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american leadershit "hard choices"...

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Anyone who has spent enough time in Washington or has even a cursory familiarity with the professional functionaries who staff the foreign policy and national security apparatus here will have encountered, at one time or another, well-intentioned, seemingly humble, painfully earnest bureaucrats who are certain that the rest of the world needs, indeed cries out for, “American leadership.”

 

by James W. Carden

 

In the absence of such leadership, the world would surely descend into chaos—or so goes the prevailing thinking. And so the role these invariably well-educated, hyper-ambitious missionaries see for themselves takes on a kind of world-historical importance; their job becomes so much more than merely protecting and advancing U.S. national interests. Their mission, as they see it, is not so much to serve America; it is to save the world.

Graham Greene was perhaps the first to spot the phenomenon of the over-ambitious American missionary, whose good intentions were never quite enough to make up for the chaos and destruction their lavishly funded and scrupulously laid out plans inevitably unleashed. Greene’s novel, The Quiet American, published in 1955 just as the first Cold War was getting underway, should be required reading for anyone wishing to understand the mindset that has plagued American foreign policy for the last 70 years.

The story, set in Vietnam as the French were barely holding on and the Americans were stepping in, centers around the fraught relationship between a starry-eyed American idealist and U.S. intelligence operative, Alden Pyle, and a cynical, seen-it-all expatriate British journalist, Thomas Fowler. Fowler, an obvious stand-in for Greene, sees right through Pyle’s paeans to democracy and aw-shucks routine to what they really are: nonsense.

Fowler recalls “suffering through” Pyle’s lectures on the Far East and his “pronounced and aggravating views on what the United States was doing for the world.” Pyle was determined “to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.” Fowler’s problem with Pyle was that the latter believed, quite sincerely, in his own bullshit. Around the same time (1952), the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was wrestling with the delusions of American innocence. In The Irony of American History, Niebuhr observed that “Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem are insufferable in their human contacts.” Greene clearly felt the same, and through Fowler expressed his view that “innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

Pyle is often thought to be based on a Col. Edward Landsdale, chief of the CIA’s Saigon Military Mission, who arrived in Vietnam in 1954 to work on counterinsurgency strategy centered around support for then-Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem. Yet Greene insisted the real model for Pyle was a U.S. economic attaché named Leo Hochstetter who, according to an article in Foreign Policy, once lectured Greene on the “necessity of finding a ‘third force in Vietnam.’”

Be that as it may, it has long struck me that Pyle also bears a likeness to someone closer to our own time: the journalist, author, and former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power, whose confirmation hearing to become the next USAID administrator was held before the Senate Foreign Relation Committee (SFRC) on Tuesday morning.

Power’s transformation from crusading war correspondent (she and the execrable Christiana Amanpour deserve much credit, if that’s the word, for bamboozling the Clinton administration into getting tangled up in the Yugoslavian civil war in the mid-90s) to skilled bureaucratic infighter, who served as a member of President Obama’s national security council and later as his U.N. ambassador, has been nothing short of remarkable. Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book on genocide, A Problem from Hell, sharply criticized the U.S. government for repeatedly standing aside and allowing some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century to take place. Power, like the fictional Pyle, really seems to believe that there is only one country that has the wherewithal, duty, and moral right to wade in and solve the world’s problems: The United States of America.

And that is precisely why handing over the reigns of USAID to Power is so dangerous.

 

At the U.N., Power used her platform to push for regime change in Syria. Still worse, Power was one of the key Obama advisors urging support for the Saudi war on Yemen, a position from which she and her colleague, former NSC spokesman Ben Rhodes, have been at pains to distance themselves in recent years. Yet if she seems aware that support for the grotesque Saudi starvation campaign on Yemeni civilians is something of a stain on her record, when pressed by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul on Tuesday, she evinced not a shred of regret for her support for U.S. military interventions in Libya and Syria. These, she explained to Paul, were “hard choices.”

