JM wrote:
<I originally brought up Samantha Power as an example of the normalcy of Obama's foreign policies views. Samantha Power is an imperialist because she believes in U.S. dominance, a U.S. led coalition of forces to enforce world order. She believes that this only can be done through a believable and ideological stand on human rights, which allows for U.S. and Co. intervention in selected areas of the world but ignores other places in the world where there is no overt controversy... etc.>
Well-conceived and well-said. In the Democracy Now segment with Jeremy Scahill (and at least one has to give her tiny kudos for entering the lion's den), she unstintingly claimed that she thought the Rambouillet (sp?) Agreement entirely reasonable, she refused to concede that it was deliberately designed to be so outrageous as to preclude any possibility of diplomatic settlement. She is sharp though, keenly aware of her critics on the anti-imperialist left: she did admit that "in part" the aerial war was prosecuted to give NATO a new rationale (and by implication to extend the politico-military preeminance of the US over its Western and Central European allies). She also had no rejoinder for Scahill's assertion of the selectivity of US human rights concerns (one repeated here by JM) which should come as no surprise, because to any sensate person there is no morally or logicaly defensible rejoinder. In any event, she is an entirely predictable ideologue of the updated Wilsonian mold, and because this outlook is so well-ensconced in the DP firmament, it should not inspire disgust, but rather drowsiness.
I forgot to add: in the Democracy Now apperance, she expressed grief that since Bush entered office, Kosovo and Serbia have been allowed to rot on the vine, and few if any "economic links to the West" have been built. We all know what that is code for, again in the finest Wilsonian tradition of the US as the guarantor of international bourgeois right. Oh, and, she said not a word in response to Scahill's mention of Camp Bondsteel. Again, none of this has me tied up in an apopleptic fit, because it is all so by the book. As JM says, it is obviously preferable to a gang of Ledeens running amuck, but please let's cast off all illusions...
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