War Power

"Samantha Power and the weaponization of human rights" is the brilliant subtitle to Chase Madar's article debunking the woman American liberals saw as "the paladin, the conscience, the senior director for multilateral affairs to bring human rights back into U.S. foreign policy" — Care Tactics.

"Human rights,'" syas the author, "a term once coterminous with freeing prisoners of conscience and documenting crimes against humanity... can now mean helping the Marine Corps formulate counterinsurgency techniques; pounding the drums for air strikes (of a strictly surgical nature, of course); lobbying for troop escalations in various conquered nations—all for noble humanitarian ends."

Of her "global bestseller" that "argue[d] that when confronted with 20th-century genocides, the United States sat on the sidelines as the blood flowed," Mr. Madar notes "Power barely mentions those postwar genocides in which the U.S. government, far from sitting idle, took a robust role in the slaughter."

"For Samantha Power, the United States can by its very nature only be a force for virtue abroad," writes Mr. Madar. "In this sense, the outlook of Obama’s human-rights advocate is no different from Donald Rumsfeld’s." Her "faith in the therapeutic possibilities of military force" is shared by many and she is not the only "human-rights entrepreneur who is also a tireless advocate of war."