Here We Go Again

“The only way to prevent the use of such weapons is to succeed on the battlefield.” — Senator John McCain, June 14, 2013

Off we go into the morass of the Syrian civil war, as weeks of pondering led President Obama to conclude that yes, there is a chemical weapons "red line," and the Assad regime has crossed it. America will now support the rebels in their struggle to overthrow Assad.

The exact nature of this support is not yet clear. The White House initially made noises about communications and transportation infrastructure, but it was soon learned that the President issued a classified order to the CIA to begin delivering weapons to the insurgents. Some Syria hawks, such as Senator John McCain, want to look at establishing a no-fly zone, but the Russians have reportedly already armed their client Assad with state-of-the-art air defenses.

According to a CNN Report McCain said:

"We have to establish a safe zone, move the Patriot missile batteries close, take out with cruise missiles their air assets and logistics on the ground, and establish that safe zone. Then we can change the equation on the ground, not before.”

Unfortunately, as bad as the Assad regime is, the strongest elements of the insurgency are arguably worse. The strongest rebel group, stuffed with jihadists imported from Iraq, recently swore allegiance to al-Qaeda. They've already been "winning hearts and minds" among the unhappy Syrian people by distributing food and other supplies. There have been reports of Islamist atrocities by the rebels.

After a great deal of confusion concerning the chemical weapons “red line,” whether Syria has crossed it, and whether Barack Obama was serious when he drew it, we learned on Thursday evening that America will be entering the Syrian civil war on the side of the rebels. According to Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, we will be providing them with as-yet unspecified “military support.” From CBS News:

“The President has been clear that the use of chemical weapons – or the transfer of chemical weapons to terrorist groups – is a red line for the United States,” said Rhodes in a separate written statement.

“The President has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has,” he continued.

In terms of further response, Rhodes said, “we will make decisions on our own timeline” and that Congress and the international community would be consulted. Mr. Obama is heading to Northern Ireland Sunday for a meeting of the G8 group of nations; Rhodes indicated the president will consult with leaders of those countries.

“Any future action we take will be consistent with our national interest, and must advance our objectives, which include achieving a negotiated political settlement to establish an authority that can provide basic stability and administer state institutions; protecting the rights of all Syrians; securing unconventional and advanced conventional weapons; and countering terrorist activity,” Rhodes said.”

A fine list of priorities, which grows more improbable with each item. The “negotiated political settlement to establish an authority that can provide basic stability and administer state institutions” would mean Syrian dictator Bashar Assad throwing in the towel and slinking off with a few billion dollars in his pocket, which is possible, although these things are more likely to end with the former dictator getting “negotiated” into a noose.

Good riddance to bad rubbish, but unfortunately what replaces him probably won’t be much interested in “protecting the rights of all Syrians,” handing over its weapons, or cracking down on terrorism. Here’s what our new military clients have been up to this week, as reported by USA Today:

“A Syrian rebel group’s pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda’s replacement for Osama bin Laden suggests that the terrorist group’s influence is not waning and that it may take a greater role in the Western-backed fight to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The pledge of allegiance by Syrian Jabhat al Nusra Front chief Abou Mohamad al-Joulani to al-Qaeda leader Sheik Ayman al-Zawahri was coupled with an announcement by the al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq, that it would work with al Nusra as well.

Lebanese Sheik Omar Bakri, a Salafist who says states must be governed by Muslim religious law, says al-Qaeda has assisted al Nusra for some time.

“They provided them early on with technical, military and financial support, especially when it came to setting up networks of foreign Jihadis who were brought into Syria,” Bakri says. “There will certainly be greater coordination between the two groups.”

The Jabhat al Nusra Front (“The Victory Front”) is generally described as being made up of Sunni Islamist Jihadists. Its goal is to overthrow the Assad government and to create a Pan-Islamic state under sharia law and aims to reinstate the Islamic Caliphate. It encourages all Syrians to take part in the war against the Syrian government.

As CNN notes “Jabhat al-Nusra is widely regarded as the most effective fighting force in Syria, and its thousands of fighters are the most disciplined of the forces opposing Assad.” That might be due to the large number of Iraqi jihadists who have been joining its ranks. Something tells me those guys didn’t cross the border to fight for a new authority that would protect the rights of all Syrians and do away with terrorism. Al-Nusra also follows the Hezbollah playbook and win the loyalty of the populace by distributing food and other services, which would seem to give them a substantial lead in the “winning hearts and minds” department.

Earlier this week, a teenage boy working at a cafe refused to bring one of the customers more coffee, quipping “Even if Mohammed comes back to life, I won’t.” (Bizarrely, the Washington Post’s account of the incident inserts the word [Prophet] in front of Mohammed’s name, as if readers wouldn’t understand who the lad was talking about. The boy’s comment was overheard by a passing group of rebel fighters, who grabbed him, whipped him, gathered a crowd – including his parents — to hear him accused of blasphemy, and then made an example of him by putting bullets in his mouth and neck. Just think what these guys will be able to do with American weapons!

Supposedly we’ll be providing military support to only the nice rebels. How we’re going to do that without putting boots on the ground is anyone’s guess.

Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who have long advocated a U.S. military role in the Syrian revolt, were pleased with President Obama’s announcement. ”We appreciate the President’s finding that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons on several occasions,” they said in a statement. ”We also agree with the President that this fact must affect U.S. policy toward Syria. The President’s red line has been crossed. U.S. credibility is on the line. Now is not the time to merely take the next incremental step. Now is the time for more decisive actions.”

“A decision to provide lethal assistance, especially ammunition and heavy weapons, to opposition forces in Syria is long overdue, and we hope the President will take this urgently needed step,” the Senators added, although White House adviser Rhodes talked more along the lines of communications and transportation equipment, saying no decision had yet been reached about establishing a no-fly zone. Not by the White House, anyway. The Russians have made a decision about a no-fly zone, and they evidently don’t like the idea one bit, because they’ve been shipping advanced anti-aircraft missiles to their good friend Bashar Assad.

I’ve seen much speculation about how this announcement ties into Bill Clinton essentially taunting Obama as a “wuss” for staying out of Syria during an appearance with John McCain. Did Clinton’s remarks push Obama over the edge, given the former President’s great influence over Democrats? Or was Clinton dispatched to that appearance by Obama to give him cover for an intervention he already wanted to make? (If the latter is true, it would seem weird that Clinton’s remarks as delivered seemed so belittling toward the current President but then again, there is bad blood between Clinton and Obama, and Bill Clinton has a long history of working little improvised jabs into statements he makes in support of Obama.)

Bloomberg News confirms suspicions that we’re going to send a lot more than communications and transportation infrastructure to the rebels: “President Barack Obama is authorizing lethal military aid to rebel groups under a classified order instructing the Central Intelligence Agency to arrange delivery of the weapons, according to a U.S. official familiar with the decision who asked not to be identified discussing the move.”

Washington's Syria debate rages within the boundaries of a broader debate about America's appropriate role in the Middle East and the world. The Obama administration clearly and correctly places a high premium on not being dragged into another Iraq-style quagmire. Many in Washington view this refusal to intervene in Syria, like the withdrawal from Iraq, as an abdication of leadership. But even most hawks recognize that the United States can't afford, and the public doesn't want, another Iraq or Afghanistan — that's why few openly recommend a full-scale U.S. intervention.

The endless arguments about Syria too often focus on the tactics — arming the rebels, diplomacy, no-fly zones. But as Micah Zenko recently noted in Foreign Policy Magazine, “these more limited options involve Washington more directly in the war without any realistic prospect of ending it.” Cratering runways might work for a few hours, but then Bashar al-Assad will repair them. No-fly zones might limit the destruction of Assad's air force, but the Syrian military has other resources at its disposal. Arming the rebels will slightly tilt the battlefield but will not likely break the strategic stalemate or give Washington significant influence within the Syrian opposition. The first step on the slippery slope is always easy, but it's much harder to actually resolve a conflict or to find a way out of a quagmire.

These painfully familiar arguments about U.S. options miss the point, though. They conceal a prior question: What does it mean for U.S. policy to "work" in Syria? Should Syria be viewed as a front in a broad regional cold war against Iran and its allies or as a humanitarian catastrophe that must be resolved? That question crosses partisan lines and gets to fundamental questions about how to understand the rapidly changing Middle East.

The distinction matters directly and profoundly for the debate over specific policies. Steps that effectively bleed Iran and its allies might well prolong and intensify Syria's bloodshed, while policies that alleviate human suffering and produce a more stable postwar Syria may well require dealing with Assad's backers. Imagine that Secretary of State John Kerry brokered a diplomatic breakthrough that ended the fighting and secured a political transition but included an Iranian role — from the latter perspective this would be a stunning success, but from the former it would be an epic disaster.

