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Holding Them to the Promise of Responsibility to Protect: Contemplating the Paradox of R2P

By Jovanni Reyes  ·  NYTX  ·  August 20, 2013

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Who Will Stand Up for Responsibility to Protect? (August 1, 2013), Mike Abramowitz makes the case for coercive humanitarian intervention under the mantra Responsibility to Protect, or R2P.  Mr. Abramowitz is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum where he currently holds the position of Director for Center for the Prevention of Genocide. He works in promoting R2P with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who as Secretary promoted the un-humanitarian sanctions on Iraq which—according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization—provoked the deaths of 567,000 Iraqi children (Mahajan, 2001).

Abramowitz writes in reaction to the Obama Administration’s appointment of Samantha Power to the U.S. ambassadorship and her confirmation hearing by the Senate on August 1. In the article, Abramowitz quotes Power as saying when asked about R2P that “there is no one size fits all solution, no algorithm, nor should there be. If confirmed to this position, I will act in the interests of the American people and in accordance with our values”. He understands Power’s ambiguity and the politics behind it, but suggests that since every country in the world has agreed to the principles of R2P, it is “our” job to hold them up to that promise; by “our” I assume he means the American people. Abramowitz forgets that Samantha Power is a liberal interventionist who, along with former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice and former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, was instrumental in pushing the U.S. to intervene in Libya, resulting in the overthrow of the government, killing many people in the process, including the assassination of the country’s leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi (Cooper & Myers, 2011).

R2P is the “newest” and “coolest” addition to international relations. This is not a new concept, however, but a rebranding of an old concept named humanitarian intervention, kin to an even older concept in international affairs referred to as Jus ad bellum.  Yet, the way in which R2P is being interpreted and applied by Western powers implies that there is an overt attempt by Western powers to overrule state sovereignty as understood in international affairs since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648.  Furthermore, it undermines the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928, which practically outlawed war, and it ignores the U.N. Charter’s insistence that only the United Nations can sanction war, via Security Council resolution. Libya was the first test for R2P.  It has left an unsavory legacy in the eyes of many U.N. member states, however. Many wanted to believe that the new doctrine was indeed genuine and not just another fancy term to justify military intervention.

When the U.N. authorized R2P to protect the people of Benghazi against a hypothetical bloodbath, it sanctioned intervention because Gaddafi’s forces were quickly regaining territory lost to the armed insurgents and marching fast to the rebel held coastal city (Rieff, 2011).  Sanguinary statements made by Gaddafi about going from house to house showing no mercy to the Benghazi rebels made the case too easy for the U.N. to approve intervention and NATO to execute.

The U.N. authorization for intervention was only to protect the people of Benghazi and to coerce the government to cease fire and sit with the rebels for negotiations, which the African Union was already negotiating, to the annoyance of the West. The authorization was not to overthrow the regime, recognize a de facto government and facilitate the assassination of the Libyan head of state (Dewaal, 2012). That was a Western initiative. Today, the people in Libya are worse off than they were before the uprising, and what’s worse, the destabilizing situation in Libya is no longer an urgent matter to the intervening powers the way it was when Gaddafi was in power (Smirnov, 2013).

Abramowitz mentions the civil war in Syria as justification for R2P, but fails to point to Bahrain (a U.S. client) and the government’s brutal crackdown on protestors. He also mentions the 1999 Kosovo War—implying that humanitarian intervention helped stop genocide, but fails to acknowledge that most of the ethnic cleansing took place during the 78-day NATO bombing (Chomsky, 2001); that most of the cleansing was done by the Kosovo Liberation Army, the group that NATO was backing; and that shortly after the war ended reports revealed that the war’s death toll was largely exaggerated (Marden, 1999). He fails to bring up how humanitarian intervention didn’t get to the people of East Timor, who in 1999 were invaded and slaughtered by the Western-friendly Indonesian military, along with their paramilitary proxies at a rate higher than the killings that took place in Kosovo (Powell, 2006). Apparently, the friendly nation of Indonesia was not a state targeted by the West; it seems that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was.

The stated purpose of the R2P doctrine is to “adequately respond to the most heinous crimes known to humankind” (International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect, n.d. ) such as the mass murder of civilians, gross human rights violations, war crimes, genocide and ethnic cleansing.  Proponents of R2P see the doctrine as altruistic—a tool to commit all states to the effort of stopping atrocities, war crimes, and human rights violations. Detractors see it as opportunistic, inconsistent and hypocritical—an excuse for the West to project power in order to pursue its political interest. It is not that critics of R2P do not think that stopping war crimes and genocide is undesirable, it’s just that in practice R2P is applied arbitrarily on a weaker state by the powerful who are then never held accountable for their own crimes during the intervention. These same critics often claim that those in government who are most gung-ho about R2P and humanitarian intervention, often forget history and do not consider past policies imposed by their own countries and their undesirable effects leading to the present situation (Fenton, 2009).

One of the stated principles of R2P is to find the root cause of a conflict and engage in conflict resolution to resolve it and avoid further conflict. R2P as it is applied has been an entirely Western enterprise, a tool to project power and advance goals and policies, only to forget their own political meddling and its aftermath. In the interest of accuracy, the Responsibility to Protect should be renamed the Right to Intervene. There are many people who are genuine humanitarians in the West, and who truly want to see an end to armed conflict and atrocities. Unfortunately, none of them make policies.

Jovanni Reyes is a member of Iraq Veterans Against War, holds a Master’s in International Relations, and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Instructional Technology.

References

Chomsky, N. (2001, April-May). A Review of NATO’s War over Kosovo. Retrieved from Chomsky.info: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200005–.htm

Cooper, H., & Myers, S. L. (2011, March 18). Obama Takes Hard Line With Libya After Shift by Clinton. Retrieved from New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/19/world/africa/19policy.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Dewaal, A. (2012, December 19). The African Union and the Libya Conflict of 2011. Retrieved from World Peace Foundation: http://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2012/12/19/the-african-union-and-the-libya-conflict-of-2011/

Fenton, A. (2009, July 26). The Responsibility to Protect. Retrieved from Global Research : http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-responsibility-to-protect/14537

International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect. (n.d. ). An Introduction to the Responsibility to Protect. Retrieved from International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect: http://www.responsibilitytoprotect.org/index.php/about-rtop

Mahajan, R. (2001, November 1). ‘We Think the Price Is Worth It’. Retrieved from Fairness & Accuracy on in Reporting: http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/we-think-the-price-is-worth-it/

Marden, C. (1999, November 13). UN war crimes prosecutor confirms much-reduced Kosovo death toll. Retrieved from World Socialist Web Site : http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/11/koso-n13.html

Powell, S. (2006, January 19). UN verdict on East Timor. Retrieved from Genocide Studies Program: http://www.yale.edu/gsp/east_timor/unverdict.html

Rieff, D. (2011, November 7). R2P, R.I.P. . Retrieved from The New York Times : http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/opinion/r2p-rip.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Smirnov, A. (2013, February 17 ). Absolute Lawlessness: Libyan “Democracy” Two Years After NATO Air War. Retrieved from Global Research: http://www.globalresearch.ca/absolute-lawlessness-libyan-democracy-two-years-after-nato-air-war/5323093

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August 20, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Konyism of Samantha Power, US Ambassador to the United Nations

By Vijay Prashad | Jadiliyya | August 15 2013

“Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise,” Samantha Power, 2003.

