Free Republic

What Is Samantha Power Thinking?The charismatic Obama adviser believes that stopping "genocide" is the United States' top foreign-policy priority. On March 18, President Obama explained his decision to mobilize the United States military for international intervention in Libya. “Left unchecked,” he said, “we have every reason to believe that Qaddafi would commit atrocities against his people. Many thousands could die. A humanitarian crisis would ensue. The entire region could be destabilized, endangering many of our allies and partners.” (As if it hasn’t been already?) That last sentence was a Realpolitik, national-interest justification for the U.S. intervention. But it rang hollow....

Earlier this summer, when Helen Thomas said Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and return to Germany, among other places, The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz appeared to share the widespread outrage. The nation’s most prominent media writer noted Thomas’s history of “spewing bias and bile,” and asked, “why wasn’t she reined in earlier?” So you might have expected that Kurtz would again have been on the case when Martin Peretz, the editor in chief and long-time owner of The New Republic, blogged earlier this month that “Muslim life is cheap.” Peretz added: “I wonder whether I need honor...

What dismays me most about Barack Obama's Middle East initiative is that the only country in the area he seems to be pressing is Israel. He is not pressing Egypt and perhaps that's because there is nothing that Cairo can give. Maybe I'll be surprised by the presidential visit to Riyadh, but he is, thus far, also not pressing Saudi Arabia and its king to whom he offered at the G-20 meeting rather curious and extravagant homage. If you read A Safe Haven by Allis and Ronald Radosh (reviewed by me in the Wall Street Journal) you'll see how King...

I like Eric Holder. And, no, despite what Peter Wehner wrote in today's Contentions, Holder is not responsible for the pardon given Marc Rich in the late dusk of the Clinton administration. This was Bill Clinton's smarmy move, and his alone. But I, too, am mystified by Holder's remarks, reported by the Associated Press and CNN today, basically denying the progress that Americans have made in their relentless and ongoing march to racial equality. Here is one snippet (and it is not a distorting snippet) of what Holder actually said: "we have always been, and we, I believe, continue to...

The last nominee for ambassador to the United Nations about whom The New York Times was frantic was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In fact, it was frantic about him twice. The first time was in November 1970, when Moynihan's name was, for a brief moment, floated as a likely candidate. The Times was quick to declare him the "wrong man for the u.n." The right man was Charles Yost, a foreign servant for nearly four decades so discreet as to be almost invisible. Moynihan never made clear why he did not then take the post. Did he initially decline it because...

The disarray of the Left has been obvious since at least the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989. All the splendid achievements of socialism in the glorious shadow of the Soviet Union, poverty and misery, oppression, fear, and murder on a grand scale could no longer be masked. The collapse and dismemberment of imperial Soviet Russia followed within a couple of years and removed any lingering doubts about the merits of socialism. Clearly, socialism couldn't deliver the goods. The capitalist economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore encouraged Mao's successors to let loose the reins of communist...