‘Resign’: Wall Street Journal Slams Samantha Power’s Hypocrisy on Syria

Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Fortune/Time Inc
Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Fortune/Time Inc

UN Ambassador Samantha Power is guilty of exactly the same negligence toward the Syrian civil war that she once criticized when the Clinton administration failed to intervene the the Rwandan genocide, and should resign, the Wall Street Journal said in an editorial Friday.

The scathing editorial, “Bystanders to Genocide,” repeats what Breitbart News observed even before Power was confirmed in 2013 — that she was doing nothing to stop the slaughter in Syria, in deference her political masters.

The Journal notes that Power built her career as a pundit, and later as a policymaker, through her published works on the Rwandan genocide — and American neglect:

Ms. Power knows something about barbarism and responsibility. In 2001 she published a searing account in the Atlantic about the Clinton Administration’s failure to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which as many as 800,000 Tutsis were killed over three months by their Hutu neighbors.

Ms. Power spared no one in her depiction of the Administration’s “almost willful delusion” about the killing, its diplomatic prevarications to avoid using the word “genocide,” and its concern with how U.S. intervention would play in the midterm elections. She was particularly tough on U.S. officials who “were firmly convinced that they were doing all they could—and, most important, all they should—in light of competing American interests and a highly circumscribed understanding of what was ‘possible’ for the United States to do.”

The essay was titled “Bystanders to Genocide.” Ms. Power later expanded the article into a book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” for which she was widely praised. Barack Obama read the book and promoted her rise in government.

Now, however, the Journal notes, “Ms. Power can sound like those officials she once scolded for thinking they were doing everything they could given the complexities of the situation.” It slams some of her recent excuses for inaction, such as the complexity of the war on the ground.

The war was far simpler when Power (and President Barack Obama) had the chance to take decisive action, both in the early days of the Arab Spring in 2011 and after Syria violated Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons in 2013.

The Journal concludes that “Power has become an echo of the officials she once denounced for justifying American inaction in the face of mass slaughter. The honorable decision would be to resign.”

Breitbart News urged Power to resign in 2013, when she was still a national security adviser at the White House, in charge of a useless committee called the Atrocities Prevention Board that did nothing about Syria.

The Journal now agreed. Read the full editorial here.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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