On 10 August, the newly appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, addressed the Fourth Estate Leadership Summit, an event of Invisible Children. This was Ambassador Power’s first public address since she took her seat at the United Nations. Invisible Children is the campaign group that has been behind several iterations of the “Stop Kony” video, which went viral in 2012. Power praised the group for its “new kind of activism” whose “army of civilian activists” had pushed the Obama administration to tougher action against Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and whose example had helped Kenyans and Russians and most of all Arabs, who “barely knew democracy as recently as three years ago,” to use the Internet to hold governments accountable. Power is not naïve. She knows that the Internet is not sufficient, since it is simply “a means to an end. What matters is the real world scoreboard.” The “real world scoreboard” touts up the exertions of power by actors that Power sees as benign, such as the United States government. Internet activism can prod the US government to action, and when it does, then it is effective. World history can only happen when the US government’s snout pushes along the Dialectic; anything else is simply the passage of time.

What did the Stop Kony video achieve, according to Power? It pushed a US senator (John Kerry) to draft a bill to stiffen US action against Kony. This bill and its consequent law drew on two resources. First, since 1986 the United States had drawn up lists of narco-traffickers that it wished either arrested or killed, and to which end it provided a bounty on the heads of these people through the State Department’s Narcotics Rewards Program. Each reward was not to exceed five million dollars. Second, the State Department has used a similar rewards program for individuals who helped turn in war criminals sought by international tribunals and courts (for Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Yugoslavia). These international bodies had already drawn up their lists of criminals, for whose heads the United States provided rewards. The Kerry bill refashioned these programs into the Rewards Program Update and Technical Corrections Act of 2012, signed into law by Obama in January 2013. The new approach allows the US State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice to draw up its own lists and to offer rewards for the capture of criminals. John Kerry, now the Secretary of State, hastened to say that the new approach is “not a dead-or-alive bounty program. Information must lead to the secure arrest, transfer, or conviction of these people in a court of law. We want these men to look into the eyes of their victims and answer for their actions.”

Power, one of the champions of the new law and an advocate of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine for liberal interventionism, follows Susan Rice to the United Nations. Rice was equally adamant about the use of US-NATO force to enforce her perception of what counts as a human rights violation. During Rice’s tenure at the United Nations there was no use of the language of human rights and the R2P doctrine on behalf of the Palestinians (under occupation by the state of Israel), or the people of the Congo (under the yoke of neighbouring Rwanda through the M23 rebel group), or indeed of the people of Equatorial Guinea (whose ruthless president Obiang enjoyed a warm photo-op with the Obamas in 2012). US allies never felt the edge of Rice’s rhetoric, nor Obama’s sanctions. [Vijay Prashad, “The Agonies of Susan Rice: Gaza and the Negroponte Doctrine,” Jadaliyya, 15 November 2012] Dressed in sheep’s clothing, the ravenous wolves of the Global North defended their allies while they threatened their enemies. It didn’t help the latter that many of them are vicious and deserve to be caught and punished. But it did help the United States and its allies to concentrate the spotlight on them and allow their friends to sit in the shadows, smug in their impunity. It also allowed the United States and its allies to import armed forces into parts of the world (mainly Africa as it turns out) where it has interests to protect.

Kony, the Trojan Horse

Like so many post-colonial states, Uganda has not been able to settle its problems of political geography and political economy. A North-South divide in the country was exacerbated by British colonialism, which relied upon the South to provide it with recruits to the crucial King’s African Rifles and petty administrators for the region. When the South became the vanguard of the anti-colonial struggle, the British turned their recruitment efforts to the North, among the Acholi and West Nile groups, driving a wedge that endures. The South had been host to whatever economic development had been forged by colonialism, who brought in captive labor from the North. These fissures provided grist for the mill of post-colonial leaders such as Obote and Amin, both of whom used these divides to their venal ends. Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army, rooted in the South, took on the Northern forces of Obote in the early 1980s that resulted in massacres of hundreds of thousands of people. Museveni came to power in 1986 through the National Resistance Movement, a thin veneer of difference from his army of previous years. It continues to rule Uganda, with Museveni crowned as one of the African Renaissance leaders by the Clinton administration.

A defeated and demoralized North came together behind two millenarian cults, first that of Alice Auma Lakwena (Holy Spirit Mobile Force) in 1987 and then second after her downfall, that of her kinsman Joseph Kony in the 1990s. Kony’s LRA became a dangerous cult, kidnapping children, using violence to sow fear in Acholiland, and fighting a war against the Ugandan government without a defined political strategy. No political dialogue emerged during the 1990s or the early 2000s, as Museveni sought a military solution against the LRA and as Kony floundered through the haze of anarchic violence. In 2005, the International Criminal Court framed arrest warrants for Kony and four of his lieutenants, and the US government placed the LRA on its terror list. Not long after this, Kony’s LRA had been severely degraded and his remaining forces (not more than 200) fled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from where it is reported to have taken refuge in the Central African Republic. By 2012, the LRA was no longer the existential threat it was to Northern Uganda. It had become a criminal gang, poaching animals and stealing food, looking for survival rather than for political power. As the US State Department’s own Amanda Dory told Congress in April 2012, “The common assessment is that [Kony] has been significantly degraded and is in a survival and evasion mode at this point.” This sober assessment did not slow down the frenzy of the “Kony 2012” nor of the entry of US troops into the African continent. None of the grievances of the North that gave rise to Alice Auma or Kony have been settled. The fissures remain, even as Kony has been chased off.

Invisible Children, which made the Kony 2012 video that Powers praised, has its roots in evangelical Christian politics. It came to Kony only after its foray into Darfur had floundered (on the way in which the Darfur issue suited both US and Israeli state interests, see Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, 2010). It sought an African mission to champion, an old colonial narrative of the white Christians who make their name by saving the black Africans. Their view of the conflict is simplified to the point of a cartoon: the more they demonize Kony, the more Museveni’s own dictatorial rule is minimized, and the more they validate the entry of US armed forces into the region (Obama sent one hundred military advisors to Uganda in 2010).

Obama’s administration sinks in the quicksand of its liberal ambitions –few of its liberal foreign policy objectives have been met; not the closing down of Guantanamo’s prison, nor the tethering of an out-of-control surveillance apparatus, nor even the War on Terror in general. In fact, Obama has intensified the drone warfare in Yemen and Pakistan, and tethered itself to a resurgent Saudi Arabia on the back of Qatari withdrawal. To polish its carapace, the Obama administration has become a latter-day believer in gay rights on the world stage. Power went on Jay Leno’s program to talk about global LGBT rights and held a Google hangout with human rights activists where the issue of LGBT rights was center-stage (later, on twitter, Power mourned the loss of “Eric Ohena Lembembe, a courageous Cameroonian activist tortured to death last month”). But, to stay on the Uganda story, Power did not raise the issue of LGBT rights and Uganda. In 2011, gay activist David Kato Kisule was murdered in Mukono, Uganda. Kato had been a leader in the struggle for gay rights in Uganda. Invisible Children’s financial links to the Discovery Institute complicates matters for Powers’ liberal interventionism–Discovery’s head Lou Engle was in Kampala, Uganda in May 2010 heading up an anti-gay rally in support of an anti-gay bill that has been championed by President Museveni. Ambassador Power’s claim to move a pro-LGBT agenda at the UN is at odds with her choosing to give her first speech at a forum that shares much with the anti-gay agenda of the Discovery Institute and Ugandan President Museveni. She did not make any remarks about this at her speech at the Fourth Estate Summit. In fact, Power did not raise the issue of LGBT rights at that Los Angeles gala. This is standard issue “pinkwashing,” a cavalier use of a real campaign to re-brand the sinking ship of US soft power.

