist China supported the Pol Pot regime and opposed the newly united communist Vietnam because it was largely a protégé of the Soviet Union. According to Power, the U.S. didn’t want to offend China because it wanted to encourage the split between it and the Soviet Union, so the U.S. condemned the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia as a violation of the UN charter. (Conservatives who never tire of sneering at the Carter administration’s naïveté ought to read this chapter.)
Power, caught between two wrongs—the Cambodian genocide and the unprovoked invasion of another country—can’t seem to process the matter, all but screaming “Does not compute! Does not compute!” There was also the problem, mentioned but never resolved, that the mass murders didn’t really constitute “genocide” as Lemkin had defined it—though Power invariably prefers an “expansive” definition of genocide, because she’s almost always on the side of intervention.
Fortunately for Power, “history” came to her rescue, because the Vietnamese invasion was not particularly bloody. The killing stopped, while Vietnam did not embark on a course of conquest, as the right loudly and constantly claimed it would. Shockingly, the dominoes remained upright.
Power can’t resist coming down in favor of endorsing rather than condemning the Vietnamese invasion, but doesn’t notice that the U.S. was, in effect, able to eat its cake and have it too: the killing in Cambodia stopped, unaffected by the U.S. condemnation of Vietnam’s action, a conveniently empty gesture that avoided alienating the Chinese without endangering the Cambodians. Power, as she always does, refrains from examining realpolitik “excuses” for not engaging in the sort of virtuous interventions that she champions. Was it “reasonable” for the U.S. to implicitly side with a genocidal regime, which was nonetheless at an end, to gain favor with China, thus weakening our great adversary, the Soviet Union? Even more to the point, wasn’t it “effective”? The massacres were halted, while relations between the U.S. and China remained amicable. This is the sort of awkward question that Power generally feels is immoral to ask, much less answer, and so she never even considers them.
Power discusses in some detail the “awkward” position of Sen. George McGovern, who after optimistically praising the Pol Pot regime when it first took over, became a strong advocate of intervention to halt the wholesale massacres, prompting Dean Rusk to “thank” McGovern, with irony, for giving him a lesson in irony. But was Power “agreeing” with Rusk, not merely that McGovern was a hypocrite but that he was wrong to oppose the U.S. decision to back South Vietnam with hundreds of thousands of ground troops? Power carefully leaves this question unanswered. She has a habit of quoting “pregnant” statements by historical figures without saying whether she agrees with them, which can amount to little more than using hindsight to make important people look stupid.
But were the two cases of Vietnam and Cambodia really “on all fours”, as the lawyers (of which Power is one) like to say. If Dean Rusk and the other members of the Johnson administration had known what they were getting into, it’s hard to believe that any would have supported Johnson’ decision to send U.S. ground troops in large numbers. On the other hand, if Power did support U.S. intervention against the Pol Pot regime, why not against the Viet Cong, and why not, indeed, support Gen. MacArthur against Harry Truman in the question of whether to attempt the subjugation of North Korea? There are many reasons for differentiating between intervening in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Korea, but this leads to the sort of “practical” reasoning that Power hates. She pretends that moral values always provide a perfect guide to policy, and that there’s never a question as to whether intervention might do more harm than good. Very much like Hillary Clinton, for Power, the rhetorical question “And do nothing?” overwhelms all argument.7
I wish a lot of people would read Power’s chapter on Iraq and the Kurds and the U.S. I have long complained about American deceit, hypocrisy, and ignorance regarding the leadup to “Iraq I”—most bitterly, perhaps, here, but most extensively here. Power recounts the Reagan and Bush I administrations’ prolonged support of Saddam Hussein, essentially saving him from defeat when his unprovoked invasion of Iran in 1980 backfired, and describes how, over and over again, both administrations ignored Hussein’s atrocious treatment of the Kurds, justifying their inaction on realpolitik grounds—Hussein protected the Arab world (and Israel) from Iranian aggression and therefore merited U.S. support. In addition, Iraq had a strong appetite for American exports. Power repeatedly quotes, with scorn, from State Department memos and reports making these arguments, arguments that Power finds inherently immoral. One must never act for “practical” reasons. As for the argument that “using” Saddam against Iran is an example of using the lesser evil to achieve the greater good—as Roosevelt and Churchill “used” Stalin to defeat Hitler and as Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan all used Maoist China to undermine the Soviet Union—well, that’s not the kind of discussion Power wants to have. It somehow can’t be true, and it’s corrupting even to entertain the possibility that it might be.
