By Arnold Ahlert ——Bio and Archives--June 6, 2013
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needs not tweaking but overhauling. We need: a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States...A country has to look back before it can move forward. Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors.
I was struck by a headline that accompanied a news story on the publication of the Human Rights Watch report. The headline was, I believe: "Human Rights Report Finds Massacre Did Not Occur in Jenin." The second paragraph said, "Oh, but lots of war crimes did." Why wouldn't they make the war crimes the headline and the non-massacre the second paragraph?"In other words, despite the reality that the so-called Jenin massacre never happened, Power thought the Times should juxtapose its headline to show that Israel was still guilty of war crimes. In a 2004 review of radical leftist Noam Chomsky's book Hegemony or Survival, Power agreed with many of his criticisms of American's foreign policy, and lumped Israel with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, and Uzbekistan in references to the "sins of our allies in the war on terror." Then in 2007, when Power was a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, she gave an interview that has been scrubbed from the school's website. "Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the 'national interest' as a whole is defined and pursued..." Power contended. America's important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive. In addition to appealing to conspiracy theories of tiny Israel's control of US foreign policy, Power completely ignores the reality that the "counter-productive" war in Lebanon was precipitated by Hezbollah in a cross-border assault, during which eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two captured. Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah admitted the operation had been planned for months. In 2008, Power released a book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira De Mello and the Fight to Save the World, a biography of the UN official killed in Baghdad in a 2003 terrorist bombing. When a UN force sent to Lebanon in 1982 to stop a series of attacks emanating from a mini-state created by the PLO in that country proved ineffective, Israel forces remained there as well. Power argued that: Israeli forces refused to comply with the spirit of international demands to withdraw and the major powers on the Security Council were not prepared to deal with the gnarly issues that had sparked the Israelis invasion in the first place: dispossessed Palestinians and Israeli insecurity. Again, Power implied moral equivalency by ignoring the reality that Israel went into Lebanon to destroy a terrorist infrastructure on the Lebanese-Israeli border that had attacked IDF forces and the Israeli communities near the border. Also in 2008, Power wrote a Time magazine column belittling concerns about Iran's nuclear program, characterizing it as a figment of George W. Bush's imagination. And again in that same year, she completely disavowed her 2002 "thought experiment" in an interview with Miftah.org., a pro-Palestine sovereignty website. "Even I don't understand it," she says. "This makes no sense to me. The quote seems so weird." Power's nomination as the US Ambassador to the UN make perfect sense, of course, for an Obama administration that has made it clear there is precious little in the way of moral clarity with regard to its relationship with Israel, even as the disaster of the Arab Spring threatens to destabilize the region in a manner that may pose an unprecedented level of danger to the Jewish State. The last thing America needs is another representative willing to see the entire world, including Israel and the United States, in morally relative terms. Power's clear disdain for American exceptionalism is more than enough to disqualify her for the job of UN Ambassador. Our enemies have no such misgivings about who they are and what they want--and what they are willing to do to get it.
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Arnold Ahlert was an op-ed columist with the NY Post for eight years.