Friday, January 19, 2018

Samantha Power Regrets

"I've had a lot of bad ideas in my life," former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power tells Politico. "Though none as immortalized as that one."
Wow. It's a major concession. And what might "that one" be?
Not standing idly by in the White House while Iranians protested a fixed election in 2009, then advocating a nuclear agreement that bankrolled the theocratic regime's expansionism and militarism and corruption. Not serving as U.S. representative to an international body that took no effectual action to stop the Syrian civil war, in which more than 400,000 people have been killed, civilians gassed, and millions of refugees gone to Jordan, Turkey, and Europe. Not flacking for a president who, out of fear of reprisal, waited until a month after the 2016 election to punish Russia for interfering in American democracy, who spent years trying to coax Vladimir Putin onto the "off ramp" from the illegal annexation of Crimea, did nothing more than scold Russia after learning it had violated the INF treaty, reduced America's nuclear deterrent at the very moment our adversaries were building up their armaments, denied Ukrainians lethal defensive aid against Russia-backed separatists, and routinely put up obstacles to domestic extraction industries that undercut Russia's share of the energy market. She's not talking about any of that.
What Samantha Power regrets is allowing documentarians to record the election-night party she threw, in the words of Susan Glasser, "for all 37 female ambassadors to the U.N. as well as feminist icon Gloria Steinem and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to celebrate what they all expected to be Hillary Clinton's inevitable victory."

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