Power largely tells the painful story of continued U.S. neglect/betrayal of the Kurds though her favorite narrative device, the brave, lonely hero, in this case Peter Galbraith, son of the famous economist John Kenneth Galbraith,8 the passionate misfit who gets himself disliked by the establishment because he cares too much— “he was notorious for arriving late to meetings, for dressing sloppily, and for acquiring tunnel vision on behalf of his causes.”
Amazingly, Power suffers a sudden lapse in her moral fervor just when one might think it would burn the brightest: the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1989. She makes no mention at all of a set of rather stunning facts: that the Bush administration privately gave Saddam assurances that the U.S. would not object if Iraq seized part (but only part) of the oil-rich country and only acted because Iraq set out to take the whole thing; and that President Bush publicly urged the oppressed minorities in Iraq to rise up and oust Hussein, even though his administration was committed to keeping Hussein in power, to continue in his role as counterweight to the ultimate U.S. Middle East bête noire, Iran. In other words, Bush was deliberately using the Kurds as cannon fodder, raising their hopes of freedom while actually condemning then to death, which is rather like sending the Machiavel to school, one might say.
It is staggering to me that Power makes no mention of this, engaging in a Machiavellian mind game that I am utterly unable to fathom. Who is she playing up to here? What is her “endgame”? I am totally at a loss, though an unkind guess is that since “Gulf I” resembled in appearance the sort of international moral crusade against “evil” that she is constantly advocating, though in substance it was the precise opposite, she is unwilling to expose its massive hypocrisy.
She continues her own hypocrisy by turning over the story of the Kurds’ betrayal to Bush administration itself:
On February 27, 1991, Bush declared a cease-fire only 100 hours after the ground war began. Alarmed at the prospect of “another Vietnam,” Bush had deferred to the wisdom of General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in calling off the war before sealing Hussein’s doom. Iraq was left with some 300,000 combat-ready troops and 2,000 tanks. Trusting in allied support and underestimating Baghdad’s resources, however, Iraqi Shiites began a rebellion in southern Iraq on March 2, and the Kurds rose up in the north on March 6.
This is nonsense. Bush was not “alarmed” at the prospect of another Vietnam. How could he be? Saddam had agreed to a cease-fire after literally 100 hours of ground combat. The VC never agreed to a cease fire. Nor was Bush deferring to Powell’s “wisdom”—the content of said wisdom Power leaves undefined. The Bush administration had decided beforehand to leave Saddam in power. The purpose of the invasion was to discipline Saddam, to keep him in his place, not to remove him. President Bush himself, along with then secretary of defense Dick Cheney and secretary of state Jim Baker, all testified to this. Power does describe the plight of the Kurds after their betrayal, but never points to the fact that Bush deliberately lured them into a rebellion that he had decided beforehand would not be allowed to succeed.
Power provides further hypocrisy in her discussion of the decision of the U.S. to literally “stand down” when Saddam used his helicopter force to murder Kurdish rebels:
When the United States had negotiated its cease-fire with Iraq earlier in the month, it had not insisted upon banning Iraqi military helicopter flights. U.S. commander Norman Schwarzkopf later said he had been “suckered” into permitting their limited use for liaison purposes only. It was these helicopters that now became Iraq’s ultimate terror weapon against the Kurds. Because the helicopters had delivered poison gas against the Kurds in 1987 and 1988, many Kurds fled ahead of Iraqi counterattacks.
