Behold, one of the most important articles for Americans to read, right now, and holler to the heavens about the monster it portrays.
Even those of us who pay relatively close attention to the mess that is American foreign policy are probably unaware of the influence Samantha Power has in an increasingly pathetic administration. It is quite like being unaware of Paul Wolfowitz about twenty years ago.
It should come as no surprise to readers of Pat Buchanan, Leon Hadar, Srga Trifkovic, Andrew Bacevich, the late Chalmers Johnson, Chronicles, The American Conservative, and this site that despite the occasional rhetoric to the contrary, liberal internationalism and neoconservative internationalism have been playing tag-team intervention for most of the years since 1898, with short periods of respite between the two world wars. Russell Kirk spent much of the last decade of his life urging Americans to decry this hubris.
I don’t intend in this notice to rehearse their arguments or make new ones, except to point out that Samantha Power’s proudest moment so far is apparently her influence in getting the Clinton administration to blow the hell out of Serbs. Later she would call Hillary a “monster” while working to put the much more compliant (and ignorant) Obama into the White House.
St. Paul says (Romans 13:1) that “the powers that be are ordained by God.” Not this Power.
Books mentioned in this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.
Yikes! Darth Vader in a (bad) coiffure. If I remember Dr. Kirk's lecture, Pericles squandered the joint-defense money of the Delian League on feel-good public-works projects, and in order to distract people when they started asking questions, he cranked up a war with Sparta which they lost. Could anything apart from distraction explain the speed and glee with which Obama, poncy Cameron and that Gallic dwarf, Sarkozi, went to war with Libya? When the public tires of Libya (long before we're out of there) our masters will start another imbroglio: under the UN definition of genocide, telling an ethnic joke qualifies so we'll have no paucity of choices.
This may upset wise, prudent people such as John Willson, but I am beginning to 'channel' John Belushi: "hey, what the X$£%??!!" Most Americans, most Republicans, and more than a few people who call themselves conservatives (without being Neo) groove on this stuff. It took ten years at billions of bucks a month to find and shoot a 6'4" geeky-looking Saudi terrorist living next door to the Pak military academy, and instead of asking questions the gringos are blowing car-horns and waddling about shouting 'USA! Number One!" Como se dice "flunking the IQ test?"
Maybe twenty new wars and a few more years of "quantitative easing" will solve the problem through bankruptcy and currency collapse. Then, quite unintentionally, no more international meddling, no more 1,000+ secret and official military bases worldwide, no more globo-cop, no more defense budget equal to that of the rest of the world combined, no more Obama-care, no more shoddy over-subscribed and over-priced universities, welfare-victims, TSA grope-artists, subsidized baby-killing, military-industrial-complex or slush-bucket corporate subsidies in the new shrinking state. All can happen quicker if America holds the line on tax increases. Want to rebuild communities from the ground up? When government stops delivering mail, teaching kids, policing the streets and collecting the rubbish, there will be powerful incentives for new-found cooperation. Want a Jeffersonian, agrarian, small-town America? This could be the big opportunity knocking. Not altogether a pretty prospect, I admit, but perchance inevitable and maybe of ultimate benefit.