Samantha Power, Cuban humor, etc.

Power Outage

Samantha Power last week completed what might have been the most ill-starred book tour since the invention of movable type. A Harvard professor and foreign policy writer who won a Pulitzer for her 2003 study of genocides, A Problem from Hell, Power is a card-carrying member of the Obamaphile elite--she plays basketball with George Clooney and claims that Sen. Obama sometimes text-messages her in the middle of the night. She arrived in the U.K. last week looking to promote her new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. (Vieira de Mello was the acclaimed top U.N. bureaucrat killed in the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003.)

On Monday, March 3, Power appeared on BBC radio and said that Obama, whom she had been advising, might be interested in doing some population relocation in Iraq. She said that such a course of action would be regrettable, but might be necessary, admitting that "moving potentially people from mixed neighborhoods to homogenous neighborhoods [is] tragic. .  .  . It's the equivalent of facilitating ethnic cleansing, which is terrible."

A week that began with her equating one of her candidate's mullings with ethnic cleansing only deteriorated from there. That same day, she sat for an interview with the New Statesman, telling the left-wing weekly that Obama was like Vieira de Mello in his "willingness to talk to dictators" (the magazine's phrase). Of the latter, she admitted, "In his relationship with evil, he almost got a little seduced."

On Thursday, Power appeared on the BBC TV show Hardtalk, where she tried to explain that Obama's commitment to withdrawing all combat troops from Iraq in 16 months is really just a "best-case scenario" (her words). Agog, the host asked, "So what the American public thinks is a commitment to get combat forces out in 16 months isn't a commitment?"