Again, nonsense. The U.S. held the whip hand in Iraq. General Schwarzkopf could have told Saddam “We never agreed to this. If you don’t cease operations in one hour, I’m going to shoot down every helicopter you’ve got in the sky and destroy every one you’ve got on the ground.” What would Saddam do? Sue the U.S.? Take us to court? Complain to the UN? Bush allowed this to happen because he wanted it to happen, wanted to leave Saddam in the driver’s seat to continue his role as the main roadblock to the feared expansion of Iranian power. I simply don’t understand why Power, after denouncing American complicity in Saddam’s crimes for a long chapter, suddenly covers that complicity up when it reaches its zenith. She even concludes with words of praise for the Bush administration, which, pressured by the Turkish government, struggling with hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees from Iraq, eventually launched “Operation Provide Comfort” to allow the refugees to return to Iraq safely:
On April 16, 1991, the United States joined with its allies and launched Operation Provide Comfort, carving out a “safe haven” for Kurds north of the thirty-sixth parallel in northern Iraq. Allied ground forces would set up relief camps in Iraq, and U.S., British, and French aircraft would patrol from the skies.162 Provide Comfort was perhaps the most promising indicator of what the post–Cold War world might bring in the way of genocide prevention. Under the command of Lieutenant General John M. Shalikashvilli, some 12,000 U.S. soldiers helped patrol the region as part of a 21,000-troop allied ground effort. This marked an unprecedented intervention in the internal affairs of a state for humanitarian reasons. Thanks to the allied effort, the Iraqi Kurds were able to return home and, with the protection of NATO jets overhead, govern themselves.
Though she doesn’t mention it, Morton Abramowitz, her mentor from the Carnegie Endowment, was ambassador to Turkey at that time. She also doesn’t stress, to the extent that she might have, that this “unprecedented intervention” was largely due to complaints from Turkey that she was being forced to bear the weight of the humanitarian catastrophe so largely resulting from the brutal realpolitik of George I.
A Problem From Hell was very much in the news, as was Power, when the administration of George II launched Gulf War II, and Power confused a lot of people by opposing the invasion, claiming, correctly, that it was in effect a unilateral intervention and even going so far as to say, again correctly, that the intervention could weaken our national security instead of improving it:
The issue, though, is whether the United States can be, in a sense, the unilateral guardian of human rights and whether the intervention itself won’t have destabilizing consequences, both in terms of our security, the very security in whose name we’re really launching this intervention, and in the name of international principles like human rights, international justice, international stability.
Power made the comments on a televised “debate” with pro-interventionist liberal Jonathan Chait, who worked for the New Republic at the time, reflecting the vociferously pro-interventionist views of editor/publisher Marty Peretz. The build up to the invasion was an intensely “political” time, with the stakes for would-be public figures like Power much higher than they had been prior to 9/11, so it’s not surprising that Power hedged her bets a little, particularly she was running directly counter to Peretz, who had, after all, given her the opportunity to make herself famous by publishing her book. Power damned with faint praise the likely outcome for the Iraqis—“An American intervention likely will improve the lives of the Iraqis. Their lives could not get worse, I think it’s quite safe to say”—a statement that in fact proved to be optimistic.
In The Education of an Idealist Power repeats her statements of opposition to intervention in Iraq, which were in fact quite reasonable. However, she doesn’t pursue the “obvious”, that the Bush administration invaded, not to “free” Iraq but to use that country as the center for a massive build up of American military power that would dominate the Middle East for decades to come, a staggering exercise in both hubris and hypocrisy—and, as it emerged, incompetence as well. Power, though she warned that the invasion might decrease rather than improve American security, makes no mention of the fact that Saddam played no role in the 9/11 attacks, that the “Axis of Evil” that the U.S. was supposedly setting out to destroy consisted of three nations—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—who played no role in the 9/11 attacks and indeed had almost nothing to do with one another.
