Going to the “phenomenology of war” as Carl von Clausewitz wrote on, “War is never an isolated act.” And this statement captures that perfectly, which few Americans understand. As we see with Ukraine (with US hostile acts against Russia going back to the 1990s when Newt Gingrich “declared war against Russia” in his “Contract with America”)(just read it). And we see today with Israel, as captured in this statement.
"Sykes, when asked about Power’s response to her public challenge onTuesday, said she was disappointed Power’s chronology of the conflict began Oct. 7 without touching on the “past 75 years of Palestinians being violently forced off their ancestral land.”
Which could be added to that under Trump, the US became a full co-belligerent with Israel against the Palestinians, and International Law, with illegal transfers of territory to Israel as ratified by Trump.
For anyone here who has read my emails condemning the self-identified “New Right” of National Conservatism, with Trump, DeSantis, Hawley, Gaetz, et al., the so-called “Right-wing Peaceniks," their "standard bearers," and assume I therefore, with a simplistic dichotomous way of thinking, support Biden and the Democrats, you couldn’t be more wrong. And obviously I do not support “Never-Trump” GWB Republicans. My vituperation against the Trumpite/Straussian New Right comes from their embrace of an even more intense "authoritarian legal theory,” of Carl Schmitt’s which they call for to be implemented, though not attributing it to Schmitt. As do the other two but to a slightly lesser degree of intensity.In the first 15 years or so of this century, Carl Schmittianism was propagated by Adrian Vermeule (now of "New Right Illiberalism”) and Eric Posner, and others, “left” and “right,” and was all the rage, as the "authority for Emergency Law” (think Reichstag Fire Decree).
I attended as a guest and participant a seminar on Schmitt at Princeton, being acquainted with a number of other invitees through a Human Rights email list. Of which my anti-Schmittianism began as a minority view, I recall. I may flatter myself too much perhaps to believe I changed a few minds there, but I did of a couple at least as they told me so. And sat next to David Petraeus’s PhD thesis advisor at dinner, with whom I courteously disagreed on his assessment of Petraeus!
So regardless of party, I despise duplicity and hypocrisy in promoting militaristic policies. With Samantha Power right next to DJT and his New Right promoters in that, with Power the beneficiary of the same sort of duplicitous “cognitive operation” that Trump was. That is, that they supposedly oppose US war, but “sometimes we just gotta do it.” For Power, that’s to stop the genocides she sees all around the world, by our “Enemy.” Never by the US or its allies, like Israel. Just a similar propaganda meme Trump was sold on by New Right PsyOp auxiliaries that Republicans “only go to war defend our interests,” but writ large, historically, and today, which they omit. With Israel alway our “Greatest Interest,” while blaming war in the Mideast on Biden for his “weakness,” not his belligerence, as he carried it on from Trump.
A long way of saying, this is characteristic of all three major US political factions, including the “New Right Third-way” along with the two parties, which is, “omitting” the past, and refusing to see the “past as prologue.” At least for political propaganda purposes.
"Sykes, when asked about Power’s response to her public challenge onTuesday, said she was disappointed Power’s chronology of the conflict began Oct. 7 without touching on the “past 75 years of Palestinians being violently forced off their ancestral land.”
“I am a lifelong Democrat but this administration’s vetoing of a cease-fire and enabling of genocide does not bode well for the Democratic Party,” she said in an interview."
At least the Democrats have a small faction which retains some capacity to see reality, that is, still in “Karl Rove’s Reality Based World,” dismissed of course by the Republicans/New Right as “Woke Marxism.” Correctly defined in its right-wing political usage as “critical of Israel.”
USAID’s Samantha Power, genocide scholar, confronted by staff on Gaza
A prominent adviser to President Biden, Power was challenged publicly over the administration’s policy, with one employee saying it has ‘left us unable to be moral leaders’
USAID Administrator Samantha Power meets with members of Congress in 2021. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Samantha Power, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development and a world-renowned scholar on genocide, was pointedly challenged by current and former USAID employees who during a public event Tuesday questioned her stance on the war in Gaza and complicity in the divisive U.S. policy.
“You wrote a book on genocide and you’re still working for the administration: You should resign and speak out,” said Agnieszka Sykes, a global health specialist who told The Washington Post she left her job at USAID late last week.