Many of the advocates of aggressive intervention define the Syrian conflict primarily as a front in the cold war against Iran. From this perspective, Hezbollah's entry into the fray and the fall of Qusayr are not necessarily a bad thing — Washington now has an opportunity to strike directly at one of Iran's most valuable assets in the Middle East. The enemy's queen, to use a chess metaphor, has now moved out from behind its wall of pawns and is open to attack. Fear of a rebel defeat — and of a victory for Hezbollah and Iran — should squeeze more cash and military support out of the Arab Gulf, Europe, and the United States.

If Washington endorses the goal of bleeding Iran and its allies through proxy warfare, a whole range of more interventionist policies logically follow. The model here would presumably be the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan -- a long-term insurgency coordinated through neighboring countries, fueled by Gulf money, and popularized by Islamist and sectarian propaganda.

"Success" in this strategy would be defined by the damage inflicted on Iran and its allies — and not by reducing the civilian body count, producing a more stable and peaceful Syria, or marginalizing the more extreme jihadists. Ending the war would not be a particular priority, unless it involved Assad's total military defeat. The increased violence, refugee flows, and regionalization of conflict would likely increase the pressure on neighboring states such as Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq. It would also likely increase sectarianism, as harping on Sunni-Shiite divisions is a key part of the Arab Gulf's political effort to mobilize support for the Syrian opposition (and to intimidate local Shiite populations, naturally). And the war zone would continue to be fertile ground for al Qaeda's jihad, no matter how many arms were sent to its "moderate" rivals in the opposition.

The debate about open U.S. military intervention in Syria should therefore be built around a frank discussion of the goals, not only the means. At the moment, advocates of arming the rebels switch between making the case that it would strike a blow against the Iranians, and that it would improve the prospects for a negotiated solution. The fundamental tension between those who argue that the rebels need more arms so that Assad will be forced to come to the table, and those who argue that this is a path leading to the complete defeat of the Syrian regime should be resolved now -- not after Washington gets involved.

Last week, the Daily Beast published an "exclusive" news story supported by comments from two anonymous administration officials: "Obama Asks Pentagon for Syria No-Fly Zone Plan." The newsworthiness and hype surrounding such reporting was puzzling given that the military's operational plans for a no-fly zone (NFZ) in Syria were completed many months ago and have been refined as new information has become available. Of course, versions of these plans have also been briefed in detail to the White House on multiple occasions. Soon after the Daily Beast story ran, Pentagon spokesperson Dave Lapan felt compelled to declare: "There is no new planning effort underway." This failed effort to plant a story about White House interest in NFZ options for Syria is perhaps the most perfunctory effort ever to coerce a foreign leader — in this case, Bashar al-Assad, before the forthcoming diplomatic discussions in Geneva.

The Obama administration's leaks should not be surprising — they are representative of the theatrical and half-hearted nature of America's debate over military intervention in Syria. On March 27, 2011, just one week after a U.S.-led coalition began selectively enforcing an NFZ over Libya, then-Senator Joseph Lieberman endorsed a similar measure for Syria, in case Assad "turns his weapons on his people and begins to slaughter them, as Qaddafi did." Over the subsequent 27 months, every plausible military tactic and mission has been exhaustively analyzed and deliberated by policymakers, active-duty and retired military officials, pundits, journalists, and others.

Civilian officials have requested a range of military options, the Pentagon's planning process has responded, congressional committees have held multiple hearings, the media has covered the unfolding fighting in and around Syria, and interested commentators have offered their opinions.

Seven months ago, State Department spokesperson Vitoria Nuland told reporters: "On the no-fly zone itself, you know that we've been saying for quite a while we continue to study whether that makes sense, how it might work." As those "studies" have continued, the American people have been polled repeatedly to gauge their opinion — the latest two polls demonstrate that less than a quarter of Americans think the U.S. military should intervene in Syria.

At this point, it is safe to say that — short of definitive evidence of large-scale regime-directed chemical weapons use, or threats to Turkey, a U.S. treaty ally — it is highly unlikely that the United States will intervene militarily in Syria's civil war. There are many reasons for this, including an American populace exhausted with nearly a dozen years of continuous warfare, senior military officials deeply opposed to an open-ended mission while still fighting in Afghanistan and confronting the threat of Islamic militants regrouping in southwest Libya, and a president who adheres to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates's semi-serious dictum: "Every administration gets one preemptive war against a Muslim country."

However, the most significant explanation of America's unwillingness to attack Syria is that the level of military force that officials and policymakers are willing to employ would not materially change the outcome of the civil war. The threshold of force that would have to be used — as well as the sheer numbers of advanced, lethal weapons that would have to be supplied to the armed opposition — to assure the toppling of Assad, will not be forthcoming. The course and outcome of Syria's civil war is simply not that important of a national interest for the United States to take the lead and catalyze a military coalition or weapons-supplying role.

Even the most prominent and vocal advocate of intervention, Sen. John McCain, has proposed military options that would be wholly insufficient to defeat the Syrian Army, associated paramilitary forces, and foreign fighters. McCain has repeatedly emphasized that no U.S. ground troops should be committed to this effort, declaring in April: "The worst thing the United States could do right now is put boots on the ground in Syria." On Sunday, he also endorsed a NFZ and a "safe zone," but added: "We don't have to risk our pilots. I would not send U.S.-manned aircraft over Syria." McCain said that these zones could be enforced with Patriot missile batteries in Turkey, though Turkish officials have told their American counterparts that they do not support the use of the missiles or their sovereign territory to enforce a NFZ.

Forget the small arms. If the White House really wants to alter the course of the Syrian civil war, it may well need to impose a no-fly zone. The good news is it probably won't be too hard to pull off, given the battered state of Assad's air defenses. The bad news is it could drag the U.S. into a wider war.

Bashar al-Assad's air force that has conducted between 115 and 141 air strikes a month from January through April of this year, largely with old Czechoslovakian-made L-39 Delfin trainer jets and helicopters such as the Soviet-designed Mi-8, Mi-17 and Mi-24.

The weapons may be old, but many analysts believe that they've made a crucial difference as pro-regime troops have seized the momentum in Syria's civil war. Some in the U.S. government are pushing for a total no-fly zone similar to the one imposed on Libya in 2011 in order to take out that air force.

Click here to see an interactive map that shows the location of Assad's main air bases — the prime targets of any American campaign to limit Assad's power to strike from the sky.

On June 14^th, Anthony Cordesman of the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies said that anything less than (a pretty darn expensive) no-fly zone that totally grounds Assad's air force would be a "half-pregnant" solution similar to "supplying too few arms of too few lethality," as the U.S. and other nations have been said to be doing secretly for months without giving the rebels enough of an advantage to overthrow Assad.

A full-on no-fly zone would involve the U.S. and any other nations launching a high end assault with everything from B-2 stealth bombers to submarine and ship-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles aimed at destroying Assad's radars, missile sites and air defense control networks. It'd be similar to what was done at the start of Operation Odyssey Dawn, only bigger due to the fact that Syria has a much better air defense network than Libya did. Once these door-kickers have taken out the most dangerous elements of Syria's air defenses, other strike fighters such as U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles, F-16 Vipers — some of which are already in neighboring Jordan along with a 7,000 MEU—, and U.S. Navy and Marine Corps F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and F/A-18 Hornets would then be relatively free to hunt down and destroy Assad's aircraft on the ground or in the air.

As Cordesman points out, all of these jets would need to be flown off at least one aircraft carrier. The attack would also involve aircraft based in nearby Turkey, perhaps in Jordan, as well as in other Middle East nations that host American warplanes. The strike jets would have to be supported by aerial refueling tankers, AWACS and possibly JSTARS radar planes, EA-18G Growler and EA-6B Prowler radar jamming jets, reconnaissance drones and other intelligence-gathering jets. This is a huge undertaking that would cost a ton and take a long time to achieve full effect. Remember, the U.S. and NATO patrolled the Libyan skies from March 2011 through October 2011, when Muammar al-Qaddafi. Also there is no indication that any NATO country is willing to ante in to the pot.

However, as Christopher Harmer of the Institute for the Study of War points out, Assad's high-end air defenses are stationary — making them easy targets for rebel ground attack and have likely been seriously degraded by months of fighting.

