Anne-Marie Slaughter Wants to Intervene in Libya
Anne Marie Slaughter in the New York Times:
PRESIDENT Obama says the noose is tightening around Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. In fact, it is tightening around the Libyan rebels, as Colonel Qaddafi makes the most of the world’s dithering and steadily retakes rebel-held towns. The United States and Europe are temporizing on a no-flight zone while the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Gulf Cooperation Council and now the Arab League have all called on the United Nations Security Council to authorize one. Opponents of a no-flight zone have put forth five main arguments, none of which, on close examination, hold up.
And then Ms. Slaughter attacks each argument. All of this was interesting, until I googled the words “Anne-Marie Slaughter” and “Iraq”. here’s the top result:
Anne-Marie Slaughter — a supporter of the Iraq invasion, a member of the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party Foreign Policy Community, and the Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs — has written an amazingly petulant and self-pitying piece at The Huffington Post that is worth looking at because her mindset is now the norm for our political and media elite. Much of her post is devoted to complaining that Tom Hayden and others have unfairly distorted her 2004 observation that “the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough.” As she notes, that sentence has been widely debated and I’ll leave it to others to decide what she really meant by it.
I want to focus instead on her other complaint — that the debate over Iraq is focused too much on assigning blame to those who were wrong in the past, and not focused enough on what to do now…
Anne-Marie Slaughter was as wrong as wrong could be about Iraq, and as Greenwald pointed out at the time, she wanted to brush all that death and blood under the rug:
Imagine if you went to a hospital to have an operation on your knee, and your surgeon completely botched it, permanently shattering your knee instead of fixing it and, in the process, needlessly removed your healthy kidney and recklessly damaged your heart and lungs. Then, as you tried to decide what you should do to rectify the damage — and you sought out the advice of doctors who presciently warned you not to have that doctor operate — the guilty surgeon insisted that he be allowed to operate again to fix it and that you listen to him regarding what should be done.
And when you screamed at the guilty surgeon — as every sane person would — to stay as far away from you as possible and that he was the last person from whom you wanted advice, he kept telling you: “Oh, forget about the past. This isn’t about assigning blame. What matters is figuring out what to do now, how to fix this.” You would think such a person insane for that line of thought.
So now Anne-Marie Slaughter’s got another op-ed in the New York Times, and unsurprisingly, she wants to establish a no-fly one in Libya.
Why on earth would anyone listen to what she has to say, when her track record is one of being wrong wrong wrong?