Sykes interrupted a speech Power was giving in Washington on climate change and natural disasters to invoke Power’s book “A Problem from Hell.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning work examines and condemns U.S. inaction on various atrocities, from Armenia to Rwanda, spanning several presidential administrations.
Like other members of President Biden’s National Security Council, Power oversees an agency deeply divided about Washington’s military support for Israel’s war in Gaza and refusal to demand a cease-fire.
But she is unique in being publicly confronted by her own workforce over the administration’s policy — a reflection of what USAID officials say is her long body of work on this subject and her organization’s responsibility to respond to distressed Gazans’ suffering from a lack of food, water and medicine amid Israel’s devastating military bombardment
After Sykes’s interruption, Power thanked her for her comments and offered a response later in the program when she acknowledged the situation in Gaza was “devastating,” and stated that “more than 25,000 civilians have been killed,” a figure not always used by the U.S. government because Gaza’s health ministry does not distinguish between Hamas fighters and Palestinian civilians. (Some U.S. officials, though, have said the ministry likely undercounts the number of casualties.)
“Not enough resources are getting in,” Power said, underscoring the urgent need to provide assistance to the more than 1.8 million Gazans who have been displaced. She noted that U.S. negotiators were seeking to broker a humanitarian pause that would allow more aid to move into the Palestinian enclave in exchange for Hamas’s release of hostages.
At the same time, Poweremphasized the “horror” of the Hamas cross-border attack Oct. 7 that killed 1,200 people in Israel and resulted in more than 240 being taken hostage. “Human life is sacred,” she said.
Power has long said the United States bears a unique responsibility to prevent mass atrocities and has admonished U.S. dithering in the face of large-scale violence, such as the Clinton administration’s handling of the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority. “Silence in the face of atrocity is not neutrality; silence in the face of atrocity is acquiescence,” she is often quoted as saying.
Injured Palestinians arrive at Nasser Medical Hospital after a December strike in Gaza. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)
During the conversation on Tuesday, a USAID employee, Hannah Funk, questioned whether the United States was squandering its moral authority on the world stage by rushing arms and equipment into Israel during its military campaign.
“The U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza has really left us unable to be moral leaders on climate change and all the other pressing development and humanitarian issues those of us who work at USAID care so much about,” Funk told Power during the question-and-answer session. “How are you leading us to reckon with and overcome this hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy?”
The United States and Israel reject the term genocide to describe the killing of Palestinians in Gaza — a contention that is at the center of proceedings before the International Court of Justice brought by South Africa. Thecourt ordered Israel to do more to prevent the killing of civilians in Gaza but did not call for a cease-fire.
In her response to Funk at the event, Power did not address genocide accusations but offered an implicit defense of Israel’s military campaign, saying “it is very important that what happened on Oct. 7 never happen again.”
“When Hamas leadership is at large, you know, those same kinds of attacks, the same kind of hostage-taking, the same kind of sexual assault, that can happen again,” she said.
She also spoke about the distinctions between the jobs of those in government and outside activists, both roles that Power has played in her career.
“The only thing harder I found in my life is not having the opportunity to be in those debates and to be on the sideline watching things that one would wish to see happen ... differently,” she said.
The interaction marks the first clash between Power and current and former USAID employees at a public event, but she has encountered dissent in other ways. In November, hundreds of USAID employees endorsed a letter calling for a cease-fire in Gaza. Liberal activists at MoveOn are circulating a petition calling on her to resign or return her Pulitzer Prize, considered the preeminent recognition of influential journalism and other published works.
She also came under criticism for not publicly disclosing the killing of a USAID contractor who died after a suspected Israeli strike in Gaza in November. Power has said that in all of her high-level discussions about the conflict, she has made protection of aid workers a priority.
“There is not a single call that President Biden makes or engagement that anybody in the Biden administration does that doesn’t put the importance of civilian protection and international humanitarian law at the at the top of the conversation,” she said during the Tuesday forum.
Sykes, when asked about Power’s response to her public challenge onTuesday, said she was disappointed Power’s chronology of the conflict began Oct. 7 without touching on the “past 75 years of Palestinians being violently forced off their ancestral land.”
“I am a lifelong Democrat but this administration’s vetoing of a cease-fire and enabling of genocide does not bode well for the Democratic Party,” she said in an interview.