In The Education of an Idealist, Power describes her visit to Baghdad, and catching sight of the US embassy, “a $740 million fortress larger than Vatican City”, a fortress which, if there were any justice in the world—Spoiler Alert: THERE ISN’T ANY—would bear the name “Tomb of Ozymandias”. One might have thought this encounter would be food for speculation on the vanity of human wishes, or the staggering cost of America’s utterly wrong-headed war on terror, invented by the Bush administration and very little modified by its successor, which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and wasted trillions of dollars, but Samantha doesn’t think that way. Even though she opposed the invasion of Iraq in particular, she offers no real critique of the fraudulent “War on Terror” as a whole—and she offers no discussion at all of the question of whether the constant U.S. intervention in the Middle East, the first Gulf War, in particular, and the continuing presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia after that war, actually led to the 9/11 attacks,9 nor whether the constant continuing intervention of U.S. forces in Middle Eastern countries—all in the name of virtue of course—don’t continue to weaken our security rather than strengthen it.
Nonetheless, Power’s prescient and praiseworthy opposition to Gulf II in real time, coupled with her Pulitzer, helped set her up for what proved to be the biggest break in a career already filled with big ones—a sit down with then Senator Barack Obama in 2005. Power’s relationship with Obama provides much of the most interesting information in her memoir. As other reviewers have noted, the two had a lot in common and fit together very well. Both came from unhappy, though not poor homes, both proved exceptionally skilled at navigating the chilled and choppy waters of big time Ivy League competition, and both had real world street cred that their more conventional would be peers could only envy. Barack was black, after all—you can’t beat that—and Samantha had her 40-mm shell.
Power notes Obama’s modesty—acknowledging how much of his meteoric rise had been due to good luck—but also noting that, in effect, he was used to it. “His manner was at once regal and relaxed”, probably not the vibe most freshman senators give off, particularly in their first year on the job.
Power suggests that their common opposition to the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 helped bring them together, though also noting, with approval, that Obama, in his speech expressing his opposition, said he was only opposed to “dumb wars.” She continues by saying “Obama said he found it maddening that Bush administration officials had simply presumed that our soldiers would be welcomed as liberators in Iraq. For him, it seemed like malpractice to judge one’s prospects by one’s intentions, rather than making a strenuous effort to anticipate and weigh potential consequences.” An unsympathetic reviewer like myself can hardly help noticing that both Power—and, as Power tells it—Obama himself—forgot that skeptical view of intervention, in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Power in particular not only tends to judge her prospects by her intentions but expects to be judged by her intentions—and not by her outcomes— as well.
She does this despite frequently acknowledging that oppressed minorities, when freed from a common oppressor, immediately seek to oppress one another, quoting an old Balkan joke, “Why should I be an oppressed minority in your country when you can be an oppressed minority in my country?” But in her, and Obama’s, formulations of U.S. foreign policy, this street savvy quickly disappears.
For example, in her account of the U.S. intervention of Libya, Power accurately describes Muammar Qaddafi, the nation’s long-time leader, as a brutal dictator, but offers no intimation of impending genocide whatsoever (because there was none), yet in 1996, when Qaddafi’s son Seif al-Islam, promised “rivers of blood” if protests against the regime continued, well, “President Obama had seen enough, and on February 26th, he called on Qaddafi to step down”—which, considering the political climate in Libya, was scarcely less than asking Qaddafi to sign his own death warrant.
Notice that not only had the convention against genocide not been triggered by the “rivers of blood” speech, or anything else, and that the convention itself did not necessarily require the removal of the leader of the offending country from office. Yet somehow the convention makes the U.S. the political arbiter of the whole world. In fact, during the Obama administration spurious charges of “genocide” were a proxy and cover for the real goal of regime change, which had already failed disastrously in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
As Power tells it, it was Obama who provided the motive force for the intervention in Libya that ensued, leading from behind with a vengeance. At a meeting where the president’s advisors argue for or against intervention while the president remains silent, he offers a final comment: “I want real options. If we are in for a dime, we are in for a dollar. I’m not going to do some half-assed no-fly zone. To me, that’s the worst option. Either we go in heavy and fast or we should not pretend we are serious about stopping Qaddafi.” Does that sound like a cautious president? Does that sound like a president who wants to hear “Let’s walk away from this one”, particularly after the president himself had called for Qaddafi to “step down”? “Well, if he won’t go, he won’t go. It was always his decision.”