At USAID, Power will have a budget of roughly $20 billion and a far-flung and powerful bureaucracy at her disposal. This is particularly concerning because over the past decade or so, USAID expanded its writ, from funding humanitarian assistance programs to running shadowy regime-change operations backed by partnerships with Silicon Valley behemoths like Google. The targets for such operations will be countries that have chosen the “authoritarian model” as Power made clear to the SFRC on Tuesday. Power pledged, among other things, her “unequivocal” support for a renewal of the Global Magnitsky Act, a pet project of William Browder, a corrupt British hedge fund billionaire who renounced his American citizenship in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes. At her confirmation hearing Power expressed a desire to “multilateralize” the Act, in other words, to force allied nations into supporting the American sanctions regime, a regime which has done much to poison relations between the U.S. and our longstanding European allies France and Germany.

For years, the USAID Development Lab and third-party vendors who ostensibly specialize in humanitarian assistance, such as DAI, have increasingly turned their attention to fomenting civil unrest in order push regime change on targeted countries. Sometimes projects like this go very, very wrong, as it did in the case of Alan Gross’s misadventures in Cuba. And while you wouldn’t know it from Tuesday’s hearing, USAID has been operating as a quasi-intelligence operation with a healthy assist from their “partners” in Silicon Valley.

USAID will provide someone with Power’s well-established record as a liberal interventionist an unprecedented opportunity to pursue a strategy of regime-change operations globally. The question as to whether these adventures actually benefit U.S. national security is one that rarely, if ever, gets asked.

 

 

James W. Carden is a former advisor at the State Department who he has written for numerous publications including The National Interest, The Los Angeles Times, Quartz, and American Affairs.

 

 

 

Read more:

 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-return-of-the-quiet-american/

 

 

 

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see also....

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her hypocritical tears...

WASHINGTON — Near the end of the 2014 documentary “Watchers of the Sky,” which chronicles the origins of the legal definition of genocide, Samantha Power grows emotional. At the time, Ms. Power was President Barack Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, and, she said, had “great visibility into a lot of the pain” in the world.

From that perch, preventing mass atrocities abroad required “thinking through what we can do about it, to exhaust the tools at your disposal,” Ms. Power said in the film. “And I always think about the privilege of, you know, of getting to try — just to try.”

Few doubt Ms. Power’s zeal — given her career as a war correspondent, human rights activist, academic expert and foreign policy adviser — even if it has meant advocating military force to stop widespread killings.

Now, as President Biden’s nominee to lead the United States Agency for International Development, she is preparing to rejoin the government as an administrator of soft power, and resist using weapons as a means of deterrence and punishment that she has pushed for in the past.

A Senate committee is expected to vote Thursday on her nomination to lead one of the world’s largest distributors of humanitarian aid.

If she is confirmed, Mr. Biden will also seat her on the National Security Council, where during the Obama administration she pressed for military invention to protect civilians from state-sponsored attacks in Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2013. (However, she also opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.)

That she will be back at the table at the council — and again almost certain to be debating whether to entangle American forces in enduring conflicts — has concerned some officials, analysts and think tank experts who demand military restraint from the Biden administration. Mr. Biden appears to be leaning that way: He has embraced economic sanctions as a tool of hard power and is expected to announce a full withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, ending the United States’ longest war.

“If you’re talking about humanitarianism, famine, the wars — really, other than natural causes, war is the No. 1 cause of famine around the world,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, told Ms. Power last month during her Senate confirmation hearing. “Are you willing to admit that the Libyan and Syrian interventions that you advocated for were a mistake?”

Ms. Power did not. “When these situations arise, it’s a question almost of lesser evils — that the choices are very challenging,” she said.

By its very nature, the U.S. aid agency takes a long-term view of the world compared with the immediacy of military action. Beyond the roughly $6 billion in humanitarian aid it is delivering this year to disaster-ridden nations, the agency seeks to prevent conflict at its roots, largely bolstering economies, countering state corruption and fostering democracy and human rights.

That mission is central to Mr. Biden’s foreign policy, and will perhaps prove nowhere more pivotal than in his global competition with China.

Last month, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken assured allies that they would not be backed into an “‘us-or-them’ choice with China” as the two superpowers vie for economic, diplomatic and military advantage.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/us/politics/samantha-power-biden.html

 

 

One wonders if the hypocrisy of Samantha Power is greater or lesser than that of this soft piece of crap written in the New York Times... One shall see... Power should be rejected by the Senate... In a big way, USAID is also a "controller" of other people's countries, making sure they fall under the dominance of the US empire. It's complicated, though USAID can do good work in places, it has too many strings attached to be declared "benevolent"...