Invisible Children’s “Kony 2012” helped shore up a new trend in US policy, to seek military solutions where much more complex policy options need to be considered. Forging military partnerships with Museveni’s Uganda will not help the people of the North, whose main issue is loss of land to investors, and loss of livelihood over the course of two generations. Nor will it solve the problems of a nascent people’s movement, which is being stamped down by the anti-protest Public Order Management Bill (passed by parliament on 6 August). Opposition leader Nandala Mafabi called this bill unconstitutional, but where will be the room to legally dispute it on the streets? None of this detained the human rights apparatus created by Rice and Power, and sanctified by Obama. Their human rights agenda is driven not by popular protests on the streets but by the cordite from an F-16.

R2P

“What matters,” said Ambassador Power at the Invisible Children gala, “are results – everything else is just noise.” But what matters are well is ideology and power – who gets to define what is a crisis and who gets to frame the actions necessary to solve the crisis? In 2005, through US pressure, the United Nations adopted the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. One of its champions was Samantha Power. The R2P doctrine holds that a state has the legal responsibility to protect is people, and if this state fails to do so the international community must involve itself with “coercive measures” such as economic sanctions but with military intervention as “the last resort.” In other words, the R2P doctrine is endowed with the ability to conscript Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which forces the United Nations to use military force. But, as has become obvious over the past few decades, the idea of the “international community” is not as global as it seems–that term has come to reflect the views of the North Atlantic countries, whose military hegemony through the US armed forces and its tentacular base structure as well as NATO gives them the ultimate veto over the narrative of world affairs. What matters, then, is not suffering in general, but the suffering deemed by the North Atlantic states to be against their interests, to whose defence the bombers are set loose.

Last year, India’s former Ambassador to the United Nations, Hardeep Singh Puri, offered a robust criticism of the R2P doctrine from this general standpoint. Puri pointed out that the United Nations used the doctrine “selectively,” and when the United Nations selects a conflict for intervention, the armed phase is immediate rather than “calibrated and gradual”. The selectivity is a function of those who continue to exercise their power through the UN bodies, which is to say that the North Atlantic states set the agenda for the use of the R2P doctrine. Puri’s criticisms come in the wake of the Libyan intervention, which Obama, Rice, and Power use as the standard for the use of R2P. However, many powers, including the BRICS states, are wary of that usage. They argue that the United States misled the Council and then misused the UN Resolution 1973, a feint that forced UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to publically defend the NATO action in December 2011. It is because of the way the R2P was used in Libya that it the BRICS states have indicated that they will not allow such an open-ended R2P resolution, including for Syria. Power comes to the United Nations stepping over the rubble of R2P.

Tactically, it is smart of Power to go to Invisible Children, to pose as a grassroots activist who is going to be pushed by the people and be the people’s champion in the Security Council. It will shine Power’s reputation a bit, but not much. With the Bush administration walking away from the ICC and shredding the Kyoto agreement, Power wrote, “The United States [has come] to be seen less as it sees itself (the cop protecting the world from rogue nations) than as the very runaway state international law needs to contain.” In the Obama administration, Power did nothing to contain the “runaway state,” indeed she helped secure inside the United Nations a “law,” R2P, that gives the United States permission to be unrestrained. That is the Konyism of Samantha Power.

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August 17, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | Leave a comment

How the Israel Lobby Trained a Diplomat

By Paul R. Pillar | Consortium News | July 22, 2013

David Rieff’s commentary on Samantha Power’s confirmation hearing is a trenchant account of some of the worst in what we see in the process of confirming nominees for senior positions. Even by the standards of such hearings, Power’s performance was notably obsequious.

This was an abuse of the process by the nominee, in the sense that in a proceeding ostensibly intended to learn more about the nominee we did not learn much at all except that she really, really wants the job of ambassador to the United Nations and is willing to shape her testimony in whatever way it takes to get the job.

Rieff cites the experience of Robert Bork as the master lesson for all subsequent nominees on the need to trim their views if they expect to get confirmed. That history is no doubt a factor, but to understand the pathologies of the confirmation process we should take note of the variety of ways in which that process gets abused. Many of those ways are not the work of nominees, but in at least one respect, as Power’s case illustrates, they induce from nominees’ behavior that only adds to the dysfunction.

A conspicuous and recent abuse was the attempt to cripple the work of the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by refusing to bring any nominees for those bodies to a vote in the Senate. Threats from the Senate majority leader about exercising a so-called nuclear option won a temporary reprieve from that tactic, although there is no assurance we won’t see it revived, and the chances are it will be.

One of the participants in that tactic, Senator Lindsey Graham, later acknowledged that the nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “was being filibustered because we don’t like the law. That’s not a reason to deny someone their appointment. We were wrong.”

Even when the objective is not to cripple an agency or effectively vacate the law that created it, it has become commonplace for the confirmation process to be the vehicle for pursuing policy agendas that have nothing to do with the nominee. This is at best an irrelevance and a drag on the process. It becomes abuse when confirmation votes may be determined by it.

The same Sen. Graham started crossing this line last week when he used questioning of Admiral James Winnefeld, nominated for another term as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to push the idea that the Iranian regime is still an awful and extreme beast despite the election to the Iranian presidency of Hassan Rouhani.

At one point Graham said “this will determine how I vote for you” before asking whether Winnefeld thought Rouhani is a “moderate.” Even setting aside the issue of the substantive validity of what Graham was harping on, why should a military officer’s view on this question determine his fitness to serve as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs?

Nominees, especially those already serving in the Executive Branch, have somehow to make their responsiveness to questions not run afoul of policies that have already been set by the president, and not to make it seem that they are getting ahead of the president, forcing his hand, or openly criticizing him. And yet senators repeatedly and knowingly put nominees in that difficult position.

At the same hearing last week of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John McCain did so with General Martin Dempsey, nominated for another term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. McCain tenaciously tried to get Dempsey to say that the administration’s policy on Syria was one of “inaction.”

We should hope that the nation’s senior military officer is giving his best advice in private to the president on military aspects of an important problem such as Syria, and we should expect that officer not to offer discordant characterizations of the president’s policy in public. We should also hope that senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee see the job of chairman of the Joint Chiefs in similar terms, regardless of their views about Syria or any other substantive issue.