"The fixed site portion of the Syrian air defenses — the heavy radar, heavy surface to air missiles, etc., belong to the Syrian Air Force, and in my opinion, have suffered significantly in the fighting," said Harmer. "They can't get out of the way of the rebels; more problematic, these old Soviet legacy systems are maintenance and training intensive. My guess is the Syrian Air Force has lost significant capability on its heavy, fixed site IADS due to a lack of maintenance, repair, and training."

He also points out that even Syria's most modern air defense weapons - mobile, Russian-made SA-17s and SA-22s -- don't have the reach to shoot down U.S. planes, which fire off long-range missiles like the Joint Stand-off Weapon. Nor can the defenses hope to stop American ships launching Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Furthermore, America's radar jamming EA-18Gs and EA-6Bs "can overwhelm the relatively low power radar of the SA-17 and SA-22; any fixed site (heavy power output) radar that starts to illuminate, we'll just put an (AGM-88 HARM anti-radar missile) into it. Game over for them," said Harmer. SA-17 and SA-22 are capable weapon systems, but our ability to defeat those weapons systems is far greater than the Syrians ability to interdict our air power."

There is one air defense system that could make life much more difficult for U.S. pilots, the Russian-made S-300 surface to air missiles. But the S-300 is not yet in country, despite the fact that Assad has ordered them from Russia. Those orders just got a lot more urgent, now that the U.S. is getting more directly involved in the Syrian civil war.

The bottom line to all of this military hyperbole is that yes we have the weapons systems and trained troops to enforce a total NFZ over Syria and destroy the Syrian air force. We had similar capabilities in Iraq, but after the bombing and missiles had done their work the real fighting began and went of for 7 years. In Afghanistan it’s going on 11 years and Americans are still dying on a daily basis.

No war has ever been won by bombing alone including WWII. We know this fact of history yet we continually want to revert to this argument. Just look at the battle for Monte Casino in Italy. After massive bombings and constant artillery bombardment had reduced the 6^th century Benedictine Abby to rubble it still took several attacks by allied troops to take the hill it was located on at a very high cost in lives (55,000 allied and 20,000 German).

On a similar note we bombed Tora Bora into smithereens trying to get bin Laden and it still took us 10 years to do so by using intelligence and special operators. In Libya we supported the rebels with a NFZ and bombings in order to get Gadhafi. They finally did and then they turned on us.

Syria’s blood-soaked tyrant, Bashar al-Assad, is finally right about something. He recently told an Argentine newspaper that he doubts the joint Russian-American peace initiative will stop the bloodshed in his country. Of course it won’t. Syria’s civil war is an existential fight to the death between the Alawite minority that dominates the regime and the revolutionary Sunni Muslim majority that will be smashed if it loses. The peace initiative would merely be a naive waste of time, then, but circumstances might conspire to make it something worse than that: from the proverbial Arab Street’s point of view, by cooperating with Moscow and refusing to back the rebels, Washington appears to support the Assad dictatorship.

They’re wrong, of course. Washington doesn’t support Bashar al-Assad. But it’s not hard to figure why it looks that way from the Arab point of view. The United States has demolished three murderous governments in the greater Middle East and South Asia in the last ten years — the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party state in Iraq, and Muammar el-Qaddafi’s regime in Libya. One of these regime changes took place on President Barack Obama’s watch, so everyone knows he’s just as capable of terminating a despot as was President George W. Bush. They think that since President Obama can quickly get rid of Assad, the fact that he won’t means that the White House likes him right where he is. It doesn’t help that Washington is sponsoring a joint initiative with Vladimir Putin, who really does want Assad to remain in the saddle, and at a time when Russia is gearing up to send advanced Yakhont missiles to Syria.

The reasons Washington isn’t moving aggressively against the Syrian regime are straightforward. Americans are weary of war and especially unwilling to insert themselves into Iraqi and Lebanese-style sectarian blood feuds. And unlike Qaddafi, Assad has powerful friends. If the United States widens the conflict, Iran and Hezbollah might widen it further. They might even drag in the Israelis, igniting the worst conflagration east of the Mediterranean since the Iran-Iraq war. Washington is also concerned that Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaida, might become over time no less a menace than Assad has been all these years. So the Obama administration is cautious, and for good reason.

The reality is that the Obama administration has done very well to resist the steady drumbeat to intervene in Syria. Can anyone who has observed Assad's tenacity over the last year still believe that his regime would have rapidly crumbled in the face of airstrikes or no-fly zones last year? Had the United States gone that route, Syria today would likely look much like it does now — except with America trapped in a quagmire and Obama under relentless pressure to escalate.

I suspect that Obama knows better than to give in to the pressure to arm the rebels simply to appear to be "doing something." But to sustain that posture, his administration is going to have to look beyond the array of policy options and explain precisely what the United States wants to achieve in Syria.

It's an ugly situation, and its aftermath could be even worse than the terrorist-infested ruins of Libya. Has this Administration given any sign of learning from its mistakes there? Have they come anywhere near admitting that they made any mistakes?

Who Do We Arm In Syria?

"People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous." — Edmund Burke

With the IRS and now the NSA scandals dominating the news it appears the civil war in Syria has taken a back seat in the media.

After a three-week siege, the combined forces of Hezbollah and the Assad regime have taken the important crossroads town of Qusayr, which is just south of the even more important city of Homs in east-central Syria. “Whoever controls Qusayr controls the center of the country, and whoever controls the center of the country controls all of Syria,” crowed Syrian brigadier general Yalya Suleiman.

While that boast is as much propaganda as military fact, the capture of Qusayr is a happy moment for Bashar al-Assad — who has had few of them in recent years—and for Iran and its proxy Hezbollah, whose heavy investments in propping up the Syrian dictator appear to be paying off. Indeed, the Iranians “felicitated” Assad on the gain. As well they might, since the Syrian regime is becoming ever more dependent on Tehran; Assad’s army on its own had been unable to retake Qusayr. The specter that looms is nothing less than the near-complete collapse of the U.S. position in the Middle East.

This ought to be a further signal that, despite the predictions of some of the closest students of Arab politics, there is nothing inevitable about the fall of the House of Assad. Indeed, it may well be that the morale effects of retaking Qusayr prove more important than any tactical gain—although the deployment of large-scale and well-trained Hezbollah forces is also making a difference elsewhere in Syria. If they retake Aleppo, the effect on the Syrian opposition could be crushing. And strategically speaking, the momentum is with Iran. As former Obama State Department adviser Vali Nasr writes:

“[E]vents in Syria are spinning in Iran’s favor. Assad’s regime is winning ground, the war has made Iran more comfortable in its nuclear pursuits, and Iran’s gains have embarrassed U.S. allies that support the Syrian uprising. What’s more, Iran has strengthened its relationship with Russia, which may prove to be the most important strategic consequence of the Syrian conflict, should the U.S. continue to sit it out.”

As top Obama administration officials huddle this week to possibly decide whether to lethally arm Syrian rebels trying to overthrow that country's government, they also must deal with the issue of whether any of the opposition forces can be trusted.

“That’s the $64,000 question,” says Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and Middle East expert with the American Enterprise Institute.

The United States has talked for months about the possibility of arming the opposition in Syria’s two-year-old civil war.

However, officials have been reluctant to do so because they don’t want the weapons to get into the hands of Al Qaeda linked fighters or other extremists battling President Bashar Assad’s forces, who now appear to be winning.

Rubin points out the perils the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies face when trying to get information about the players in a multi-front, Middle East war, which occasionally means paying the “bad guys” to vet the good guys.

“They’ll say one thing to your face and do another,” he said.

A Fox News report published on June 10^th states:

“The Free Syrian Army has emerged as the group most likely to receive lethal aid. The group, which consists largely of volunteers and defectors from Assad’s military forces, says its only goal is to topple the regime, with no political or religious agenda.

Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain visited Syria a few weeks ago and talked with Free Syrian leaders. But even that effort underscored the challenges faced in arming rebels, as allegations surfaced that a militant had infiltrated the visit.

“It’s a mosaic of religious and ethnic sects,” Jim Phillips, a Middle Eastern affairs expert with the Heritage Foundation, said recently. “As the so-called Arab Spring continues, the groups that rise up and try to overthrow governments in the region are also divided by ideological differences.”

Secretary of State John Kerry postponed a planned trip Monday to Israel and three other Mideast countries to participate in the White House discussions, said officials who demanded anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

The meetings now take on a heightened sense of urgency as Assad's forces are apparently poised for an attack on the key city of Homs, which could cut off Syria's armed opposition from the south of the country.

As many as 5,000 Hezbollah fighters are now in Syria, officials believe, helping the regime press on with its campaign after capturing the town of Qusair near the Lebanese border last week.

