The moral bankruptcy of the Obama administration
S amantha Power first burst into public consciousness as the author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide a series of case studies chronicling the acquiescence of American policymakers in mass slaughter — from the Armenians at the hands of the Turks to the Holocaust to Rwanda — and the elaborate justifications they offered. The book grew out of her experiences as a war correspondent in the Balkans observing the ethnic-cleansing of Srebrenica and Kosovo.
Now the US Ambassador to the United Nations her December 13 outburst against Russia for its lead role in the mass civilian casualties in Aleppo reflected the concerns of her earlier work. “Are you truly incapable of shame? Is there literally nothing that can shame you?” a teary-eyed and voice-quivering Power challenged the Russian UN ambassador.
But Ms. Power herself is the public face of a US administration that might as well be using her own work as a handbook for justifying inaction. Those justifications have shifted continuously since 2006. First President Obama confidently predicted that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad would fall without US intervention. Later he dismissed opposition forces as a ragtag group of “doctors and lawyers” who had no chance of defeating Assad’s army.
The president threatened Assad not to cross his “red-lines” and employ chemical weapons and then blinked when Assad called his bluff. When ISIS first arose Obama dismissed it as the “JV team.” Subsequently the magnitude of the ISIS threat was seized upon as an excuse for allying with Russia and Iran. Yet most of ISIS’s initial support among Syrian Sunnis was the result of Sunnis feeling abandoned by the U.S. to the tender mercies of Assad and Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah.
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