Of course, when the Libyan intervention turned out to be the third (third and counting) “U.S. tries to turn a Muslim nation into Vermont and fails disastrously” style trainwreck, Power waxes philosophical.10 Why do we keep doing this? It’s kind of like Charlie Brown and Lucy and football—well, with the lives of millions of people involved. But, out of sight, out of mind, right? “I used to muse over the fact that American political consultants who were paid millions of dollars to predict the behavior of the American electorate still frequently got their forecasts wrong—and they spoke English, talked to voters, and knew our history. Whatever our sincerity, we could hardly expect to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the culture was not our own.” I guess if we paid Samantha millions of dollars we might get better results. But not necessarily.
Power is at her absolute worst in describing her tortured efforts to cram down the abortive U.S. intervention in Syria down the unwilling throats first of the UN and then the American people. Nothing irritates Power more than the legal hairsplitting that government officials engage in to avoid doing something that she wants them to do—e.g., invade a foreign country, though she eagerly engages in similar hairsplitting to justify the same course of action.
As in the case of Libya, there is no question of genocide, but for Power the moral imperative for intervention remains the same, because the chemical weapons likely used by Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-Assad were just as bad. “They were weapons of mass destruction, capable of killing vast numbers of people at once. The nations of the world had come together after World War I to ban these weapons, and if the international consensus against their use were to break down, the lapse would almost certainly come back to haunt many more people (Americans included) in and out of conflict zones around the world.”
Of course, as I have argued many times, chemical weapons, though “weapons of terror”, are not weapons of mass destruction.11 It is more than plausible that the main reason they were banned after World War I is that no military believed that they were as effective as conventional weapons, which is undoubtedly the case even today. And as for the rest of Power’s florid predictions of future disasters—well, her crystal ball continues to be lacking.
Pushing the UN to act as the U.S. wanted in Syria proves frustrating to Power:
Despite the plethora of hard evidence [of Assad’s massive use of chemical weapons], most foreign ambassadors ducked the question of who had used chemical weapons. Exasperated, I argued at a closed meeting of the Security Council, “I know the Earth is round, not flat, but I haven’t personally traveled to the edge of the Earth to see if it ends abruptly. At a certain point, unless you have a reason for wanting not to believe—because you are a patron of the perpetrators or because you don’t want to get in the bad books of President Putin—you would accept the overwhelming evidence.”
The possibility that other nations might be getting tired of being used by the U.S. to ratify the American agenda in the Middle East, which might not be theirs, never enters Power’s head. She’s unselfish! She’s on the side of good! At the same time, Power pushes for the president to engage in an end run around the U.S. Congress—which is the branch of government that holds the responsibility of, you know declaring war:
Although the Constitution designates the President as Commander in Chief of the armed forces, it gives Congress the power to declare war. Over the past several decades, presidents have argued that the limited nature and scope of their military operations meant they were not “at war” as such, allowing them to use military force without congressional approval. However, the 1973 War Powers Resolution stipulated that, when Congress has not authorized a military operation, the President must report the action to Congress within forty-eight hours and remove US armed forces from “hostilities” within sixty days. Presidents have generally gotten around the sixty-day requirement by arguing that US hostilities were not continuous, allowing the “clock” to stop and then reset again. Indeed, during his first term, Obama himself had contended that he was in compliance with the War Powers Resolution during the 222-day military campaign in Libya because US involvement was sufficiently limited as to not constitute “hostilities” or require the automatic sixty-day pullout.
Smart, right? That’s how you make the law work for you instead of against you!
To Power’s disappointment and disapproval, however, Obama thinks this is one trick too many, and instead puts the issue before Congress. As everyone surely already knew, but was unwilling to admit, the American people were entirely unwilling to buy yet a fourth pig in a poke from sincere yet crystal-ball-free “experts” like Samantha Power, who is utterly disgusted by this outbreak of, you know, democracy, in the U.S.
Power gave a speech in which she tried to convince the Congress, and the country, to support the president:
On the one hand, we Americans share a desire, after two wars, which have taken 6,700 American lives and cost over $1 trillion, to invest taxpayer dollars in American schools and infrastructure. Yet on the other hand, Americans have heard the President’s commitment that this will not be Iraq, this will not be Afghanistan, this will not be Libya. Any use of force will be limited and tailored narrowly to the chemical weapons threat.
Yet what was the president’s “commitment” worth? Was Iraq supposed to be “Iraq”, Afghanistan “Afghanistan”, and Libya “Libya”? Or was this “commitment” more likely to as worthless as the previous three? “Any use of force”, what does that mean? The whole point was to authorize the use of force. Were previous interventions not so limited and well tailored, or did it just prove that crystal balls, particularly when employed in foreign lands, have proved to be predictably faulty?
Furthermore, Obama had already said that “Assad must go”, a goal that extended far beyond mere cessation of use of chemical weapons. Power claims that she only wanted to force Assad to negotiate, but when Power says “negotiate” she means “agree to my agenda in full.” And why would Assad do that? So that he could end up dying a humiliating death, like Hussein and Qaddafi?
When Obama was in office, he was very frequently presented as the voice of caution—or of “retreat” and “decline” in the hysterical rantings of the neocons, who I suspect wish in retrospect that they hadn’t talked quite so much—always asking, with regard to military intervention, “what’s our exit strategy?” Neither Obama, nor, certainly, Samantha ever seemed to tumble to the fact that for a military intervention there is no such thing as an exit strategy—none, at least, devoid of political pain—other than “victory”. In the first days of World War I, the French commander, General Joffre, explained what he wanted from his British ally: a single British soldier to land in France, whose duty it would be to get himself shot. Because Joffre knew that Britain would send a million to avenge the death of one.
We aren’t quite that irrational—not quite that obsessed with “honor”—these days, but only because we’ve seen what it can lead to. Yet neither Obama nor Power could stop stumbling over the obvious. This time it’s going to be different. This time it’s going to be well tailored. For this they went to Harvard?
Afterwords
Several times Power describes her feelings of helplessness, when she is traveling in undeveloped countries and is asked by poverty-stricken people she meets for “help” from the U.S. Because what can she, or the U.S., really do? Does she have a magic wand to wave that will suddenly endow the country with a modern transportation system, water purification plants, an honest bureaucracy, police department, and armed forces, and all the rest? But somehow once she’s back inside the Beltway she feels omnipotent.
In her conclusion to A Problem from Hell Power presents her conclusion as to why the U.S. failed to intervene, over and over again, in obvious instances of genocide:
The real reason the United States did not do what it could and should have done to stop genocide was not a lack of knowledge or influence but a lack of will.
This is painfully simplistic. Despite her frequent assurances that “bad” governments respond easily to “pressure”, history teaches us the precise opposite. Governments bent on brutal and merciless courses of action do not respond to “pressure”. And, as the U.S. has discovered to its sorrow—though important people like Power refuse to be edified—that the ultimate argument of kings is likely to make things worse rather than better. Despite the disastrous record of “regime change” during the Bush administration, Power eagerly pursued it under Obama as well, under the specious claim of preventing genocide, or something like it, each time, subjecting entire nations to enormous trauma, endangering the lives we were supposedly trying to protect and damaging American interests rather than furthering them.
Summoning the will to act in international affairs is nothing like summoning up the will to train for a marathon. As an aging Vietnam veteran, I will point out that Power, though she certainly placed herself in danger on occasion, did not seek to make the world a better place by enlisting in the armed forces, and I will impolitely speculate that, per impossible, had she been subject to the draft during the Vietnam War she would have avoided service, and she would have protected her children from service had they been subject.12 All the “Type A” personalities in my generation, “liberal” and “conservative” alike, avoided Vietnam, because they knew that Vietnam was not important to America. It would be “nice” to spare the Vietnamese the horrors of communist oppression, but they would not die for it. And Power would have felt the same way.
1. Both the West End and the Carnegie have come up in the world, and the Carnegie is now ensconced on Massachusetts Ave, NW, aka “Think Tank Row,” between the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings, and across the street from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies maintained by Johns Hopkins University. I expect the four of them to some day build a restaurant over Massachusetts Ave with escalator “skyways” to facilitate conferences.