The inherent vulnerability of nominees makes the confirmation process a vehicle for showing who’s boss. This is a form of abuse that goes beyond senators who do the voting, and it gets back to how Power conducted herself. Specifically, it gets to her comments about Israel, which as Rieff puts it were “so stridently one-sided as to be almost wholly indistinguishable from the talking points of Israeli diplomats.”

The now well-known background to this is an interview more than a decade ago, in which Power suggested that to quell Israeli-Palestinian violence at that time the United States should consider deploying a large protective force even though this might mean “alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import.” The constituency in question, as is its custom, denounced Power as anti-Israeli.

Power’s later means of retaining her confirmability in the face of such accusations was to disavow, totally and tearfully, her own observations. A key event was a meeting with American Jewish leaders at which, according to the meeting’s organizer, she “became deeply emotional and struggled to complete her presentation as she expressed how deeply such accusations had affected her.”

This sequence has made Samantha Power a more valuable commodity to the Israel lobby than if she had never made any comments to offend the lobby in the first place. Sustaining the lobby’s power depends on repeated demonstrations of submission to that power. The lobby could not have gotten a better demonstration of submission than to have the nominated chief U.S. diplomat at the United Nations abandon all evidence of any independent thought on the issues concerned and to make herself indistinguishable from Israeli diplomats.

Besides making for more dysfunction in the confirmation process, this kind of response from a nominee, as when Power said at her hearing that the United States has “no greater friend in the world” than Israel, badly distorts the larger public discourse on important issues. To appreciate how much it is distorted, we have to listen to distinguished and experienced people who are not up for a confirmation vote, do not expect to be in the future, and thus can voice their observations in an honest and untrimmed manner.

One such person is retired Marine Corps General and former Central Command head James Mattis, who last weekend explained some of the cost to the United States of the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “I paid a military security price every day as a commander of CENTCOM because the Americans were seen as biased in support of Israel,” said Mattis.

Moderate Arabs “who want to be with us,” he said, restrict their support for the United States because they “can’t come out publicly in support of people who don’t want to show respect for the Arab Palestinians.”

July 24, 2013 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , | 1 Comment

Venezuela ends normalization of US relations

Press TV – July 20, 2013

Venezuela says it has ended the process of normalizing relations with the United States over remarks by Washington’s ambassador-designate to the UN.

During her confirmation hearing before a US Senate committee on July 17, Samantha Power claimed Venezuela, along with several other countries, was conducting a “crackdown on civil society.”

“The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela hereby ends the process … of finally normalizing our diplomatic relations” that started in early June, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry said in a Friday statement.

The statement added that Caracas is opposed to the “interventionist agenda” presented by Power.

On Thursday, the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro denounced Power’s remarks as “outrageous,” and demanded “an immediate correction by the US government.”

“Power says she’ll fight repression in Venezuela? What repression? There is repression in the United States, where they kill African-Americans with impunity, and where they hunt the youngster Edward Snowden just for telling the truth,” he added, referring to the killing of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin.

Venezuela has offered asylum to Snowden, an American former technical contractor for the US National Security Agency (NSA), who is wanted in the United States for leaking details of Washington’s secret surveillance programs.

Maduro was the first foreign leader to state openly that he was offering sanctuary to Snowden.

Venezuela and the US have not exchanged ambassadors since 2010. However, in June US Secretary of State John Kerry and Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elias Jaua agreed on the sidelines of a regional summit in Guatemala that officials would “soon” meet for talks that could lead to an exchange of envoys.

In March, Caracas expelled two US military attaches over allegations of trying to foment instability in Venezuela.

Washington also angered Caracas by supporting Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles, who disputed the results of the April presidential election, in which Maduro won the race with 50.7 percent of the vote against 49.1 percent for Capriles.

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July 20, 2013 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | 1 Comment

Venezuela’s Maduro Responds to Obama’s Nominee for UN Envoy

By Ryan Mallett-Outtrim | Venezuelanalysis | July 19, 2013

Mérida – Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has described comments made by US President Barack Obama’s nominee for envoy to the United Nations as “despicable”, and demanded an apology.

Yesterday Maduro criticised the nominee Samantha Power’s testimony to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. During the speech, Power called for a “contesting” of what she described as a “crackdown on civil society being carried out in countries like Cuba, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela.”

“Power says she’ll fight repression in Venezuela? What repression?” Maduro responded on Venezuelan television.

“There is repression in the United States, where they kill African-Americans with impunity, and where they hunt the youngster Edward Snowden just for telling the truth,” he stated. His comments come in the wake of a Florida jury acquitting George Zimmerman on 13 July for the killing of Trayvon Martin.

He also called for an “immediate correction by the US government”.

“And the U.S. government says they want to have good relations? What tremendous relations they want,” Maduro stated.

Following his victory in the 14 April presidential elections, Maduro called for closer relations with the US. In June, his foreign minister Elias Jaua met US Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry described the meeting as the “beginning of a good, respectful relationship”.

After the talks, Jaua told Telesur that the Maduro administration is open to a more positive relationship “based on the premise of mutual respect, non-interference in internal affairs and the proper treatment of disagreements”.

“If this is respected then we can move forward in relations with US,” Jaua stated. Today, Jaua announced that the government had issued a letter of protest to the US embassy in Caracas. According to Jaua, the letter asked if there is still “willingness” in Washington to improve relations, “as expressed by the Secretary of State John Kerry”.

Since then, Maduro has criticised the US for its pursuit of whistleblower Edward Snowden, to whom he has offered asylum.

Yesterday, he stated that Power’s comments were being applauded by the “fascist right” in Venezuela. Power’s speech also received positive feedback from a number of committee members, including some Republicans.

Along with calling for more “efficiency and a greater focus on promoting freedom”, Power stated that the UN needs US “leadership” and fairness.

“There cannot be one standard for one country and another standard for all others,” she stated, before criticising the General Assembly and Human Rights Council for passing “one-sided resolutions” against Israel.

“Just as I have done the last four years as President Obama’s UN adviser at the White House, I will stand up for Israel and work tirelessly to defend it,” she said.

July 20, 2013 Posted by | Deception | , , , , | 2 Comments

The Language of Power: Obama’s “Humanitarian Hawk” & Israel’s New Gladiator at the UN

By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | July 18, 2013
(Photo Credit: Pete Souza / White House)

In her first appearance before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Samantha Power, Obama’s pick for next U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, made clear that she will spend her time in the role much as her predecessor Susan Rice did: acting as Israel’s consummate defender, fear-mongering about Iran, and opposing any move to champion Palestinian human rights or self-determination.

Rice, who has been appointed as Obama’s National Security Adviser, has said repeatedly that the American delegation to the UN “often works in ‘lockstep’ with the Israeli delegation” and spends “an enormous amount of time defending Israel’s right to defend itself and defending Israel’s legitimacy.”

“It’s an issue of utmost and daily concern for the United States,” she declared last year.  A few months ago, she reiterated this point, insisting that her role as an apologist for the Israeli government is “a huge part of my work to the United Nations” and that the United States “will not rest in the crucial work of defending Israel’s security and legitimacy every day at the United Nations.”

Power has already proven herself a loyal replacement, disavowing any semblance of past critical thinking when it comes to Israeli human rights abuses and abrogation of international law and opposing fear-mongering about Iran’s nuclear program. It is no surprise Washington hawks and, even the Israeli government, are falling over themselves to sing her praises.

