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Power’s Warning: Don’t Think About Failed Interventions

Power thinks Americans need to be warned away from counting the costs of failed policies.
Nellis holds 2011 Aviation Nation
A U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II, simulates its air to ground capabilities during the 2011 Aviation Nation Open House Nov. 12th, at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. Aviation Nation celebrates 70 years of airpower in Las Vegas and the Air Force's accomplishments in air, space and cyberspace. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Bob Sommer/Released)

Samantha Power is worried that you may have noticed the repeated failure of U.S. military interventions:

Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, warned the American public against a kind of intervention fatigue, emphasizing that U.S. leadership is needed now more than ever amid global threats from Ebola to the Islamic State.

“I think there is too much of, ‘Oh, look, this is what intervention has wrought’ … one has to be careful about overdrawing lessons,” [bold mine-DL] Power said Wednesday during the Defense One Summit.

In order to “overdraw” lessons, one would have to have at least tried to learn something from failed interventions in the recent past. There’s no evidence that this is something that Power has tried to do. It’s striking that she thinks there is too much of this reflection taking place when it is actually quite rare, if it happens at all. The fact that she thinks it is something that Americans need to be warned away from doing is revealing–and damning. She might as well be saying, “Don’t think too much about the terrible consequences of the reckless policy I supported, because that will make it harder for me to sell you on the next one.” Warning about “intervention fatigue” is just another version of railing against a non-existent “isolationism”: it conjures up something intended to frighten and distract the audience from the very real harm that interventionists’ bad policies have done.

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