TOPIC:
Obama, Human Rights, and the Lessons of the New Diplomacy
Her book about the United States turning a blind eye to genocide in the 20th century won a Pulitzer Prize. Now, Samantha Power, an adviser to President Obama, is being credited and / or blamed for U.S. intervention in Libya.
The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd opined that fierce women in the Administration outmuscled the male military establishment, persuading a skeptical President to bomb the forces of Col. Moammar Gadhafi in what now seems to be a civil war. Others, like The Daily Beast’s Tara McKelvey, assert it is sexist and silly to make a big deal of Power and her colleagues – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice – uniting in opposition to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon and John Brennan, the counterterrorism chief.
Margaret Carlson, formerly of Time and now a columnist for Bloomberg news, put it this way: “This rendering of events is greatly exaggerated but useful for critics coming at Obama from all sides, from those adamantly opposed to intervention to those who now support his actions but don’t like how he got there ...
“The conflict in Libya, as challenging as it may be, has a better chance of ending well than the gender wars. We’re still mired in stereotypes of the roles men and women play, especially in military affairs, despite years of evidence showing that women are as analytic, decisive, aggressive and determined.”
What is your take on the action in Libya and the roles of Power, Rice and Clinton?
VIDEO:
Rice and Power insisted that it would be morally wrong to let Gaddafi murder his own people and finish off the Arab Spring: Hillary Clinton crucially came down on the side of Rice and Power. This had nothing to do with their gender and all to do with their horror-laden memories of what happened in Rwanda ...
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