While nothing has been concretely decided, U.S. officials said President Obama is leaning closer to signing off on sending weapons to vetted, moderate rebel units, if possible.

Obama already has ruled out any intervention that would require U.S. forces on the ground. Other options such as deploying American air power to ground the regime's jets, gunships and other aerial assets are now being more seriously debated, the officials said, while cautioning that a no-fly zone or any other action involving U.S. military deployments in Syria were far less likely right now.

Such U.S. allies as Britain, France and Israel show no immediate desire to provide lethal aid. But if there is a consensus about who not to arm, it would be the Al-Nusra Front.

Though experienced in guerilla warfare and effective against Assad forces, Al-Nusra is a known terrorist group that the United Nations Security Council recently declared a front for Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Obama also has declared chemical weapons use by the Assad regime a "red line" for more forceful U.S. action. American allies including France and Britain have said they've determined with near certainty that Syrian forces have used low levels of sarin in several attacks, but the administration is still studying the evidence. The U.S. officials said responses that will be mulled over in this week's meetings concern the deteriorating situation on the ground in Syria, independent of final confirmation of possible chemical weapons use.

White House spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said Obama's advisers were considering all options to hasten a transition in Syria.”

Any intervention could have wide-reaching ramifications for the United States and the region. It would bring the U.S. closer to a conflict that has killed almost 80,000 people since Assad cracked down on protesters inspired by the Arab Spring in March 2011 and sparked a war that has since been increasingly defined by sectarian clashes between the Sunni-led rebellion and Assad's Alawite-dominated regime.”

…

“But Assad's military successes appear to have rendered peace efforts largely meaningless in the short term. While Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov have been trying to rally support for the planned conference in Geneva -- first envisioned for May and since postponed until July at the earliest -- even America's allies in the Syrian opposition leadership have questioned the wisdom of sitting down for talks while they are ceding territory all over the country to Assad's forces.

Beyond weapons support for the rebels, administration officials harbor deep reservations about other options.

They note that a no-fly zone, championed by hawks in Congress such as McCain, would require the U.S. to first neutralize Syrian air defense systems that have been reinforced with Russian technology and are far stronger than those that Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi had before he was overthrown in 2011.

And Washington has no clear international mandate for authorizing any strikes inside Syria, a point Obama administration officials have cited since late 2011 to explain U.S. reticence about more forceful action.”

It has gone unreported on the mainstream media that we now have 5,000 Marines in Lebanon. The Pentagon totally pinky-swears that this has nothing to do with Syria. It just happens to have sent 5,000 troops to neighboring Jordan to participate in a nine-day “air defense, disaster relief and humanitarian assistance exercise”, dubbed Eager Lion.

While the Pentagon says this round of the annual exercise — involving thousands of participants from 19 countries — has been in the works for years, the timing is awfully convenient. The fighting in Syria has started to spill over that nation's borders into Lebanon and Israel. Meanwhile, Congress is continuing to pressure the White House to do something to aid the Syrian rebels in their fight against the Assad regime who has been helped by a recent influx of fighters from Hezbollah.

Earlier this spring, the Pentagon sent several hundred "headquarters" troops from the 1^stArmored Division at Fort Bliss, Texas, to Jordan to assist U.S. and other NATO troops there in trying to figure out how to secure the Assad regime's stockpile of chemical and biological weapons should they fall out of the Syrian government's hands.

These headquarters troops are now joined in the desert by members of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a host of U.S. Navy amphibious warfare ships, Patriot air defense missile batteries — also from Fort Bliss — and F-16 fighter jets from the Colorado Air National Guard.

All of these troops are in Jordan to demonstrate the U.S.'s commitment "to the Kingdom of Jordan and regional partners and the combined efforts to sustain regional security and stability," reads a Pentagon press release on the exercise.

"Eager Lion is an excellent example of teamwork that brings together military forces and inter-agency partners from around the world," said Maj. Gen. Robert Catalanotti, Director, USCENTCOM Exercises and Training in the announcement. "This exercise challenges the participants to respond to realistic, modern-day security scenarios by integrating a variety of disciplines in the air, on land and at sea. Our relationship with Jordan and the 19 partner nations involved in the exercise is built on a foundation of interoperability that brings us closer together and enhances regional stability."

So yeah, this exercise is focused on maintaining stability — just what the war in Syria threatens.

This air defense and humanitarian relief exercise features units that could make life difficult for Assad's air force. The 2,200 Marine-strong 26^th MEU, like the six other MEUs in the Marine Corps is basically a self-contained, seagoing crisis response force equipped with everything from an infantry battalion to MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotors and the support staff to back them up. Meanwhile, those F-16s from the Colorado Air Guard's 120^th Fighter Squadron specialize in keeping enemy aircraft and missiles on the ground — during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 120th dropped hundreds of smart bombs knocking out Saddam Hussein's ballistic missiles.  While the Marines may simply be passing through Jordan, for the exercise that's supposed to last from June 9 through the 20th, the Patriot missiles and fighters may stick around for a while, providing a hedge against increased aggression by the Syrian government's air force.

This is the most recent in a series of multinational exercises that started in 2011, and while I believe that a broad range of capabilities are tested during this protracted training exercise, it's hard not to conclude that at least some aspects of the exercise (particular those focusing on humanitarian assistance, chemical warfare mitigation, and missile defense) were written into the script because of ongoing developments in Syria."

On the other side of the issue two suicide bombings hit central Damascus during rush hour today, killing 14 people and wounding at least 30 others. According to Syrian state media, the explosions hit near a police station in the commercial district of Marjeh Square. However, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that one suicide bomber detonated the explosive device inside the police station. The square has been the site of several attacks since the beginning of the uprisings, including a bombing six weeks ago that killed 13 people. However, residents of the area say the city center has been quieter since Assad's forces overtook Qusayr and began a counteroffensive pushing rebel forces from the Damascus suburbs. Meanwhile, the Syrian Army launched several attacks on opposition positions in the northern Aleppo province today two days after announcements that the regime was planning an offensive against rebel strongholds in the region. Syrian forces reportedly shelled parts of the Mannagh air base a day after opposition fighters took its radar tower. The recently weakened opposition position has added challenges for the United States as officials again consider military options on Syria. The United States has been working with Russia to plan a peace conference in Geneva. However, the head of the Syrian opposition's military wing, General Salim Idris said in an interview on Friday that the opposition had been so weakened that it would have minimal leverage in peace talks. Because of that, he said opposition representatives wouldn't attend a conference unless they were provided with additional weapons and ammunition.

The question is has Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terror organization, bitten off more than it can chew in Syria? Could the transnational terror group have fond its own Viet Nam in backing Alawite dictator Assad? Michael Young, writing in Now, makes the case:

“Hezbollah’s deepening involvement in the Syrian war is a high-risk venture. Many see this as a mistake by the party, and it may well be. Qusayr will be small change compared to Aleppo, where the rebels are well entrenched and benefit from supply lines leading to Turkey. In the larger regional rivalry between Iran and Turkey, the Turkish army and intelligence services have an interest in helping make things very difficult for Hezbollah and the Syrian army in northern Syria, particularly after the car-bomb attack in Reyhanli in May.

Many will be watching closely to see how the current crisis in Turkey affects Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ability to react to the Syrian situation, particularly if the epicenter of the fighting shifts to Aleppo. Erdogan has faced the displeasure among many in Turkey’s southern border areas with their government’s policy in Syria. At the same time, a defeat of the Syrian rebels in and around Aleppo is not something that Turkey can easily swallow so near to its borders, particularly if Hezbollah is instrumental in the fighting.

Hezbollah is willing to take heavy casualties in Syria, if this allows it to rescue the Assad regime. The real question is what time frame we are talking about, and how this affects the party’s vital interests elsewhere. For now, Hezbollah has entered Syria with no exit strategy. The way in which Hassan Nasrallah framed the intervention indicates that it is open-ended. This will prompt other parties to take actions and decisions they might otherwise have avoided for as long as the Syrian conflict was primarily one between Syrians.

Hezbollah is already a magnet for individuals and groups in Syria keen to take the air out of the region’s leading Shiite political-military organization - or simply to protect their towns and villages. As Qusayr showed, the presence of Hezbollah only induces its enemies to fight twice as hard against the party. As a proxy of Iran, Hezbollah will prompt governments to do the same, and they will see an opportunity to wear down the party and trap it in a grinding, no-win situation.

Playing in the favor of Hezbollah’s enemies is that the party has little latitude to alter its strategy in Syria. It must go all the way, predisposing it to sink ever-deeper into the Syrian quagmire, or until the point where the Syrian regime and pro-regime militias can capture and control territory on their own. That is not easy in a guerrilla war in which rebels have often out-matched the army.”

