In addition to appointing Susan Rice as National Security Adviser, for which no Senate confirmation is needed, Obama will be nominating Samantha Power to be U.N. Ambassador.Power has a problematic history. She is a strong advocate of the “mea culpa” foreign policy — in case you still hunger for more apology tours, she was one of the people who invented the Obama apology tour doctrine:https://twitter.com/keithurbahn/statuses/342256473096744961
As the tweets above indicate, in 2003 she wrote:
U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought. It needs not tweaking but overhauling. We need: a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States. This would entail restoring FOIA to its pre- Bush stature, opening the files, and acknowledging the force of a mantra we have spent the last decade promoting in Guatemala, South Africa, and Yugoslavia: A country has to look back before it can move forward. Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors. When Willie Brandt went down on one knee in the Warsaw ghetto, his gesture was gratifying to World War II survivors, but it was also ennobling and cathartic for Germany.
For Power’s Israel problem, see Noah Pollak’s 2008 column, Obama and Israel, continued:
For one, Power is an advocate of the Walt-Mearsheimer view of the American relationship with Israel. In a recent interview published on the Harvard Kennedy School’s website, Power was asked to explain “long-standing structural and conceptual problems in U.S. foreign policy.” She gave a two-part answer: the first problem, she said, is “the US historic predisposition to go it alone.” A standard reply, of course. The second problem, though, should give us pause:
Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the “national interest” as a whole is defined and pursued . . . America’s important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.So greater regard for international institutions along with less automatic deference to special interests–especially when it comes to matters of life and death and war and peace–seem to be two take-aways from the war in Iraq.
Power is not just assenting to the Israel Lobby view of American foreign policy, but is also arguing that Israel had something to do with the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003–an appalling slander, and a telling one.
Israel, in reality and contrary to the Islamist-Leftist coalition spin, lobbied the U.S. against invading Iraq.
Powers also had a questionable suggestion about imposing a solution on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute:
To nominate someone with that history to represent our nation at the U.N. of all places — an organization which is hostile to our interests, pathological about Israel, and generally run by a bloated anti-freedom bureaucracy — is problematic at best.
Oh, and for you Hillary 2016 groupies, Power called Hillary a Monster. (Okay, understood that might be a feature not a bug.)
Power is subject to Senate confirmation, and it could be, as Ed Morrissey says, “one of the most uncomfortable confirmation hearings Obama will experience.”
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY