President Obama's New Anti-American Secretary of State

President Obama's New Anti-American Secretary of State
By Ben Shapiro
4/6/2011

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made it clear that she will not serve another term under President Obama. Who can blame her? She has become the face of a fecklessly reckless administration, a pathetic press relations lackey for the worst foreign affairs president in the history of the country.

To replace her, Obama is reportedly looking to tap another prominent female diplomat. Her name is Samantha Power, and she bills herself as a human rights activist. A Yale University graduate, Power became a leftist foreign policy journalist for various major news organizations. She then came back to the United States, where she attended Harvard Law School. Her book, "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," implicated the United States in virtually every major genocide of the last century. As a fellow radical Harvard Law School grad, she quickly penetrated Barack Obama's inner circle and became his senior foreign policy adviser during the 2008 campaign.

Now she is a member of the National Security Council, and according to media reports, successor to Hillary's throne. There's only one problem: Power is an anti-Israel fanatic and a myopic internationalist who couldn't care less about doing what is right for America.

Back in 2002, Power told a University of California at Berkeley interviewer that America should put military forces on the ground in Israel to prevent Israeli "human rights abuses." "What we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line in sort of helping the situation," she said.

Channeling the conspiratorial ruminations of anti-Semitic scholars the world over, Power added, "And putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import. It may more crucially mean sacrificing -- or investing, I think, more than sacrificing -- literally billions of dollars not in servicing Israel's, you know, military, but actually in investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing billions of dollars it would probably take also to support, I think, what will have to be a mammoth protection force."

Then Power went even further -- she stated that America should impose a solution on Israel. "You have to go in as if you're serious, you have to put something on the line," she explained.

Not only does this ignore the fact that the human rights abuses in the Israel-Palestinian conflict have been almost universally attributable to the Palestinian Arabs, it throws our liberal democratic ally under the bus. But then again, Power is used to throwing allies under the bus. She, along with her NSC colleague Ben Rhodes, reportedly told President Obama to undercut Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in order to please the Arab street.

Pleasing the Arab street seems to be first priority for Power. It was Power, along with Hillary Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who pushed President Obama to go to non-war in Libya. Her fingerprints cover this abortive military operation. The problem in Libya isn't that we have no exit strategy -- it's that we had no entrance strategy, no definable goals or reasons for being there. That is, no reason except for prevention of "genocide" as broadly defined by Power. Each time Obama cites the prevention of genocide as a rationale for intervention -- even as Muslims slaughter Christians wholesale in Darfur, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, and kill non-radicals in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan -- Samantha Power's ventriloquism shines through.

Samantha Power is, at best, an ignoramus when it comes to long-term American policy. At worst, she uses human rights rhetoric as a club to wield against America itself. She has argued in favor of the so-called "responsibility to protect," an internationalist fantasy requiring the United States to place its men and women in harm's way in order to stop anything bad going on anywhere in the world. Unless it's something bad being committed by radical Muslims, of course -- in that case, we must look for root causes in Western behavior.

Power is yet another theory-first, know-nothing liberal who places her vaguely cotton candy ideals above realistic appraisal of American interests. Unfortunately, her asinine ideas have disastrous real-world consequences. Consequences about which President Obama does not care, apparently. When it comes to the White House, idiocy loves company.
_______________________________________________

To read another article by Ben Shapiro, click here.