 

 

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hypocritical cynicism...

EARLIER THIS MONTH, Samantha Power, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, tweeted in celebration about Sudan moving to join the International Criminal Court at the Hague.

 

Sharing BIG news from Khartoum: the Council of Ministers in #Sudan—yes, Sudan!—has voted unanimously to join the @IntlCrimCourt. A joint transitional govt Sovereign Council session votes next. A revolution for “Freedom Peace & Justice” just took a key step toward ending impunity.

— Samantha Power (@PowerUSAID) August 3, 2021

 

Power’s words were extraordinarily cynical in several ways. “They make clear that much of what we call the rule-based order is just an order in which we rule,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “Ultimately it is much more about continued American domination than actually having a world in which the rules are such that they protect us as well as others.”

The first issue with Power’s sentiments is obvious: The U.S. itself has not joined the International Criminal Court. Moreover, in 2002, President George W. Bush signed into law a bill authorizing the U.S. military to invade the Netherlands to free any American being held by the court.

Second, the Biden administration has strenuously opposed ICC investigations into the actions of Israel (and Palestinians) in the West Bank and Gaza and of the U.S. (and the Taliban and the former Afghan government) in Afghanistan.

Third, in 2014 when Power was U.S. ambassador to the U.N. during the Obama administration, she personally attempted to prevent the Palestinian Authority from joining the ICC — that is, exactly what she now praises Sudan for doing. At the same time, she loudly supported an attempt by the U.N. Security Council to refer Syria to the ICC for an investigation into atrocities on all sides during the country’s civil war.

Power’s glowing words today about the court are therefore certainly on brand for her: She made her reputation with the book “A Problem From Hell,” decrying the failure of the world to stop genocides in the 20th century, and went on to become the founding director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. They just have nothing to do with her own history, the stance of the Biden administration, or the actions of the U.S. government.

The relationship between the U.S. and the ICC is long, vexatious, and occasionally contradictory.

The rationale for the creation of the ICC was simple and obvious: Governments frequently commit horrifying crimes, including war, torture and genocide, yet almost never punish themselves. Therefore justice will often only be available at an international level.

At a conference in Italy in 1998, the U.N. General Assembly passed what came to be known as the Rome Statute, which established the basis for the ICC. Only seven countries voted against the treaty: the U.S., Israel, China, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, Qatar, and Yemen.

Nonetheless, Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute just before he left office, stating that “we do so to reaffirm our strong support for international accountability and for bringing to justice perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.” Clinton’s action, however, had no legal force. Moreover, he also said that he would not submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification nor recommend that Bush, his successor, do so. Rather, he suggested that the U.S. “observe and assess the functioning of the court over time” and then decide what to do.

The Bush administration was unwilling even to say nice words about the ICC. As the treaty’s 60-country ratification threshold was reached in 2002, John Bolton, then undersecretary of state, informed the United Nations that the U.S. was withdrawing its signature and that we did not intend to become a party to the Rome Statue. Then Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which authorized the president to use “all means necessary” to prevent any prosecution of Americans by the ICC. This led to the bill being nicknamed the “Hague Invasion Act.”

With the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House, the pendulum swung back slightly, with the State Department announcing that the U.S. attitude toward the ICC was changing “from hostility to positive engagement.” In practice this meant only that the Obama administration would make several small gestures of support for the court. But Obama did not re-sign the treaty and never considered sending the Rome Statute to the Senate.

Most significantly, the Obama administration — with Power directly involved — fervently opposed a 2014 bid by the Palestinian Authority to join the Rome Statute. America’s concern was that if the PA succeeded, Israeli violence in the West Bank and Gaza might be found to fall under the ICC’s jurisdiction. “The ICC is of course something that we have been absolutely adamant about,” Power told Congress at the time. “Secretary [of State John] Kerry has made it very, very clear to the Palestinians. … I mean, this is something that really poses a profound threat to Israel.”

 

Read more:

https://theintercept.com/2021/08/23/samantha-power-icc-sudan/

 

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