Soft Power, Part Four
I have tried today to establish a kind of hierarchy of evidence for discerning a presidential candidate's true beliefs. Voting records are at the top for candidates who have them. Rhetorical flourishes, on the other hand, are virtually meaningless for this purpose. A candidate’s webpage is probably relevant, but its value is limited because the content amounts to advertising and thus may well obscure the candidate’s real thinking.
The views of a candidate’s adviser’s are also relevant. Indeed, if we’re dealing with close advisers, these views can be quite probative, especially on foreign policy matters where a Senator (even one who has served for several terms) is likely to have cast revealing votes on only a small number of issues.
Samantha Power indisputably is a close adviser to Barack Obama on foreign policy. We’ve written several times about her views on Israel. The strongly anti-Israel nature of these views has become a problem for the Obama campaign, so Power is using a book promotion tour to engage in damage control. Thus, she appears to have spent much of her interview by Shmuel Rosner of the Haaretz attempting to convince Rosner that most of the things written about her in connection with the Obama campaign are “misleading.”
But the examples cited by the sympathetic Rosner serve only to undermine Power’s claim. For example, Noah Pollak has shown that, in a 2002 interview, Power advocated investing billions of dollars to create a Palestinian state. That investment would include “external intervention” involving “a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence."
What does Power have to say about her proposal to invade Israel and the surrounding territories? She says it “makes no sense” to her and she describes it as “so weird.” Even under the special rules that apply to the Obama campaign, that’s not much of a defense.
Power also pleads that Israel is not her specialty; in real life she’s just the humble Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School. But Power doesn’t dispute that she hasn’t been bashful about opining on Israel or that she advises Obama on the subject. And by the way, Anna Lindh was Sweden’s notoriously anti-Israel foreign minister from 1998-2003. Lindh was a key proponent of the slander that Israel committed a massacre at Jenin, a slander that Power has been ambivalent at best about seeing punctured.
Power is even less persuasive in discussing her recent Time Magazine column on Iran. There, she complained that "the Bush Administration attempts to gin up international outrage by making a claim of imminent danger, only to be met with international eye rolling when the claim is disproved." Amazingly, Power denies that this comment means she believes the NIE assessment about Iran’s nuclear designs is correct. She claims instead to mean only that the international community is using the NIE to fend off Bush on the Iranian issue.
Power’s dishonesty here is breathtaking. Her article plainly states that the Bush administration’s claims about Iran were “disproved.” If words have meaning, Power is stating that she believes the key findings of the NIE, not merely that the international community believes them.
Barack Obama is playing a massive con game with the American public – he’s a hard leftist running as a post-partisan figure who can bring us together. Obama has shown that he has the oratorical skills, verbal facility, and personal charisma to make a good run at pulling this off. Plainly, none of that gift has rubbed off on Samantha Power.
UPDATE: Lefty bloggers understand the problem Power poses for the Obama campaign and the weakness of her efforts to deal with the problem, so they knowingly misrepresent the charges raised by Noah Pollak against her. Thus, Matt Yglesias characterizes the charge as anti-Semitism. But, of course, Pollak has leveled no such charge; Yglesias is pulling the cheap and dishonest trick of replacing a charge he can't satisfactorily answer with one he is more confident he can.
I don't claim that Power "hates Jews" either. However, she has said that one of her "takeaways" from the Iraq war is that the U.S. should defer less to "special interests" that "dictate the way in which the 'national interest' as a whole is defined." One of the special interests she cited was our relationship with Israel, which "has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments." Thus, while there's no evidence that Power hates Jews, she does appear to be blaming Israeli interests for pushing us into the war with Iraq, a view that even Walt and Mearsheimer are no longer willing to defend.
One more note on the Yglesias defense of Power. He writes: "First Obama was an anti-semite because Zbigniew Brzezinski is an anti-semite. Then Obama was an anti-semite because Robert Malley is an anti-semite. And now according to Pollack [sic] it's Power who who's [sic] tainted by Jew-hatred." Again, the claim isn't that any of these individuals is an anti-semite. But under previously prevailing rules of logic, the fact that Obama has several advisers who are hostile to Israel would be viewed as strengthening the case that Obama shares that hostility, not as evidence that the charge must be frivolous.
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