Obama's Power Ranger

I have a suggestion for people who support Barack Obama: They should make their support contingent on Obama finding a new foreign-policy adviser.

His current foreign-policy adviser is Samantha Power, who just told an interviewer that “The next president is really going to have to walk and chew gum at the same time, because no long-term peace in the Middle East is possible until we get some kind of modus vivendi in the Arab-Israeli situation.”

Ah, that “Arab-Israeli situation.” Power is demonstrably in harmony with the Arab world, especially its long line of dictators. Her words reminded me of the unceasing echo we heard growing up under Arab dictatorship. To wit, Palestine comes first; everything else is to be sacrificed for the cause. Solve the Palestinian problem and everything else (especially our own freedom) will fall into place. That’s exactly what we were told, and it's what the Egyptians were told, and what Arabs all over the Middle East and North Africa were told. Nobody in Iraq would dare comment on the shortages of food and ordinary supplies, but we could all comment on the injustice being done to Palestinians. During the sanctions of the 1990s and early 2000s, Saddam Hussein allowed Iraqis to go hungry while he sent cash to the families of suicide bombers in the West Bank.

Obviously, I want a just solution so as to end Palestinian agonies. But the last time I looked, the Palestinian leadership was engaged in a fratricidal war for control of the Palestinians. The lives of all other Arabs can’t be put on hold until the seemingly intractable Arab-Israeli impasse is resolved. Nor, as Power believes, can the other pressing issues of the region – Iran’s nuclear dreams, Hezbollah’s “divine” militarism, Syria’s foreign policy of assassination – continue to wait for that golden day. I want to see Palestinians living happily and at peace in their own country, but I am no longer willing to sacrifice the future well-being of Iraq.

Concerning the well-being of Iraqis, Samantha Power advises Obama to abandon them, albeit possibly in new neighborhoods. “We need to be incredibly sensitive as we leave Iraq to the welfare of Iraqis who are going to be left in our wake. That potentially entails the idea of sectarian or ethnic relocation if people are in a mixed neighborhood and feel that they'd be safer in a more homogenous neighborhood,” Power said.

Power was paid how much to come up with that? She added, “Also, [it entails] massive support for neighboring countries that have taken in 2 million refugees, and some very systematic effort between now and the time we begin leaving to build funding and resource streams to internally displaced people.”

I like the part about “massive support” to the neighbors. Two of those neighbors are Syria and Iran, who are doing neither Iraqis nor the U.S. any favors by encouraging bloodshed and chaos in Iraq. Does she favor “massive support” for them? Does she know how preposterous she sounds?

Beirut journalist Michael Young was impressed by the same passage:

“So here's the plan from the author, incidentally, of a book on genocide. Accept the realities imposed by ethnic cleansing; give plenty of money to several of the neighboring countries that have been responsible for sustaining the fighting in Iraq; and pay off displaced Iraqis so that the U.S. can feel less guilty about abandoning them to their sad fate.”

Exactly. Young writes, “I would be able cynically to stomach her scheme if it were not couched in the hypocritical language of moral self-righteousness. Power knows enough about killing to know that she really needs to answer the question: What happens if an American withdrawal leads simultaneously to mass murder?”

Actually, we’ve already heard from her boss, Sen. Obama, about the possibility of Iraqi genocide, and whether he would take it into account in effecting a withdrawal from Iraq. He said potential genocide should not be a consideration. He really needs better advice.