Samantha Power’s “weird quote” and its meaning.

By Ted Belman

I highly recommend reading Martin Kramer’s blog entry Speaking Truth to Power. It contains Samantha Power’s infamous statement on the ME conflict that is currently so embarrassing her that she has claimed “Even I don’t understand it.” Stephanie Powers is a key advisor to Obama and will undoubtedly be in his cabinet.

Kramer digs deeper by going to her long time associate Michael Ignatieff who was with her in the Carr Center, to discern its meaning.

The Carr Center under this management team generally steered clear of the Middle East. But in that spring of 2002, the pressure to come up with something was very great. Ignatieff, who had been to the Middle East a few times, took the lead. On April 19, 2002, only ten days before Power emitted her “weird” quote, Ignatieff wrote an op-ed for the London Guardian, under this headline: ““Why Bush Must Send in His Troops.” I wrote a thorough critique of this piece over five years ago, so I won’t repeat my dissection of its flaws. As I showed then, the op-ed includes every trendy calumny against Israel.

More relevant now are Ignatieff’s policy conclusions. “Neither side is capable of making peace,” he determined, “or even sitting in the same room to discuss it.” The United States should therefore move “to impose a two-state solution now.”

The time for endless negotiation between the parties is past: it is time to say that all but those settlements right on the 1967 green line must go; that the right of return is incompatible with peace and security in the region and the right must be extinguished with a cash settlement; that the UN, with funding from Europe, will establish a transitional administration to help the Palestinian state back on its feet and then prepare the ground for new elections before exiting; and, most of all, the US must then commit its own troops, and those of willing allies, not to police a ceasefire, but to enforce the solution that provides security for both populations.

Ignatieff ended with a grand flourish:

Imposing a peace of this amplitude on both parties, and committing the troops to back it up, would be the most dramatic exercise of presidential leadership since the Cuban missile crisis. Nothing less dramatic than this will prevent the Middle East from descending into an inferno.

So this was the thrilling idea that swept the Carr Center that April: a “dramatic exercise of presidential leadership,” through a commitment of U.S. troops to impose and enforce a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Middle East would be saved. The “amplitude” of this notion made divestment seem small-minded. Samantha Power did not misspeak ten days later in her Berkeley interview. She was retailing a vision she shared with her closest colleague. Power went a bit further than Ignatieff, when she spoke about how this show of presidential courage “might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import.” Ignatieff would never have written that. But it was implicit in his text anyway.

So Ignatieff’s op-ed was exactly what Power meant. That she should claim no recollection of any of this context seems… weird. Or perhaps not. Remember, Ignatieff wasn’t talking about deploying “international peacekeepers,” the context now suggested by Power for her words. He specifically proposed United States troops, followed by anyone else who was “willing.” Their job wouldn’t be to keep the peace, but to “enforce the solution.” Far better today for Power to have some kind of blackout, than to tell the truth about the “dramatic exercise” she and Ignatieff envisioned.

(“Iggy,” by the way, left Harvard in 2005 to plunge into Canadian politics, and he is now deputy leader of Canada’s opposition Liberal Party. He still has strong views on what Americans should do. “I’ve worn my heart on my sleeve for a year,” he recently announced. “I’m for Obama.”)

Is there a conclusion to be drawn from this genealogy of a truly bad policy idea? Ignatieff himself may have hit on it. Last year he published a reflection on what he’d learned since experiencing real (as opposed to academic) politics.

“As a former denizen of Harvard,” he wrote, “I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners.”

Just substitute Pulitzer for Nobel.