Recently (well, yesterday), I commented on a long article in the New Yorker by Evan Osnos on Samantha Power, our ambassador to the UN, whom I described unkindly as “President Obama’s whom-shall-we-invade-next gal about town”, making further fun of her (as who would not?) for not knowing that plants “breathe” carbon dioxide rather than oxygen.
There were, unfortunately though unsurprisingly, many statements by Power in Mr. Osnos's article far less innocent than the notion cited above. Questioned about her support for U.S. intervention in the Syrian civil war, despite concerns about a “slippery slope,” Samantha comes up with this stunningly slippery reply: “Many of the same people who are very, very concerned about a slippery slope are the very same who are horrified by the enslavement of Yazidi women and children, and who look at the killing of Jim Foley as one of the most iconically heartbreaking events of our lifetime, and who recognize that, when ISIS says that it is intent on doing something, unless it is stopped, it is likely to project force in a manner that propels it forward.”
In other words, “the people who disagree with me are as hypocritical as I am,” which is an awfully mean thing to say, and, I suspect, not even true. Her line about Mr. Foley’s tragic beheading being “one of the most iconically heartbreaking events of our lifetime” strikes me as both morally disgusting and shamefully manipulative. I confess that I don’t really know what “iconically heartbreaking” is supposed to mean. Horrific events occur around the world almost every day. Selecting one of them to justify yet another self-defeating intervention in the Muslim world, after our experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya (the last, of course, done entirely on Power’s watch, and, as Osnos notes, something she essentially refuses to talk about) suggests that Power, like virtually every other DC playa, would rather commit new errors than acknowledge old ones, the body count be damned.