Hezbollah is also taking fire from one of its former leaders as reported in the Jerusalem Post:

“Former Hezbollah Secretary-General Subhi al-Tufayli criticized the Lebanese organization's military intervention in the Syrian civil war in an interview with Al Arabiya News aired on Friday.

"Hezbollah’s project as a resistance party that works to unify the Islamic world has fallen," Tufayli lamented, criticizing current Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah's decision to challenge Sunni Muslims to fight against the Shi'ite militia group.

Tufayli noted that Hezbollah has "provoked the whole world" and started a sectarian war that "opened the door for a ferocious period of sedition.”  

I am sure with 5,000 U.S. military assets stationed in Jordan Samantha Power, Obama’s appointee as Ambassador to the UN and architect of our intervention into Libya, will be chaffing at the bit to get the UN and United States involved in the Syrian civil war.

Power, a former Harvard professor known for lecturing U.S. government officials to do more to stop international violence, ran the White House’s Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights until March of 2013. She was also appointed in April 2012 by the president to chair a newly-formed Atrocities Prevention Board. Power’s book “A Problem from Hell, America and the Age of Genocide” even won a Pulitzer Prize.

Now the Obama administration is considering resettling some refugees who have escaped war-torn Syria in the United States, a development first reported by the Los Angeles Times on Sunday and later confirmed by the State Department.

According to the Times, the resettlement of the refugees would be “part of an international effort that could bring thousands of Syrians to American cities and towns.”

The Times reports [emphasis added]:

“A resettlement plan under discussion in Washington and other capitals is aimed at relieving pressure on Middle Eastern countries straining to support 1.6 million refugees, as well as assisting hard-hit Syrian families.

The State Department is “ready to consider the idea,” an official from the department said, if the administration receives a formal request from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, which is the usual procedure.

The United States usually accepts about half the refugees that the U.N. agency proposes for resettlement. California has historically taken the largest share, but Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia are also popular destinations.”

UN, government and non-governmental representatives are meeting this week in Geneva to discuss the resettlement options, according to the Times.

State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki was asked for details about the resettlement plan at the department’s Monday briefing.

“Well, let me first say the preferred solution for the vast majority of refugees is to return home once it is safe. We are in close contact with the UN on the need for resettlement of refugees from countries of first asylum throughout the world,” Psaki said.

According to Reuters the UN’s refugee agency UNHCR said today it was talking to Germany about resettling up to 10,000 Syrian refugees.

“The United States accepts more UN-referred refugees than all other countries combined, and we are aware, and we would — and the UN is aware that the U.S. would consider any individuals referred to us to have been determined to be in need of resettlement. So we are prepared to respond if asked, and will encourage other resettlement countries to do the same,” she added.

While she wouldn’t specify the number of Syrian refugees the U.S. would be willing to resettle, she explained that Congress caps the number of refugees at 70,000 in total.

Though the refugee problem is a serious humanitarian issue – with most having fled to neighboring Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey — moving some of them to the U.S. would create challenges. First, how to vet applicants from a country where so many jihadi and al Qaeda activists are present. Secondly, would the lure of possible entry to the U.S. encourage other Syrians to leave their country, further straining their neighbors’ generosity and resources?

As the L.A. Times reports, “Two resettled Iraqis were convicted of trying to send arms to Al Qaeda from their home in Bowling Green, Ky.”

The L.A. Times describes political challenges as well:

“Congress strongly resisted accepting Iraqi refugees, including interpreters who had worked with U.S. forces, after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Most lawmakers share White House caution about getting more engaged in Syria and may have little appetite for a major influx.

But Susan Rice, President Obama’s new national security advisor, and Samantha Power, Obama’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to the U.N., both have been strong advocates for refugees. They may make the White House more receptive to at least a partial opening.”

The L.A. Times points out that the Department of Homeland Security requires “careful vetting of refugees, with multiple interviews and background checks before they are allowed to enter the country.” That process, “under normal circumstances,” can take a year or more.

By now it is a pretty well-known fact that Ambassador Chris Stevens was involved in a gun-running program to the Syrian rebels. With the pressure of 80,000 dead in the Syrian civil war, advisors like Samantha Power, and the scandals involving the IRS, DOJ and NSA Obama will be more inclined to change the focus to Syria. After all he has the support on John McCain.

Obama Does It Again

"Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind." — Thomas Jefferson

Yesterday President Obama rewarded the incompetence and radical bias of his political friends by appointing Susan Rice as National Security Advisor and Samantha Power as Ambassador to the United Nations.

Let’s look at Samantha Power first.

The woman charged with the protection of global human rights for the White House for the last four years was promoted Tuesday to represent the United States at the United Nations.

Despite leading an embarrassing policy of inaction — during which 80,000 plus Syrians were killed by violence created by their own government, thousands of Sudanese were ethnically-cleansed in Darfur, and hundreds of thousands were murdered and displaced in the Congo — President Obama announced Tuesday that he has selected Samantha Power, an academic and 2008 Obama presidential campaign aide, as his next nominee to represent the United States as ambassador to the United Nations.

Power, a former Harvard professor known for lecturing U.S. government officials to do more to stop international violence, ran the White House’s Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights until March of 2013. She was also appointed in April 2012 by the president to chair a newly-formed Atrocities Prevention Board. Power’s book “A Problem from Hell, America and the Age of Genocide” even won a Pulitzer Prize.

Power has spent most of her career advocating for increased U.S. government involvement to stop rights abuses around the world.

Her appointment to run the White House office for human rights was loudly trumpeted as a coup for the NGO community: The woman whose career skyrocketed by lecturing President Bush on his inaction in Sudan was now in charge of the U.S. government’s response to future crises.

However, it didn’t take long before Power’s decades of big talk was put to the test.

In a position of power and proximity to the president of the United States, from which she could meaningfully act against any unfolding injustice, Power was largely silent and completely ineffective.

In a position of power and proximity to the president of the United States, from which she could meaningfully act against any unfolding injustice, Power was largely silent and completely ineffective.

The NGO community was left wondering which Samantha Power was getting to speak inside the Oval Office.

Prior to entering government, Power was a loud supporter of the international concept “Responsibility to Protect (R2P)”, a U.N. supported term that pressures those in power to protect the vulnerable during war, crisis and poor governing.

In fact, it’s not an over-statement to say her career was built on the idea that the government should act more and talk less.

But from inside government while sitting comfortably ensconced at the White House’s National Security Council, she was one of the most disappointing leaders to the R2P activists.

Before entering government, Power consistently espoused her strong R2P views.

In August 2004, while happily perched at Harvard, Power wrote a lengthy piece for the New Yorker on the issue of Sudan where she lamented the slowness of the Bush administration to confront the killing of tens of thousands of Sudanese, questioned President Bush’s motives for confronting the killings, and criticized him for not getting other countries to help. Power opined:

“Neither President Bush nor Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, spoke publicly about the killings in Darfur before March of this year, by which time some thirty thousand people had died as a result of ethnic cleansing.”

Even when giving President Bush credit for later dealing with the issue, Power cynically questioned his reasons. She said, “The stage was set: Bush would delight his Christian constituency; U.S. businesses would gain access to Sudan’s oil; and Sudanese civilians would stop dying.”

Yet once Power finally achieved a position of actual authority, she continuously failed to act or even forcefully speak out in favor of U.S. government action.

She espoused little to no support of Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution when Iranian students and others took to the streets to protest the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

She sat silent during the crucial moments when the Syrian crisis first started and has remained absent for two years as 80,000 plus Syrians have been killed.

And despite years of fierce rhetoric against Bush for inaction in Darfur, she has become mute as genocide continues to ravage the region.

An academic with zero real-world diplomatic experience, her biting words ring hollow from inside the White House.

Elizabeth Blackney, an NGO activist on human trafficking said, “For Samantha Power to be promoted is disturbing. She shed her record as an anti-genocide, human rights advocate for political power and affiliation. She became the bystander, the "person sitting in an office" implementing a bad policy that ensured greater suffering."

Sending Power to the United Nations sends the message that President Obama doesn’t care as much about actually helping the world’s vulnerable as he does about loyalty and academic prestige.

Sadly, the U.S. may be represented at the U.N. by someone who has no multilateral diplomatic experience outside of one-hour classroom exercises.

Power’s record at the NSC proves academic success means little in the real world, but all-too-much to the president of the United States.

While not being very effective as a human rights advocate and more of an Obama political operative Power has a history of controversial comments that could haunt her in confirmation — including likening U.S. foreign policies to those of the Nazis.

In a March 2003 New Republic magazine essay, Samantha Power wrote that American foreign policy needs a "historical reckoning" which would entail "opening the files" and "acknowledging the force of a mantra we have spent the last decade promoting in Guatemala, South Africa, and Yugoslavia."

She continued: “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. When (German Chancellor Willy) Brandt went down on one knee in the Warsaw ghetto, his gesture was gratifying to World War II survivors, but it was also ennobling and cathartic for Germany. Would such an approach be futile for the United States?"

Republicans in the Senate, which must approve Power for the diplomatic post, could press her during her confirmation hearing on a number of other topics, including comments she's made on Libya and Israel. If confirmed, Power would take over for Susan Rice, whom Obama appointed as his new national security adviser. Rice, unlike Power, will not face a confirmation hearing

Power, aside from being a well-known foreign policy expert, is also married to Obama's former regulatory "czar" Cass Sunstein.

Asked Wednesday if the White House is girding for a contentious confirmation, Press Secretary Jay Carney said, “We would not expect one.”

He lauded Power’s “remarkable career” as a journalist and foreign policy adviser, as well as her “passion” for issues like shedding light on genocide.

But others say her views on the Middle East spark concerns about her position on Israel. She once suggested the possibility of military intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

During a 2002 interview with Harry Kreisler, host of Conversations with History, a program produced by the University of California Berkeley Institute of International Studies, Power said America needs “a willingness to actually put something on the line in sort of helping the situation."

“Not of the old, you know, Srebrenica kind or the Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence, because it seems to me at this stage — and this is true of actual genocides as well and not just, you know, major human rights abuses, which we're seeing there. But — is that you have to go in as if you're serious, you have to put something on the line,” she said.

Power, a Pulitzer Prize winner, Harvard Law School graduate and Harvard professor, created a public ripple during the 2008 Democratic primary race when she was quoted in a foreign newspaper calling then-candidate Hillary Clinton names.

"She is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything," Power told The Scotsman, which published her comment.

"But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive," she added.

Power resigned from Obama’s campaign following her comments.

Power, a human rights expert and former White House adviser, left the White House earlier this year, though she was considered the president’s likely pick to move to the U.N. She has long been connected to Obama. And if you’ll recall, she has had her fair share of controversy, specifically after she was forced to resign from the president’s 2008 campaign following negative remarks she made about Hillary Clinton.

Power’s comments though didn’t lead to completely severed ties to Obama, as she was soon back in the fold. So, too, was her husband — she is the wife of former regulatory czar Cass Sunstein. As early as 2011, TheBlaze covered expectations that Power could possible secure greater power, specifically if the president was elected to a second term. Her U.N. appointment appears to solidify these expectations.

In the past, Irish Central called her one of the main architects of the Obama administration’s policies in Libya, noting her influence over the White House. And Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a 2011 New York Times profile that “She is clearly the foremost voice for human rights within the White House and she has Obama’s ear.”

Bloomberg has more about her Libya involvement as well:

“She played a role, along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and other NSC advisers, in convincing Obama to push for a UN Security Council resolution to authorize a coalition military force to protect Libyan civilians. Other administration figures were concerned about the effectiveness of a no-fly zone and differences within NATO over what Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned would be a “big operation.” [...]

Power, who sought the limelight as a writer and public intellectual, has learned to be a behind-the-scenes policymaker over the past two years, associates say.”

Eventually, she repaired relations with Clinton. That said, she’s still widely seen as a problem by conservatives who oppose her ideals. After all, it wasn’t only her comments about the former Democratic presidential candidate that has caught the ire of critics; her foreign policy, too, is seen by some as problematic.

Power has a complicated history with the Obama camp and has also been accused, in the past, of making disparaging remarks about Israel.

In March 2011, Glenn Beck covered Power on his radio show and a subsequent article on GlennBeck.com recapped the host’s stance:

“For anyone who thinks that Samantha Power is just some low level cog in the Washington machine, the New York Times just did a nice profile on her role in the current administration. It turns out that Mrs. Cass Sunstein is probably the most dangerous woman in America, after all.

“Samantha Power took the podium sounding hoarse and looking uncomfortable. In two hours, President Obama would address the nation on Libya and Miss Power, the fiery human rights crusader‑‑ they shouldn’t use the word crusader in this instance, should they? The human rights crusader who advises Mr. Obama on foreign policy did not want to go out in front of the boss,” Glenn said, adding some of his own commentary to the article he was reading from.

“I’m not going to talk much about Libya, she began, but when it came for her question, she count help herself. Our best judgment, she said, defending the decision to establish a no‑fly zone was the failure to do so would have been extremely chilling, deadly and, indeed, a stain on our collective conscience,” Glenn continued.

“Now from her perch on the national Security Council, she is in a position to make the case for the commander in chief and to watch him translate her ideas into action. She’s clearly the foremost voice for human rights with in the White House, says Kenneth Ross. She has Obama’s ear. The Irish‑born Miss Power, 40, functions as kind of an institutional memory bank on genocide,” he continued.

“So we have Cass Sunstein’s wife advising on the Responsibility to Protect,” Glenn said “If you’re in the circle of George Soros, she was a queen. George Soros immediately funded a group to push the Responsibility to Protect.”

“[UN official Richard Falk] has been pushing for the right to protect or the Responsibility to Protect to be used against Israel and they’ve been trying this now for the last couple of years, and that’s what this is really all about, period. This is about going after Israel,” Glenn said.”

Last year, The Chicago Sun-Times provided information about Power and her involvement in Obama’s Atrocities Prevention Board, an effort to prevent future genocide (i.e. the doctrine of a “Responsibility to Protect”) and other horrific occurrences:

“Samantha Power — who won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on genocide and now advises the Obama administration on the subject–will chair President Barack Obama’s new Atrocities Prevention Board, which gets down to work Monday as Obama delivers a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. [...]

The Obama White House efforts to address genocide is headed by Samantha Power, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights. Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide” and worked briefly for Obama when he was a U.S. senator from Illinois.”

But that has largely been seen as an interventionist policy — something many Republicans and Democrats shy away from.

Considering her past comments about Israel and her perceived stance on the Middle Eastern country, it’s likely that her appointment will be contentious, drawing particular frustration from conservatives and those who believe that her policy stances will be damaging to the current Middle Eastern scenario.

Past comments do little to temper these fears. In her 2002 interview with Harry Kreisler, the director of the Institute for International Studies at Berkeley Kreisler asked her the following:

“Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine – Israel problem, let’s say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, at least if one party or another starts looking like they might be moving toward genocide?”

Power’s response, in the eyes of those who support Israel, was problematic, as she claimed support for “external intervention” in the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma and said that it’s important to consider the “lesser evils” associated with getting involved in alleviating the issue.

She also, at one point in her commentary, claimed that Middle Eastern leaders — including Israel, it seems — are “destroying the lives of their own people.” Here is a portion of her response:

“What we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line…and putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import. It may more crucially mean…investing literally billions of dollars not in servicing Israeli military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine.

In investing billions of dollars it would probably take also to support, I think, what would to be, I think, a mammoth protection force…a meaningful military presence because it seems to me at this stage — and this is true of actual genocides as well and not just major human rights abuses which we’re seeing there — but is that you have to go in as if you’re serious. You have to put something on the line and unfortunately the position of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful, it’s a terrible thing to do, its fundamentally undemocratic.

But sadly, you know — we don’t just have a democracy here either — we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of principles that guide, you know, our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. And there, it’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deference to people who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people, and by that I mean what Tom Friedman has called “Sharafat.” I mean, I do think in that sense, there’s — that both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible, and unfortunately, it does require external intervention which, very much like the Rwanda scenario — that thought experiment, of ‘if we had intervened early’ — any intervention is going to come under fierce criticism, but we have to think about lesser evils, especially when the human stakes are just becoming ever more pronounced.”

DiscoverTheNetworks.org also makes some fascinating claims about some of Power’s other most recent statements. Here’s just a sampling:

In her 2004 review of Noam Chomsky’s book Hegemony or Survival, Power agreed with many of Chomsky’s criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and expressed her own concerns about what she called the “sins of our allies in the war on terror,” lumping Israel together with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, and Uzbekistan. She called Chomsky’s work “sobering and instructive.”

In 2005–06, Power worked as a foreign policy fellow in the office of U.S. Senator Barack Obama. In this role, she helped to spark and inform Obama’s interest in the deadly ethnic and tribal conflict of Darfur, Sudan.

In a 2007 interview, reported in FrontPage Magazine, Power said that America’s relationship with Israel “has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics.” The United States, she explained, had brought terrorist attacks upon itself by aping Israel’s violations of human rights.

Naturally, many will still wonder if her views surrounding Israel and the Middle East will impact how she manages her position at the U.N — and, more specifically — her treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Now for the tarnished Susan Rice.

Much is known about Susan Rice since her disgraceful appearance on five Sunday talk shows immediately following the attract on our consulate in Benghazi where she followed the fictitious party line of blaming a YouTube video for the murder of our Ambassador and three others.

It is worth considering the reason Obama appointed Rice for the position of National Security Advisor — a position not requiring Senate confirmation.

In an op-ed piece on Fox News.com by K.T. McFarland, who served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs under President Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1985:

“Tuesday morning my reaction was why appoint Susan Rice as national security adviser? She will be a DISASTER.

Here's why: I spent seven years working for the most successful NSC adviser in history, Henry Kissinger.

I watched him conceive new policies, negotiate with foreign leaders, ride herd over the bureaucracy, massage the press and foreign policy intelligentsia and work behind the scenes with congressional leaders.

Susan Rice can’t do any of those things.

She has zero credibility with the media, on Capitol Hill, with the foreign policy community and foreign leaders, and is so badly tarnished by the Benghazi scandal that she walks into the job on Day One weak and wounded.

The most obvious problem is her disastrous performance on the Sunday talk shows peddling the administration’s fairy tale on Benghazi; when she was either complicit in the cover-up or incompetent.

Either she knew what really happened and deliberately lied to the American people or she was a mere actress who read the script she was given and didn’t know enough to question whether the words she spoke were accurate.

Rice might have been able to overcome the Benghazi debacle if she had other strong credentials, for example being a senior military officer like Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft, or a respected academic like Henry Kissinger and Zbig Brzezinski. But Susan Rice is none of these.

When the spotlight was on her at the U.N. she was an ineffective ambassador who couldn't get Russia or China on board to deal with Syria or impose strict sanctions against Iran.

Not only did she fail to persuade those key members of the Security Council, she didn't know it until after the votes on sanctions were taken!

Benghazi was supposed to be her audition for the Secretary of State job -- go on all the Sunday talk shows and be the Obama administration’s primary spokesman.

She was so eager for the try out that she didn't stop and ask why they wanted her. The decision to send someone from the administration to appear on all five talk shows is a decision made at the highest levels of the White House.

It should have been the Secretary of State, or maybe Secretary of Defense, or CIA chief, or NSC Adviser or White House Chief of Staff – they were part of the decision process.

Susan Rice was the one senior administration official who knew nothing about events leading up to Benghazi and the attack itself, yet the White House asked her to go on those shows?

Alarm bells should have gone off in her head!

I checked their schedules and most of the other senior officials were in Washington and available that morning. It’s just that they were smarter than Rice and realized it was a poisoned chalice.

So what is Obama thinking with the Rice appointment? He’s doubling down and circling the wagons. He's rewarding Rice for being a loyal (if incompetent) soldier. He is hanging tough on the scandals and claiming that he knew nothing about them until he read about them in the papers.

On the other hand, maybe Obama's appointment of Rice is smarter than it looks on the surface.

By appointing Rice to the NSC job the president can invoke executive privilege and claim she doesn’t have to testify on Capitol Hill. And even if she does talk about Benghazi, at some point, she will certainly be a loyal soldier if she is now sitting just steps from the Oval Office.

But despite what the president might want the Benghazi isn't over, not by a long shot.”

The Obama administration is all about failing. If you have lied to the American people, overseen policies that resulted in the deaths of American citizens, created other policies that have undermined American law and interests, screwed up royally, and covered up your actions, then you are primed for position and promotion in the Obama administration.

The most recent example this is Susan Rice. Rice is, of course, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations who was wheeled out on September 15th of last year on five Sunday morning show to peddle a whopper of a lie. She said that they believed the terror attack in Benghazi (which they all knew at the time was a terror attack committed by forces linked to al Qaeda) was simply a “spontaneous demonstration as a result of what had transpired in Cairo,” and she explicitly blamed an obscure YouTube video. That was a lie, she knew it was a lie, everyone around her knew it was a lie, and she said it anyway.

Now she’s getting rewarded with a big promotion to National Security Adviser. That gig requires no Senate confirmation, so she’s in. Great work if you can get it.

Taking her place at the U.N. will be Samantha Power, the wife of Obama’s radical regulatory czar Cass Sunstein. Power is the one who came up with the basis for our disastrous intervention in Libya — which ultimately led to the Benghazi attack and the deaths of those four brave Americans. Called “Responsibility to Protect,” Power’s doctrine argues that the U.S. has a moral responsibility to intervene anywhere there is a slaughter or the potential of slaughter (whether our strategic interests are involved or not). She successfully argued R2P and Obama led the NATO operation that helped to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi (who had not initiated an assault against his people). Qaddafi fell, was killed, and then we went on a social engineering experiment that led to the outpost in Benghazi and gunrunning out of Libya to Syria.

This brings us to Syria. If Power’s “R2P” were applied consistently, then Obama should have intervened there 2 years ago, when Assad’s slaughter began. There is still no intervention there, 70,000 to 80,000 lives later. I’m not arguing for intervention — in fact, I don’t think we should be injecting ourselves in that Arab civil war. But there is no consistency in policy: intervene in Libya where there was no slaughter, but don’t intervene in Syria where there is an actual slaughter. Whatever exists of an Obama “doctrine” (which is quite a mess and is resulting in the rise of anti-American regimes and forces around the world) is Samantha Power’s worldview. Lord help us, now she’s going to be our U.N. Ambassador. Failing upward!

Not to mention Victoria Nuland, who led the charge in demanding the edits to the Benghazi “talking points” documents that protected “her building’s leadership.” She’s now being promoted to Assistant Secretary of State.

Top IRS officials who oversaw the targeting of conservative and patriot groups remain in their jobs, and those who aren’t still employed by the IRS were scheduled to leave and retire anyway. Lois Lerner, a major villain in this scandal, is on “administrative leave” while still drawing her $177,000 salary. Paid by you. (You may want to work a little harder.)

And don’t forget that several of the officials overseeing Fast and Furious in Arizona — which resulted in the deaths of two brave Americans — were merely shuffled around to different jobs. Not fired, not held accountable, just moved around.

If you suck at your job and are willing to lie through your teeth, I’ve got good news. In this horrendous Obama Economy, you can always get a job among your fellow liars in the Obama administration. You might even get promoted.

On an interesting note it appears that President Obama is prone to surround himself with weak and incompetent women who are devoted to him and his ideology. We have Susan Rice a nobody when it comes for foreign policy and national security. Then there is Samantha Power an Irish political operative, who will be, no doubt, our next Ambassador the United Nations. This is really a dead end job that usually results in a book deal and fairly good speaking fees. Janet Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland Security has been as dreadful as she was as governor of Arizona. For the life of me I can’t understand why he picked her. She did not deliver Arizona to Obama in 2008. Kathleen Sebelius has been a joke as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Her job was just saved when a federal judge told her to reverse course — a 10-year-old girl dying from cystic fibrosis should be added to the adult lung transplant list. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has been an overbearing greenie now accused using phony e-mail accounts associated with the pseudonym Richard Windsor to take online training programs on subjects including ethics, whistleblowers and records preservation. The EPA is now under investigation for targeting conservative groups. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who submitted her letter of resignation last week, was in the pocket of the unions and brought the action against Boeing for moving to South Carolina. Now Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, is being considered as her replacement.

And of course there is his mentor and power behind the throne Valerie Jarrett. President Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden three times before saying yes, because he got cold feet about the possible political harm to himself if the mission failed. Instead of listening to advisors from the U.S. military, Defense, or even State, Obama was acting on the advice of White House politico and close friend Valerie Jarrett.

This account comes from Richard Miniter's upcoming book “Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors who Decide for Him.” Miniter has written six books on the war on terror. He is relying on an unnamed source within the U.S. military Joint Special Operations Command who was directly involved in the operation and planning of the Osama bin Laden kill mission.

Is the story credible? According to Edward Klein, a reporter once asked Obama if he ran every decision by Jarrett. Obama answered, "Yep. Absolutely."

Edward Klein, former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor of the New York Times Magazine for many years, describes Jarrett as "ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple's friend and Consigliere." Klein -- who claims he used a minimum of two sources for each assertion in his book on the Obama presidency, The Amateur -- writes in detail about Jarrett opposing the raid on bin Laden. She told Obama not to take the political risk. Klein thought Obama ignored Jarrett's advice. Miniter tells us he listened to her, three times telling Special Operations not to take the risk to go after bin Laden.