In her confirmation hearing yesterday, Power revealed her adherence to AIPAC talking points, essentially working her way down the tried and true list of boilerplate phrases.  “The United States has no greater friend in the world than the State of Israel,” she said, adding, “Israel is a country with whom we share security interests and, even more fundamentally, with whom we share core values – the values of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”

“America has a special relationship with Israel,” she stated, to the surprise of no one and the consternation of George Washington‘s ghost. “I will stand up for Israel and work tirelessly to defend it,” she promised.

Perhaps her most disturbing comments, however, were about Iran.  Shamelessly exploiting the horror of the Holocaust to fear-monger about the Islamic Republic, she declared:

“…within this organization built in the wake of the Holocaust – built in part in order to apply the lessons of the Holocaust – we also see unacceptable bias and attacks against the State of Israel. We see the absurdity of Iran chairing the UN Conference on Disarmament, despite the fact that its continued pursuit of nuclear weapons is a grave threat to international peace and security.”

With this statement, Power, in her eagerness to check off all the buzzword boxes prescribed by AIPAC, directly contradicts the consistent assessment of the United States’ own intelligence community, which has repeatedly concluded that Iran is, in fact, not pursuing a nuclear weapons as it has no nuclear weapons program.

Early last year, an unnamed U.S. intelligence official told the Washington Post that Iran has not decided to pursue nuclear weapons, explaining, “Our belief is that they are reserving judgment on whether to continue with key steps they haven’t taken regarding nuclear weapons.”  At the time, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta affirmed this position, admitting, “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.”

Soon thereafter, the New York Times reported, “Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier.” This, the paper noted, “remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.”

Either Samantha Power is an idiot or she’s lying.

In fact, there was a time when Power wasn’t so confident in making such a declarative statement. In a 2008 interview with Miller-McCune, Power noted that she was “not an expert on Iran,” but condemned the “American sabre-rattling” of the George W. Bush administration. “The threats – implicit and explicit – of U.S. military action have united very diverse secular, Islamist and nationalist strands,” she said, adding that American “belligerence” had “backfired.”

When asked specifically about whether she thought “Iran is trying to create nuclear weapons,” Power replied, “It would surprise me if they weren’t, but I don’t know.”

Still, she disparaged the findings of the National Intelligence Estimate and simply assumed Iran “would see as in its interests to amass as much firepower as possible,” due to the foreign threats it faces. Nevertheless, she stated, “It does not seem as though the Iranian regime is close to possessing nuclear weapons” and said that “when U.S. leaders claim Iran poses an imminent threat, they are not currently heard as credible.”

Now, five years later, Power sounds exactly like Bush’s own UN Ambassador, perennial Iran hawk John Bolton, who in 2006, insisted to the UN Security Council that “Iran had defied the international community by continuing its pursuit of nuclear weapons” and that this “pursuit of nuclear weapons constituted a direct threat to international peace and security.”

Furthermore, Power’s incredulity regarding what she deems the “absurdity of Iran chairing the UN Conference on Disarmament,” betrays her own ignorance on Iran’s constantly repeated stance regarding nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament.

Iran has long championed a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East and is a party to all disarmament treaties on weapons of mass destruction, including the Biological Weapons Convention, Chemical Weapons Convention, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  Israel, however, is not a member to any of them.

Last year, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi stated that Iran fully supports the establishment of a NWFZ, but that Israel, and its American backers, presented the “only obstacle to the creation of such a zone…due to its persistent refusal to join the NPT and to place its nuclear facilities under the IAEA safeguards system.”  The United States consistently blocks crucial international conferences dedicated to nuclear non-proliferation for the sole purpose of protecting Israel’s massive nuclear arsenal from scrutiny.

Samantha Power has surely embraced her new role in Turtle Bay as Israel’s stalwart apologist.

Abe Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League’s hasbarist-in-chief, once called Susan Rice a “gladiator” fighting in the United Nations on behalf of Israel.  There is no question Samantha Power will, for the sake of our “special relationship” and “shared values” with an aggressive, nuclear-armed, settler-colonial apartheid state, similarly take up the sword and continue to unleash hell on the entire Middle East.

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July 18, 2013 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | 2 Comments

Care Tactics

By Chase Madar • The American Conservative • September 1, 2009

American liberals rejoiced at Samantha Power’s appointment to the National Security Council. After so many dreary Clintonites were stacked into top State Department positions—Dennis Ross, Richard Holbrooke, Hillary herself—here was new blood: a dynamic idealist, an inspiring public intellectual, a bestselling author of a book against genocide, a professor at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights. And she hasn’t even turned 40. The blogosphere buzzed. Surely Samantha Power was the paladin, the conscience, the senior director for multilateral affairs to bring human rights back into U.S. foreign policy.

Don’t count on it. “Human rights,” a term once coterminous with freeing prisoners of conscience and documenting crimes against humanity, has taken on a broader, more conflicted definition. It can now mean helping the Marine Corps formulate counterinsurgency techniques; pounding the drums for air strikes (of a strictly surgical nature, of course); lobbying for troop escalations in various conquered nations—all for noble humanitarian ends.

The intellectual career of Samantha Power is a richly instructive example of the weaponization of human rights. She made her name in 2002 with A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. In this surprise global bestseller, she argues that when confronted with 20th-century genocides, the United States sat on the sidelines as the blood flowed. Look at Bosnia or Rwanda. “Why does the US stand so idly by?” she asks. Powers allows that overall America “has made modest progress in its responses to genocide.” That’s not good enough. We must be bolder in deploying our armed forces to prevent human-rights catastrophes—to engage in “humanitarian intervention” in the patois of our foreign-policy elite.

In nearly 600 pages of text, Power barely mentions those postwar genocides in which the U.S. government, far from sitting idle, took a robust role in the slaughter. Indonesia’s genocidal conquest of East Timor, for instance, expressly green-lighted by President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger, who met with Suharto the night before the invasion was launched and carried out with American-supplied weapons. Over the next quarter century, the Indonesian army saw U.S. military aid and training rise as it killed between 100,000 and 200,000 East Timorese. (The figures and the designation of “genocide” come from a UN-formed investigative body.) This whole bloody business gets exactly one sentence in Power’s book.

What about the genocide of Mayan peasants in Guatemala—another decades-long massacre carried out with American armaments by a military dictatorship with tacit U.S. backing, officer training at Fort Benning, and covert CIA support? A truth commission sponsored by the Catholic Church and the UN designated this programmatic slaughter genocide and set the death toll at approximately 200,000. But apparently this isn’t a problem from hell.

The selective omissions compound. Not a word about the CIA’s role in facilitating the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian Communists in 1965-66. (Perhaps on legalistic grounds: Since it was a political group being massacred, does it not meet the quirky criteria in the flawed UN Convention on Genocide?) Nothing about the vital debate as to whether the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths attributable to U.S.-led economic sanctions in the 1990s count as genocide. The book is primarily a vigorous act of historical cleansing. Its portrait of a “consistent policy of non-intervention in the face of genocide” is fiction. (Those who think that pointing out Power’s deliberate blind spots about America’s active role in genocide is nitpicking should remember that every moral tradition the earth has known, from the Babylonian Talmud to St. Thomas Aquinas, sees sins of commission as far worse than sins of omission.)