2. My feelings for Kirkpatrick, whom of course I never met, are strongly otherwise. Her famous essays are really nothing more than propaganda, frequently relying on artful rhetoric, abstract arguments regarding the differences between totalitarian and “traditional” authoritarian governments that are simply stated rather than proved, and almost never descending to something so pedestrian as actual facts when discussing specific cases. Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick, by a former student, Peter Collier, is quite interesting, even though Collier points out none of the flaws and hypocrisies in her “reasoning”. Though he admires Kirkpatrick, and seems to feel protective of her, he at the same time goes out of his way to mention, repeatedly, her compulsive need to misrepresent her personal life—claiming, for example, that she felt far more fulfilled as a wife and mother than by her career, when in fact she threw herself into her career with incredible and unceasing energy, while, according to Collier, keeping her three sons at arm’s length emotionally. One gets the impression that he felt irritated by her frequent hypocrisy and engaged almost unconsciously in a form of payback as a result.
3. I guess it’s necessary these days to explain that Dulles was President Eisenhower’s first secretary of state. His dour personality was a source of endless jokes. Carol Burnett made an early splash singing “I Made A Fool Of Myself Over John Foster Dulles.” I think many Jews my age remember Eisenhower as the man who refused to grant clemency to the Rosenbergs and who appointed Dulles secretary of state.
4. Wilson is justly excoriated for his racial bigotry, bringing segregation to Washington, DC, among other things (though neither Harding, nor Coolidge, nor Hoover—nor Roosevelt—bothered to do anything about it). But he also appointed Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, and Morgenthau was surely one of the first Jewish ambassadors.
5. For example, Laqueur says that “Rubinstein repeats an old canard—namely, that the existence of Auschwitz was unknown in the West until the summer of 1944; this contention has been authoritatively refuted at least 100 times by now.” That is not what Rubinstein says at all.
6. The U.S. did not ratify the treaty until well into the Reagan Administration, and even then only because Reagan needed to mend relations with the American Jewish community and Israel after his “unfortunate” decision to go through with a wreath-laying ceremony at the World War II cemetery in Bitberg, Germany to honor the war dead there, which unfortunately included members of the infamous Waffen-SS. The recent decision of the U.S. Congress to recognize as genocide the wholesale murder of Armenians in World War I by the Ottoman Empire as clear “payback” for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s success in talking U.S. President Donald Trump into allowing Turkish troops into Syrian territory previously occupied by American troops, thus endangering the Kurdish population residing there, shows remarkable similarities.
7. During the Obama administration, Power’s relations with Hillary were always “correct”, thanks to Power’s embarrassing “off the record” (so she thought) venting regarding Hillary during the 2008 primaries, which forced Power to resign her position with the Obama campaign. Power, unlike Hillary, did oppose the second Bush administration’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, but otherwise their attitudes were quite similar.
8. JKG is better described as a gifted liberal publicist functioning in the guise of an economist, because he made no contribution to economic thought.
9. I have made this argument frequently—for example, here—relying heavily on Christian Alfonsi’s important, neglected book, Circle in the Sand, whose major points I summarized as follows: U.S. policy makers received frequent warnings that presence of a substantial number of U.S. troops could lead to disaster. During the leadup to the first Iraqi War, the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, warned the administration that “It remains our judgment that Saudi and Arab political realities preclude a U.S. military presence in the Islamic holy land which appears to be open-ended or semi-permanent.” During the war itself, a report issued by a committee headed by Richard Clarke stated that “A permanent U.S. presence will provide a rationale for, and could become a target for, the terrorist threat that will outlive the war.” But the Saudi ruling class wanted us there, as did Israel, and the Israel lobby here in the U.S.
10. If it ever occurred to Power that if the U.S. had not intervened in Libya, there would have been no Benghazi, no discovery of Hillary Clinton’s secret file server, no FBI investigation of Clinton, and thus no Donald Trump in the White House, she never mentions it.
11. See my post “WMD: The Right Lies Well”, also referenced in footnote 9 above.
12. I am happy to hurl the same unprovable charge against Jeane Kirkpatrick.
