Posted on 03/04/2008 4:59:18 AM PST by jdm
After Barack Obama invades Pakistan, one of his close advisers, Samantha Power, may have another target in mind: Israel.
Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine-Israel problem, let’s say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, at least if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving toward genocide?
Power gave an astonishing answer:
What we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. 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—billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line.
Unfortunately, imposition of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful. It’s a terrible thing to do, it’s fundamentally undemocratic. But, sadly, we don’t just have a democracy here either, we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of principles that guide our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. It’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deference to [leaders] who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people. And by that I mean what Tom Friedman has called “Sharafat” [Sharon-Arafat]. I do think in that sense, both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible. And, unfortunately, it does require external intervention.... Any intervention is going to come under fierce criticism. But we have to think about lesser evils, especially when the human stakes are becoming ever more pronounced.
Funny how that doesn’t apply to Saddam...
´The statements don’t justify the headline.
She never said she wanted to “invade” Israel. She suggests placing American troops between the two and/or using them to build a Palestinian state.
Now that is a BAD IDEA. But it does not constitute an invasion which implies there would be military resistance. She IS suggesting doing something that would be opposed by the Jewish community in the US. She IS NOT suggesting that American soldiers enter Israel without the consent of the IDF.
The article is pertinent, the headline is ludicrous, silly, intentionally inflammatory and just plain wrong.
As an aside from the main topic of the story, we DO NOT live in a Democracy.....we live in a REPRESENTATIVE REPUBLIC. At least, we are supposed to. Things would be a lot better if the constituents and representatives remembered that. If anyone tells you we live in a democracy, simply have them recite The Pledge of Allegiance (if they even know it). We don't say "to the democracy, for which it stands......"
Add to that an end to "servicing Israel's military" and alienating AIPAC, and it certainly sounds like she means to invade Israel and occupy it for the forseeable future.
Even if she is a deluded Pali sympathizer, doesn't she realize that we would then become the hated "occupiers"? If this is what BhO has in his "think tank", then he is in trouble.
ping
But, Iraq didn’t need to be invaded.
The tile come straight from the source. In reading the entire article,the author says Powers and her supporters suggested the US impose a solution on both Israel and the Palitinians with military force on the ground. Sounds to me that requires an invasion.
I pray Obama gets the nomination after a bloody fight. Then the multitude of these outrages will wreck him in November.
1. I never accused you of altering the title
2. You should get your hearing checked.
I agree, all the anti-war left seems to want to invade Darfur immediately but Iraq was a useless and illegal war. They wanted to intervene in Kosovo to save the Muslims. Now they want to invade Israel/Palestine to save the Muslims. Didn’t invading Iraq save the Muslims from Saddam? I guess some useless and illegal wars are more equal than others.
The passages of the article I underscored and bolded sound like she either favors (or favored) invasion. I’m not sure how else one is to interpret what she said. What she suggests would require military intervention, at least that’s how I read it.
‘Liberal democracy’ implies representative democracy. It doesn’t mean a democracy run by liberals, or whatever else it was you thought it meant.
My country (the UK) is a liberal/representative democracy too. It is a broad term encapsulating the form most modern ‘democracies’ take. We are not a republic.
In 1935, Germany renounced the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles that limited the size of the German army to 100,000 and reclaimed the Ruhr valley that made a future military buildup possible.
If the Allied nations had invaded Germany at the time, they would have had a relaitively easy victory with maybe 5,000 combat deaths and would have discovered no armed forces of any great might in Germany.
At the time and in later years, pacifist critics would have roundly denounced the Allied leaders of 1935 as warmongers and war criminals responsible for the deaths of German women and children. They would have ridiculed those Allied leaders for waging war, not against a real threat, but against an imaginary threat put into their minds by a Charlie Chaplain movie character in The Great Dictator.
It is true that such Allied action in 1935 would have prevented the deaths of 40 million Europeans from 1939 to 1945 but, the way History works, leaders seldom get credit for having prevented something that never happened.
Liberals want us to Invade any country that has no national security interest to us.
Much of what is in that movie is indeed true, but it is unfortunate that it opens with quotes from Coursi, author of Atomic Iran. He knows little if anything about the subject matter he wrote about, as evidenced by the fact that, in his book, he actually outlined a scenario in which Israeli F15s and F16s attack Iran and then land on board US aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf.
There are 5th graders with better knowledge of military operations.
A better source would be Countdown to Crisis by Ken Timmerman or Iran’s Nuclear Option by Al Venter. Both were much better books.
If those troops are "placed" there against Israel's wishes then, yes, it IS invading Isreal - no way around it.
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