Power’s willful historical ignorance is the inevitable product of her professional milieu: the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. One simply cannot hold down a job at the KSG by pointing out the active role of the U.S. government in various postwar genocides. That is the kind of impolitic whining best left to youthful anarchists like Andrew Bacevich or Noam Chomsky and, really, one wouldn’t want to offend the retired Guatemalan colonel down the hall. (The KSG has an abiding tradition of taking on war criminals as visiting fellows.) On the other hand, to cast the U.S. as a passive, benign giant that must assume its rightful role on the world stage by vanquishing evil—this is most flattering to American amour propre and consonant with attitudes in Washington, even if it doesn’t map onto reality. A country doesn’t acquire a vast network of military bases in dozens of sovereign nations across the world by standing on the sidelines, and for the past hundred years the U.S. has, by any standard, been a hyperactive world presence.

For Samantha Power, the United States can by its very nature only be a force for virtue abroad. In this sense, the outlook of Obama’s human-rights advocate is no different from Donald Rumsfeld’s.

Power’s faith in the therapeutic possibilities of military force was formed by her experience as a correspondent in the Balkans, whose wars throughout the ’90s she seems to view as the alpha and omega of ethnic conflict, indeed of all genocide. For her, NATO’s bombing of Belgrade in 1999 was a stunning success that “likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives” in Kosovo. Yet this assertion seems to crumble a little more each year: estimates of the number of Kosovars slain by the province’s Serb minority have shrunk from 100,000 to at most 5,000. And it is far from clear whether NATO’s air strikes prevented more killing or intensified the bloodshed. Even so, it is the NATO attack on Belgrade—including civilian targets, which Amnesty International has recently, belatedly, deemed a war crime—that informs Power’s belief that the U.S. military possesses nearly unlimited capability to save civilians by means of aerial bombardment, and all we need is the courage to launch the sorties. Power has recently admitted, perhaps a little ruefully, that “the Kosovo war helped build support for the invasion of Iraq by contributing to the false impression that the US military was invincible.” But no intellectual has worked harder than Samantha Power to propagate this impression.

A Problem From Hell won a Pulitzer in early 2003. America’s book reviewers, eager to be team players, were relieved to be reminded of the upbeat side of military force during the build-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Surely Saddam Hussein, who had perpetrated acts of genocide against the Kurds, needed to be smashed by military force. Didn’t we owe it to the Iraqis to invade? Hasn’t America played spectator for too long? Power, to her credit, did not support the war, but she has been mighty careful not to raise her voice against it. After all, is speaking out at an antiwar demonstration or joining a peace group like Code Pink really “constructive”? It is certainly no way to get a seat on the National Security Council.

The failed marriage of warfare and humanitarian work is also the subject of Power’s most recent book, Chasing the Flame, a biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN humanitarian worker who was killed, with 21 others, by a suicide bomber in Baghdad just months after the U.S. invasion. Most of the book is a sensitive and rather gripping account of Vieira’s partial successes and heroic efforts in refugee resettlement in Thailand, Lebanon, and the Balkans. He eventually rose to become the UN’s high commissioner on human rights—a position he left when asked by George W. Bush to lead a UN “presence” in Iraq. That the UN’s top human-rights official would rush to help with the clean-up after an American invasion that contravened international law may strike some observers as strange. (One can imagine the puzzlement and outrage if the UN’s high commissioner on human rights had trailed the Soviets into Afghanistan in 1979 to help build civil society.) But for Vieira, and for Samantha Power, there is nothing unseemly about human-rights professionals serving as adjuncts to a conquering army, especially when the prestige of the UN—scorned and flouted during the run-up to the war—is on the line. Besides, Vieira had the personal assurances of the U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer—a simply charming American: he even speaks a foreign language—that the UN taskforce would have a great deal of sway in how a new Iraq was built.

In June 2003, Vieira arrived in Baghdad and was surprised to find himself completely powerless. That Vieira and company believed the UN insignia would be more than a hood ornament on Blackwater’s Humvees bespeaks not tough-minded idealism but wishful thinking. Power herself claims that Kofi Annan’s main reason for sending Vieira off to Baghdad was to remind the world of the UN’s “relevance” by getting a piece of the action. But for him and his colleagues, this confusion of means and ends proved deadly, one of tens of thousands of blood-soaked tragedies that this war has wrought. The clear lesson is that humanitarian work is always fatally compromised if it’s part of a militarized pacification campaign: NGO workers wield no real power and serve mostly as window dressing for the conquering army.

But this isn’t the moral that Power draws. She is still looking for Mr. Good War. Today, her preferred human-rights adventure is an escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

For the past seven years Afghanistan has been the “right” war for American liberals, but this carte blanche is fast expiring, as more civilians and soldiers die, as the Taliban resurges, and as the carnage whirlwinds into Pakistan. The numerous humanitarian nonprofits in Afghanistan are no longer backed up by the military; it is they who are backing the armed forces, having morphed into helpmates to a counterinsurgency campaign. This transformation has, according to one knowledgeable veteran of such work in Afghanistan, rendered humanitarian work unsustainable. But Power, like so many American liberals, remains committed to “success” in Afghanistan—whatever that means.

As a human-rights entrepreneur who is also a tireless advocate of war, Samantha Power is not aberrant. Elite factions of the human-rights industry were long ago normalized within the tightly corseted spectrum of American foreign policy. Sarah Sewell, the recent head of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, has written a slavering introduction to the new Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual: human-rights tools can help the U.S. armed forces run better pacification campaigns in conquered territory. The Save Darfur campaign, more organized than any bloc of the peace movement in the U.S., continues to call for some inchoate military strike against Sudan (with Power’s vocal support) even though this disaster’s genocide status is doubtful and despite an expert consensus that bombing Khartoum would do less than nothing for the suffering refugees. Meanwhile, the influential liberal think tank the Center for American Progress also appeals to human rights in its call for troop escalations in Afghanistan—the better to “engage” the enemy.

Nor is the imperialist current within the human-rights industry a purely American phenomenon: the conquest of Iraq found whooping proponents in Bernard Kouchner, founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, now Sarkozy’s foreign minister, and Michael Ignatieff, also a former head of the Harvard’s Carr Center and poised to become Canada’s next prime minister. Gareth Evans, Australia’s former foreign minister and a grinning soft-peddler of Indonesia’s massacres in East Timor, is perhaps the leading intellectual proponent of the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P as it is cutely called, an attempt to embed humanitarian intervention into international law. Evans, who recently stepped down from leading the International Crisis Group, laments the Iraq War chiefly for the way it has soiled the credibility of his pet idea.

To be sure, the human-rights industry is not all armed missionaries and laptop bombardiers. Human Rights Watch, for example, is one of few prestigious institutions in the U.S. to have criticized Israel’s assault on Gaza, for which its Middle East and North Africa division has endured much bashing not just from right-wing media but from its own board of directors. That said, HRW’s rebuke was limited to Israel’s manner of making war, rather than Israel’s decision to launch the attack in the first place—the jus in bello, not the jus ad bellum.

