Former President Obama’s U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is shameless. Samantha Power, who literally wrote the book on the heavy moral costs of American inaction in the face of genocide, is now blaming the Trump administration for the Assad regime’s latest sarin gas attack on Syrian civilians.
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
This the same woman who stood by and watched as her boss, Saint Obama, refused to act on a self-imposed “red-line” following Assad’s first deployment of chemical weapons against the people of Syria.
@SamanthaJPower Congrats.
I thought you could not become more morally bankrupt, but darned if you didn’t pull it off.— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) April 5, 2017
@SamanthaJPower .Shameless. Your boss, Obama, did nothing to stop the suffering. This has been going on for years. Disgusting moral hypocrisy.
— Joshua Yasmeh (@JoshYaz) April 5, 2017
Since 2011, Assad has been butchering his own people, and the Obama administration did nothing to take his bloody hands away from the levers of power. This failure to act wasn’t just moral cowardice but strategic idiocy.
Not only did ISIS begin as an offshoot of al-Qaida in Syria, but it flourished in the wake of Assad’s extermination of a fragmented and under-armed Syrian opposition.
History will be a cruel judge of Ambassador Power and her feckless boss Barack Obama.
In the last few months of the Obama presidency, Power began to atone for her unforgivable sins, parting ways with the administration by directly implicating Russia in the mass slaughter of civilians in Syria.
Indeed, she was one of a handful of Obama administration officials who pushed for military action in Syria. But ultimately, the Chamberlinian wing of the White House won out.
But rather than resign in protest (as Frederic Hof, the US Special Advisor on Transition in Syria, did), Power continued to go to bat for the morally-bankrupt Obama administration, soothing her own guilty conscience for complicity in genocide with nothing more than words, empty White House statements and loud remarks at the U.N.
As Tablet Magazine’s Lee Smith writes, “…Power is a handmaiden to war crimes. And no number of righteous tweets or broadsides against Russian diplomats can hide how the White House has used her monumental 2002 classic, A Problem From Hell, as a how-to manual in how to enable genocide and still maintain your soulful cred.”
This “ambassador from hell,” as Smith puts it, should have resigned; her background and expertise make ignorance an impossible refuge.
“It is hard to imagine any future edition of A Problem From Hell being complete without a chapter on Syria,” adds Smith. “In the past, she notes, one of the key ways to shirk responsibility was to claim that no one really knew what was going on. But that doesn’t work in the age of the 24-hour news cycle and social media.”
The fact that President Obama reportedly hired Power after reading her book on genocide now seems like a sick and twisted joke.
Make no mistake. Power is morally impotent. She has no absolutely no moral standing to discuss, let alone condemn, the new administration, particularly when it comes to Syria.
There are only two words that should be coming out of her mouth: I’m sorry.