You may not remember, though I obviously do, the language that Samantha Power, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, used to try to sell the American people on President Obama’s “plan” to use military force to persuade Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-Assad to behave himself:
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.
As I pointed out two years ago, in the course of an extended rant devoted to Samantha’s entire public career, President Obama had already said “Assad must go,” strongly suggesting that, once the bombs started falling, they wouldn’t be stopping any time soon, particularly since the U.S. had pulled the same trick in its excellent Libyan adventure, claiming that we only wanted to “prevent genocide” (which, of course, was not happening in the first place), only to keep the pressure up until revolts broke out, ultimately concluding in the ignominious execution of long-time Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi. Well, Congress didn’t listen to Samantha, but then Obama didn’t listen to Congress, and U.S. troops ended up in Syria anyway, and they’re still there.
And the “narrowly tailored” bombing? Well, that hasn’t been working out so well. As the New York Times reported in a story by Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt,
In the last days of the battle against the Islamic State in Syria, when members of the once-fierce caliphate were cornered in a dirt field next to a town called Baghuz, a U.S. military drone circled high overhead, hunting for military targets. But it saw only a large crowd of women and children huddled against a river bank.
Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast. As the smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in search of cover. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors.
The final death toll was around 70 and the date was March 18, 2019. As the Times reports, the U.S. covered up the entire incident, to, I think, no one’s surprise. If Ms. Power has commented on this travesty I couldn’t find it, but, surprisingly (or not), I did find a statement by her back in September 2016, that is strangely apropos, when, according to Yahoo News, a “U.S. led coalition strike” somehow led to the bombing of a Syrian army outpost killing 62 Syrian soldiers, who were considered—at the time, at least—to be good guys, or at least not bad guys:
We are investigating the incident. If we determine that we did indeed strike Syrian military personnel, that was not our intention. And we of course regret the loss of life.1
Regrets? Yeah, Samantha’s had a few. But I guess not many—rather like the “military officials” who concluded that a more recent strike, killing 10 innocent women and children in Afghanistan, was, somehow, no one’s fault. I mean, all the boxes had been checked. What do you want, egg in your beer?2
Afterwords
The New York Times also has the Afghanistan story. At Slate, Fred Kaplan has a “nice” overview of the American way of war, though he might have written this a lot earlier. I was complaining about this back in 2008, and in 2010—“money” quote from General McChrystal, “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.” As late as October, 2010, Fred was still pumped about our mission in Afghanistan, to my perhaps unkind amusement, though, to his credit, the scales fell rapidly from his eyes only two months later.
1. Samantha furiously rejected a Russian call for an emergency meeting of the UN on the bombing, calling it a “stunt, replete with moralism and grandstanding.” Yeah, Russia! Listen up! The moralistic grandstanding is Samantha’s department!” You don’t get to play that game!
2. When I was a small boy, “egg in your beer” was somehow considered an outrageous request, to be screamed whenever a batter in a pickup game refused to swing at a “good pitch”.