Human-rights organizations can do a splendid job of exposing and criticizing abuses, but they are constitutionally incapable of taking stands on larger political issues. No major human-rights NGO opposed the invasion of Iraq. With their legitimacy and funding dependent on a carefully cultivated perception of neutrality, human-rights nonprofits will never be any substitute for an explicitly anti-imperialist political force. In the meantime, America’s best and brightest will continue to explore innovative ways for human rights to serve a thoroughly militarized foreign policy.
__________________________________________

Chase Madar is a civil-rights lawyer in New York.

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July 13, 2013 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

What Did Samantha Power Say About Iraq Invasion?

By Peter Hart | FAIR | June 10, 2013

Samantha Power on Democracy Now!

Samantha Power on Democracy Now!

Obama National Security Council adviser Samantha Power has been named the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. That news prompted a piece in the New York Times (6/9/13) headlined “A Golden Age for Intervention?” by Neil MacFarquhar.  The article raises some of the usual issues surrounding Power’s work– most prominently the notion that the United States should use military intervention in the name of humanitarianism.

MacFarquhar writes that Power

wants the system to work. As flawed as the Security Council is, she has often said, its endorsement amplifies international approval for controversial action. She criticized the American invasion of Iraq because it lacked the council’s stamp, among other reasons.

But what did Samantha Power actually say about the Iraq War before it happened?

Power was prominent in elite foreign policy discussions at the time;  her 2002 book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide won a Pulitzer the following year.

MacFarquhar makes it sound like Power had multiple reasons she opposed the war. But it’s difficult to find such evidence.

On March 10, 2003, she appeared on MSNBC‘s Hardball to debate pro-war writer Jonathan Chait–whom she agreed with on a few points.

Indeed, it was somewhat difficult to say what Power’s position was overall:

An American intervention likely will improve the live of the Iraqis. Their lives could not get worse, I think it’s quite safe to say.

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 seemed especially concerned about how the ramifications of the war on U.S. standing in the world:

It legitimates the go-it-alone approach and it sort of reinforces the impression of us as an outlaw nation, which is ironic because, of course, Saddam’s regime is far more an outlaw nation than ours.

So Power certainly did not support the way the United States was launching the war. But that’s not really the same as opposing the war; it’s wishing for  more effective management of the war.

And host Chris Matthews closed the segment trying to get Power to take a position:

MATTHEWS: Is this a just war, Samantha?

POWER: It will have a just result locally and probably a very unjust result…

MATTHEWS: Is it a just war?

POWER: I don’t think we can be the guardians of justice…

MATTHEWS: No, I–so it’s not a just war?

POWER: We haven’t fought it yet, Chris. I mean, you know, you can’t say whether…

MATTHEWS: Well, you have to decide about a war before you start it, not afterwards. Is this a just war…

POWER: No, you can’t weigh in on proportionality, on discrimination, on whether we actually follow through and actually look out for the rights of the Iraqis…

(CROSSTALK)

POWER: … after the war. We don’t know that now.

MATTHEWS: But in its outset, is it a just war?

POWER: It’s not being fought for human rights reasons. I don’t know who–why–I mean, it would be great if human rights were a necessary condition.

At that time, bonafide critics of the Iraq War were much clearer than that, and it’s hard to find much else that would suggest that Power had a particularly clear anti-war case she made publicly–though she did, like many others, come around to articulating a more forceful critique of the Bush administration by the time that administration was almost over.

Weeks after the war started, a Los Angeles Times article (4/10/03) on Power included this assessment of Iraq:

 “That’s what’s so great about the fall of Saddam Hussein. Now we can actually put our money and power where our might has been so far. We can demonstrate what we have claimed all along, that this war is about them,” she said, referring to the Iraqi people.

“The hard work is just beginning, in Iraq and also in restoring U.S. credibility as a global actor. I hope the book provides the spirit in which that can be done.”

Some of Power’s most pointed critics–like writer and lawyer Chase Madar–have argued that Power does not forcefully critique U.S. policies that have encouraged and enabled massive crimes against humanity, preferring instead to talk about instances where the United States could have taken steps to intervene militarily in a given crisis and didn’t.

But in the case of Iraq, at a time when the themes of her celebrated book were very much a part of the debate over whether or not to go to war, it was hard to determine where Power stood.

June 10, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | 2 Comments

An Exchange on “Humanitarian” Intervention with Rocky Anderson

The Infected Scalpel

By John V. Walsh | Dissident Voice | February 7th, 2012

A few days back I received an announcement from Rocky Anderson, announcing his presidential bid as the candidate of the newly formed Justice Party. Although social justice was mentioned prominently along with the desperate economic plight of many in the U.S., I was struck by the fact that the struggle against war was not prominently mentioned and the question of the U.S. Empire and overseas bases seemed to get no mention. “Human Rights,” an increasingly plastic category at least in the hands of the U.S. ruling elite, figures prominently in Anderson’s campaign literature and world view. I was further surprised that “High Road to Human Rights,” an organization founded by Anderson, counted on its board of advisers, Elie Wiesel, a defender of the Apartheid Israeli regime. On the other hand, Anderson was a staunch opponent of the war on Iraq and even the war on Libya, the latter because it lacked Congressional approval.

I wondered about Anderson’s commitment to anti-interventionism and his view on “humanitarian” interventions, something that should be crystal clear from someone running for president and appealing to progressives. The following email exchange resulted:

From JW to RA:  Hello Rocky,

I wish that you would spell all this out a bit more clearly.

Are you for “humanitarian” interventions as in the Balkans?  Have you read Jean Bricmont’s great (and short) book “Humanitarian Imperialism”?

Are you for getting rid of all our overseas bases and devoting a limited military to purely defensive purposes?

Many pwogs*, for example, Amy Goodman and CIA “consultant” Juan Cole, were cheerleaders for the Libyan intervention, despite Libya having had the highest Human Development Index in all of Africa before NATO destroyed its infrastructure and reduced it to rubble in the name of human rights.

We have two versions of imperialism – the “tough guy” Dick Cheney brand and the “humanitarian” Susan Rice version.  Both are the same in reality whatever the words attached to them.  We must break with them both and cease viewing the world solely through the very arbitrary lens of “human rights,” a good sell among the pwogwessives.

But what good are human rights to a starving illiterate woman in India, a category that Mao consigned to the dust heap of history in China?

From RA to JW:  Yes, so long as we are in compliance with the War Power Clause of the Constitution and the U.N. Charter, I favor the U.S. working with the international community in putting to an end massive atrocities.  I strongly believe in living up to the promise of “Never Again.”  Given all my work in this area, I don’t know how you would have any doubt about my position.  I don’t think political boundaries should control our moral obligations to our brothers and sisters elsewhere.

I recommend to you A Problem From Hell, by Samantha Power.

Your reference to Susan Rice was a curious one.  She sat on her hands (as you apparently would have had her do) when she was with the NSC and failed to take any action to stop the genocide that led to the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in 100 days.  According to an article in The Atlantic by Samantha Power, Susan Rice was apparently more concerned with the political implications in the mid-term elections in 1994 than she was about the horrendous fate of the Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda. Those who stood by when their action could have ended the atrocities are, in my view, complicit.

