by EDWARD S. HERMAN
Samantha Power is power hungry, unprincipled, and a poor scholar. Her power hunger was on full display in her groveling before members of the Zionist lobby and Senate while seeking their support for her ambassadorship to the United Nations, and her promise to fight for “Israeli security” and “press” for an Israeli seat on the Security Council on her accession to that office.
We may recall that Power devoted considerable space and indignation in her “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002) to denouncing Serbian ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav wars, but Israel’s multi-decade and systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians she is prepared to overlook, pledging to fight within the United Nations against what she called “unacceptable bias and attacks against the state of Israel.”
Power focused heavily on Bosnia and Serb villainy in her book, repeatedly mentioning and denouncing alleged Serb plans and actions to clear out non-Serb populations. According to Power, “The purging of non-Serbs was not only an explicit war aim of Serb nationalists; it was their primary aim” as they sought “ethnic purity.” Yet despite unprecedented public outcry about foreign brutality, for the next three and a half years the United States, Europe, and the United Nations stood by while some 200,000 Bosnians were killed…. What the United States and its allies did not do until it was too late…was intervene with armed force to stop genocide.”
The 200,000 figure was eventually scaled down in establishment sources to about 100,000 on all sides, including soldiers, and Power also underplays the Western intervention during those three and a half years in the 1990s—the NATO powers pumped arms into the hands of non-Serb groups throughout those years, turned a blind eye to the Bosnian Muslim import of Al Qaeda forces to help fight the villains, and fended off peace efforts (with the help of the NATO-serving, UN-organized Yugoslav Tribunal) throughout the period that would have ended the ethnic cleansing.
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Samantha Power’s bias in Problem from Hell reached well beyond her account of the Yugoslav wars. Her selectivity in dealing with genocide was precisely attuned to the demands of U.S. foreign policy. If the genocides were carried out by the United States itself, as in the Vietnam war and Iraq’s two-phased mass killing (the “sanctions of mass destruction” applied from 1991-2003, and in the 2003-2012 war and occupation), Power does not include them, nor does she address the genocides carried out by the U.S.-supported military in Indonesia in 1965-1966 by the military rulers of Guatemala in the early 1980s or by the apartheid regime of South Africa.
Although each of these tower over Bosnia in numbers killed, those names don’t even show up in Power’s index. She does mention Indonesia’s invasion and occupation of East Timor (1975- 2003), but only to chide the United States for “looking away” as this ally killed up to 200,000 people (double the Bosnian numbers). But she misrepresents history here also as U.S. officials didn’t just “look away,” but gave Indonesia a go-ahead for the invasion, gave it diplomatic protection in the UN, and supplied it with arms.
Worthy Victims
So Samantha Power’s “genocides” have consistently featured “worthy” victims, while those unworthy—like Guatemala’s many thousands of Mayan Indian peasants and the hundreds of thousands slaughtered in Indonesia, South Africa, and Angola—are ignored. Israel also fails to show up in Power’s index despite the fact that Israel’s ethnic cleansing is extremely clear, blatant, racist, and one-sided (Serb ethnic cleansing was part of a mutual land grabbing process and, in the end, as noted earlier, more Serbs were permanently cleansed than Croats or Albanian and Bosnian Muslims). It is also clear that whereas the Serbs were not trying to oust Bosnian Muslims from all of Bosnia, Israel’s ambitions for the “chosen people” have a broader scope as the increasingly right-wing governments of Israel keep enlarging settlements, expropriating Palestinian property, and making the conditions of life unbearable for Palestinians throughout their shrinking territory, occupied by an Israel that refuses to negotiate a final boundary line (Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld, 2006). The “peace process” is a sick joke, designed not to bring peace but to stall a settlement that would make further Israeli ethnic cleansing a clear case of aggression.
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