We need to understand the role Valerie Jarrett plays in Obama's private and political life.

"If it wasn't for Valerie Jarrett, there'd be no Barack Obama to complain about," starts Klein's chapter on Jarrett. He quotes Michelle Obama on Jarrett's influence over her husband: "She knows the buttons, the soft spots, the history, the context."

No one outside Michelle has the access or power over Obama's decision-making like Jarrett does. Here's an odd little fact that gives some insight into what kind of president Obama is: Michelle, Michelle's mother, and Valerie, and only a few others in Washington, are allowed to call Barack by his first name. After work, Jarrett joins Obama at night in the Family Quarters, where she dines often with the First Family. She goes on vacation with them.

Jarrett's title is the weird mouthful "Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs." She is the gatekeeper, but she is also much more than that. She occupies Karl Rove's and Hillary's old office and has an all-access pass to meetings. She shows up at the National Security Council, at meetings on the economy and budget. She stays behind to advise Obama on what to think and do Obama uses her as his left-wing conscience. Klein's sources describe how at each pressing issue, Obama turns to ask her, "What do you think the right thing to do is?" As president, he likes to have her next to him "as the voice of authentic blackness in a White House that is staffed largely by whites."

A longtime friend told Klein that Jarrett is the "eyes, ears and nose" of the Obamas. She tells them whom to trust, who is saying what, whom to see at home and abroad. Michelle wants her there: "I told her it would give me a sense of comfort to know that (Barack) had somebody like her there by his side." As Obama told the New York Times, "Valerie is one of my oldest friends. I trust her completely."

To understand why Obama relies so heavily on Jarrett, we must remember the president's identity crisis as a black man, which is the main subject of his memoir, Dreams from My Father. Valerie Jarrett's adoption of the Obamas as her friends and protégés in Chicago's upper-crust black society was one of the greatest things that ever happened to Obama. Until becoming a community organizer, Obama tells us he felt himself to be an inauthentic American black. Nothing in his life helped him understand or fit into the American black community.

Within a few weeks of Obama's birth, conceived out of wedlock as he was, his mother moved away to a different college, leaving Obama's African birth father behind in Honolulu.  There may have been a shotgun wedding or not — in the memoir, Obama says he is not sure. The only time Barack set eyes on his father was a brief visit when he was ten. Our president lived with his white mother, then with her and her Indonesian husband in Indonesia from age six to ten. He was so unhappy that he chose to leave his mother and live with his white grandparents back in America. Obama's America was the tolerant, wealthy American world of Honolulu's top prep school.

His only black experience was his grandfather's creepy old friend, Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying Communist and self-disclosed pederast, who was Obama's voice of authentic blackness. One result of this lonely and unhappy childhood as a mixed-race child was Barack Obama's envy problem. The key to understanding Jarrett's power over the president is that Obama didn't just envy people with normal parents and loving, successful fathers. He envied American blacks, especially those who grew up in intact black families, knowing who they were, comfortable in their black skin.

Valerie Jarrett reflects Obama in many ways. Like himself, Valerie looks more white than black. Her mother had three white grandparents, and her father was black. Like Obama, she lived in the Muslim world for part of her childhood, when her father practiced medicine in Iran. Like Obama, she is a committed leftist. But there are crucial differences. Her father was not a drunk Kenyan polygamist like Obama's, but a famous pathologist and geneticist. Her mother was not a leftist expatriate like Obama's, but a distinguished psychologist. Valerie married into Chicago's black elite, the top rung of African-American society. She went to Stanford, got a law degree from Michigan, and became Mayor Richard Daley's deputy chief of staff, "the public black face" of his administration.

When Valerie Jarrett hired Michelle to work for Daley and befriended her, the Obamas gained access to the exclusive world of upper-class black Chicago politics. Valerie knew everyone whom it was important to know in black and Jewish money circles. She gave Barack entrée and legitimacy. She financed and promoted his ambitions for national office.

Obama finally belonged. Not that Jarrett's record in Chicago was anything to be proud of. Jarrett was known for her corruption and incompetence. Daley finally had to fire her after a scandal erupted over her role in misuse of public funds in the city's substandard public housing. She went on to become CEO of Habitat Executive Services, pulling down $300,000 in salary and $550,000 in deferred compensation. Again, she managed a housing complex that was seized by government inspectors for slum conditions. The scandal didn't matter to Obama. The sordid corruption was all part of Jarrett's Chicago success story.

Every insider in Chicago told Klein the same thing: Jarrett has no qualifications to be the principal advisor to the president of the United States. She doesn't understand how Washington works, how relations with Congress work, how the federal process works. She doesn't understand how the economy works, how the military works, how national security works. But she understands how Obama works and Chicago politics.

The president turns to Valerie Jarrett for definitive advice on all these issues. She has given him terrible advice over and over, and still he turns to her.

Her true job is to make Obama feel proud of himself. When Obama looks at Jarrett, he sees himself as whole and good and real. He is no longer the fake black, the fatherless kid flailing around in a white world, tortured by the unfairness of it all. She fills the emptiness at the core of his identity. She admires and adores him. Jarrett told New Yorker editor David Remnick that the president is "just too talented to do what ordinary people do." And the icing on the cake —she shares his left-wing politics that project unfairness out onto white America.

Obama relies on Jarrett to create the White House bubble he likes to live in, where his narcissism is stroked and his desire to do the big, left-wing thing is encouraged. Jarrett is the doorman. She runs access to the president. As Klein puts it, she guards him from meeting with "critics and complainers who might deflate his ego." No one gets past Jarrett who has an incompatible point of view.

Jarrett pushed ObamaCare. At the beginning of Obama's presidency, there was pressure on Obama to focus on the economic crisis. Rahm Emanuel advised a small, bipartisan health care reform with popular items such as coverage for young adults — to get it passed quickly and focus on the country's money problems. Jarrett urged the president to be true to his left-wing agenda. She was all for having Reid-Pelosi create the ObamaCare assault on the American health system and ramming it through on a one-party vote, using Chicago-style politics, while Obama crossed the country doing what he does best: make speeches. Obama liked Jarrett's idea. Emanuel is now out of the White House.

Jarrett pushed the Solyndra fiasco. Jarrett promoted Solyndra because one of her richest Chicago connections, billionaire George Kaiser, a top Obama bundler, had a 35% share in Solyndra. Kaiser visited the White House sixteen times.

Larry Summers, the director of the president's National Economic Council, warned Obama that the federal government should not get involved in venture capital of any sort. Summers understood that crony capitalism sabotages economic growth. Huge government funding distorts and destroys whatever market segment it touches, replacing economic decisions with political ones.

A member of Obama's finance committee warned the president that Solyndra was going bankrupt. But it is Obama and Valerie who see eye to eye, and they saw the value to Obama of rewarding his political cronies. It worked fine in Chicago. Larry Summers is now out of the White House.

Jarrett pushed Obama to take on the Catholic Church over contraception, arguing that it would appeal to single women (she was right) and that religious freedom isn't important (she was wrong). Bill Daley, who had replaced Rahm Emmanuel as chief of staff, argued against Obama pushing contraception on the Church and invited Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan of New York to meet with a displeased Obama, who didn't appreciate hearing from the Church. Daley is now out of the White House.

Valerie Jarrett is the most powerful woman in Washington. She has guided the president's decisions on health care, the budget, the stimulus, the deficit, foreign affairs.

So when Jarrett told Obama that the mission to kill bin Laden was too politically risky, and to play it safe, it is entirely plausible to believe that the president listened to her. It is consistent with everything we know about Obama's dependence on her. According to Miniter's source in the U.S. Military Joint Special Operations Command, Obama listened to her for four months, dithering and deciding no the first three times the military told him that the time to get bin Laden was now.

The only possible exception to Obama’s proclivity for women would be Hillary Clinton who would stab him in the back when she gets the chance. No doubt her appointment as Secretary of State was a payback to Bill Clinton for supporting him in 2008. But after four years of Obama’s feckless, confused, and misguided foreign policy Ms. Clinton decide to bail out as she needed four years for the public to forget she was associated with Obama. It’s a wonder Ms. Clinton lasted as long as she did with the specter of Valerie Jarrett hanging over her head.

I can’t help but wondering if Obama’s proclivity to surround himself with women is due to his lack of a father figure in his youth and being raised by a domineering, radical left-wing mother along with his marriage to a strong and equally domineering wife along with having two very needful daughters. Daughters who seem to get whatever they desire and their mother wants from a weak and ineffective father. The question to ask is Valerie Jarrett his advisor or his mother?