From JW to RA: I think the Samantha Powers of the world are a big part of the problem.

I recommend that you read Humanitarian Imperialism by Jean Bricmont.

From RA to JW: I think isolationist nationalists who don’t care about the suffering of other people who happen to be in other parts of the world are “the problem”.  Sorry, John, we’re on completely different moral planets here.

I’ll try to read the book you referenced.  Have you read A Problem From Hell?  It’s heart-breaking — and a real indictment of the failure of the US to do what is required to stop the atrocities.

From JW to RA: I cannot agree, Rocky.  The “international community” is a euphemism for NATO and the US.  The UN foolishly went along with the destruction of Libya – and we can now see that Russia and China are finally drawing a line in the sand at Syria.

You fail to see that the US is the most ruthless Empire in the history of humankind, and it will cover up its atrocities with appeals to “human rights.”  It is the biggest lie of all.   Would you favor military intervention to end apartheid in Israel?  Will you take that position on the campaign trail?

For those of us living in the heart of Empire there is no alternative to being principled anti-interventionists.  The Empire is incapable of waging a “good war,” whatever that may be.  An anti-interventionist is not an “isolationist nationalist.”  That is simply a smear.

Samantha Power has not written a heart rending account of what has been done to Iraq, I notice.

Finally, the Empire has always cloaked its wars in virtue, from the White Man’s burden to “human rights,” and it always will.  The path to hell is paved with naiveté.

From RA to JW: Samantha Power has not written that account of Iraq because we did not intervene on humanitarian grounds.  It was an illegal war of aggression, at odds with the War Power Clause and with the UN Charter.  You paint with a very misleading, broad brush.  You can advocate abandoning people during genocides and other mass atrocities.  I will always be on the other side.  I share your anti-imperialistic views; I do not share your willingness to turn a blind eye to humanitarian disasters.

You will never convince me of what I perceive to be an extremely selfish, heartless isolationist position.  I would always advocate doing what I would want the U.S. and international community to do if I were in the position of a victim of genocide.  To advocate doing what is right is hardly naïve.  And it is hardly countenancing wars of aggression.  No one has a stronger record of opposition to the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq than I.

From JW to RA: You are well meaning as far as I can tell, but you hold very dangerous views IMHO.

If people want to help those in far off lands, let them form their Abraham Lincoln brigades, something the US Empire also opposed.  Of course, that means putting one’s body on the line, not someone else’s body.

First do no harm.

From RA to JW: So you would advocate repeal of the Genocide Convention?  We couldn’t be further apart in our views on this.

But, then, I recognize the concerns with US empire that drive your views on this.  We need to strive to be better on all counts.  That’s why I have worked so hard in all of these areas over the years — and a large part of why I’m doing what I am now.

From JW to RA:  I never said that I wanted to repeal the Genocide Convention.  Why do you conclude that?

But what is being done to the Palestinians is a slow genocide.  Do you advocate military action against Israel to get rid of the Apartheid regime there?  You should be explicit about that.

Noam Chomsky points out that the slaughter in the Balkans, greatly exaggerated, took place AFTER NATO’s bombs started falling.  And that was not really a genocide either.

Nor is Darfur a genocide either – a brutal war on both sides apparently but not a genocide. In fact, only the US and that outrageous liar Susan Rice label it as such.

And then there is the slaughter in Libya a country that once had the highest Human Development Index in all of Africa.  The concrete reality is that the US is always up to no good and will kill and kill to get its way. We should not be in the business of providing cover for that.

I do not think that you really appreciate that the formerly colonized peoples of the world do not want Western interventions.  They have had quite enough of the benefits of such neocolonial acts.

From RA to JW: You are so incredibly wrong.  The people (at least the Tutsis) of Rwanda, and of Kosovo, view the U.S. as heroically coming to their aid and stopping the massacres.  You would have been content with sitting back after the massacre at Srebrenica.  To me, that is the greatest moral cowardice.

And how can you maintain that you would not seek the repeal of the Genocide Convention?  It creates a legal obligation to take action to stop genocides wherever they occur.

I cannot countenance the U.S. continuing to build its empire; neither can I countenance people — or our nation — turning a blind eye to mass atrocities when they can be stopped.

This will be my last email on this topic.  I’m dismayed that any person can be so insensitive toward victims of genocide or other mass atrocities.  (I’m curious.  What have you done, if anything, to help stop wars of aggression or mass atrocities?)

Good luck – 

At this point someone on the list of those cc’d to this exchange jumped in, J.A., an Israeli expat who as a young man was swept into the Yom Kippur war and saw many of his friends needlessly killed. He left Israel in part to save his son from future slaughters of this sort and has vowed never to return. He wrote:

From J.A. to RA and JW:  Rocky, humanitarian intervention is a slippery slope argument, and is being used for imperialistic ambitions (The latest example is Libya, and still Afghanistan – freeing the Afghan women. I remember well, Samantha Power supported this view) and, in general, being used to justify our military power. (Humanitarian aid via aircraft carriers, being the good policeman of the world, etc).

BTW, you wrote “illegal invasion”; is there a legal invasion?

Here is a question: Since you support “humanitarian” intervention, do you support attacking Israel and freeing the Palestinians from the  Israeli harsh occupation? You must know about the suffering of the Palestinians under the Israeli Apartheid and the stealth genocide by Israel, so should we invade Israel?

(It is a rhetorical question to demonstrate how absurd is the “humanitarian” intervention view).

Joshua

From JW to RA:  You did not answer whether you would advocate in your campaign a military expeditionary force led by the US to end Israeli apartheid and the slow genocide of the Palestinians?  Why can you not answer that?

And will you launch another expedition to restore the Tibetan theocracy?  It will probably take a few million persons under arms and a return to the draft.  Or how about an occupation of India where the most dire poverty continues and the farmers driven from their agriculture by agribusiness commit suicide in huge numbers?  Or is that OK because “democracy” reigns?

And a second point.  The greatest stimulus to nuclear proliferation is the huge conventional military force which the US has.  That is the force that you need to preserve in order to save the world.  The only protection for a small nation is nukes.

Long ago when the US was trying to take down the Chinese revolution and waging a war on Vietnam, Mao Zedong opined that US imperialism is the number one enemy of the peoples of the world.  I am afraid that remains true.

And you are proof positive that the progressive movement, so called, is no longer anti-interventionist or anti-Empire.

As they say, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

At least you admit it outright – and that amount of honesty deserves credit.  I suggest that you openly proclaim the new humanitarian interventionism as part of your platform.  Now if only other progressives would also do that, we could separate wheat from chaff more readily.

JW

P.S. As a medical student I learned that there are some things that are beyond one’s control and that when one tries to control them the only thing that results is harm — sometimes fatal harm.

John V. Walsh can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com.

~

* Pwog

A derisive term for a political progressive. First appeared in the 1960s as a term for old guard leftists of Jewish background. Derived from the tendency of Jews of Eastern European heritage to pronounce ‘R’ as ‘W’, in keeping with Yiddish pronunciation. Now can be used as a term for all progressives, regardless of ethnicity.

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