Former UN Ambassador Samantha Power likes to act like she’s the world’s most compassionate humanitarian. After all, she’s really upset about what’s been going on in Syria. Can’t you tell from her tweets?
Tuesday night, she described how troubled she was about the latest chemical attack by Bashar al-Assad. The former diplomat shook off any responsibility and pointed out one of the main culprits: President Trump.
Backed by Russia&Iran, declared permanent by Trump, Assad regime in #Syria feels safe to do what it wants. Gassing people is what it wants.
— Samantha Power (@SamanthaJPower) April 5, 2017
Power continued retweeting various accounts condemning Assad’s barbaric attack without a hint of irony. Apparently Power needs a recent history lesson, considering she and her former boss played a prominent role in letting the bloodshed continue.
For starters, the de-facto position of the Obama administration was essentially granting Assad permanence. Yes, the former president occasionally said Assad had to go and give free elections to his people, but US-led airstrikes never targeted Assad’s forces. Further, Obama laughed off Mitt Romney’s concerns about Russia in 2012 — and let’s not get started on where Iran’s getting all that money to give to Assad.
Of course, no criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of Syria is complete without mentioning the infamous “red line” speech. I wonder if the United States completely humiliating itself had any role in making Assad feel “safe to do what [he] wants.”
Before serving as America’s youngest ambassador to the UN in history, Powers made a name of herself by vocally criticizing “bystanders to genocide.” In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Powers condemned the United States for not doing enough about global atrocities.
“The system, as it stands now, is working. No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on,” Powers wrote.
By the time she left the UN, Powers was an enabler of the mass killings she so frequently criticized the US for not preventing. In 2013, Powers practically argued that we had no choice but to act against Assad with military force after he continued using chemical weapons or else we risk signaling “to North Korea and Iran that the international community is unwilling to act to prevent proliferation or willing to tolerate the use of weapons of mass destruction.”
According to her own reasoning, Obama’s refusal to act against Assad only encouraged more slaughter — and gave tacit permission for other dictators to do the same.
Since 2011, over 400,000 people have died in the Syrian Civil War. If Power is looking to blame someone, she can start by looking in a mirror.
