Foreign Policy Debate? Let’s Check In On Obama’s ‘Atrocities Prevention Board’
Suspicious that your neighbor might be up to a little genocide?
On August 4, 2011, the White House issued a press release touting the creation of a “standing interagency Atrocities Prevention Board”. Later, the administration announced that the Board was to be headed by Samantha Power — the Obama foreign policy advisor who was removed from Obama’s 2008 campaign for referring to Hillary Clinton as a “monster”, and who once advocated that the U.S. consider invading Israel.
Six months following a PR rollout planned around Holocaust Remembrance Day and culminating with a speech by Obama at the Holocaust Museum, little evidence exists of any Board activity beyond a connection to a bizarre FBI website referring people who have information “concerning a specific incident of genocide or a war crime” to the FBI tip site.
From the 2011 release:
President Obama is committed to strengthening the United States Government’s ability to prevent mass atrocities and serious human rights violations. In 2010, he created the first-ever White House position dedicated to preventing and responding to mass atrocities and war crimes. And in Kyrgyzstan, Cote d’Ivoire, Libya[!], Sudan, and elsewhere, this Administration has prioritized the protection of civilians and the prevention of mass atrocity and serious human rights violations, and employed a wide range of economic, diplomatic, and other tools in service of those ends.
Today, President Obama is directing a comprehensive review to strengthen the United States’ ability to prevent mass atrocities. The President’s directive creates an important new tool in this effort, establishing a standing interagency Atrocities Prevention Board with the authority to develop prevention strategies and to ensure that concerns are elevated for senior decision-making so that we are better able to work with our allies and partners to be responsive to early warning signs and prevent potential atrocities.
The confounding sentence does little to detail what responsibilities the Board would actually be entrusted with, or how it would carry out its mission. One year later, it is not apparent that the Board itself had any clarity regarding what actions it should take in pursuit of the “President’s directive”.
Following the press release, Obama officially announced the creation of the Atrocities Prevention Board nine months later, on April 23, 2012, at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, four days after Holocaust Remembrance Day:
We’re making sure that the United States government has the structures, the mechanisms to better prevent and respond to mass atrocities. So I created the first-ever White House position dedicated to this task. It’s why I created a new Atrocities Prevention Board, to bring together senior officials from across our government to focus on this critical mission. This is not an afterthought. This is not a sideline in our foreign policy. The board will convene for the first time today, at the White House.
The public response generally included skepticism and mockery, from the leftist Stephen Walt (co-author of the roundly condemned, anti-Semitic Israel Lobby) to conservative and mainstream outlets. Charles Krauthammer was particularly biting:
I kid you not. A board. Russia flies planeloads of weapons to Damascus. Iran supplies money, trainers, agents, more weapons. And what does America do? Support a feckless UN peace mission that does nothing to stop the killing. (Indeed, some of the civilians who met with the peacekeepers were summarily executed.) And establish an Atrocities Prevention Board.
With multiagency participation, mind you. The liberal faith in the power of bureaucracy and flowcharts, of committees and reports, is legend. But this is parody.
Just curious: how does Fast & Furious fit into the Atrocities Board strategy?
It never fails to astonish me how governments can support two contradictory ideas at the same time, like banning smoking while collecting billions in tobacco taxes and spending other billions on treating tobacco-related diseases and subsidies to tobacco farmers. (Those are just the first examples that come to mind, not the start of a rant for or against tobacco.)
Ladies and gents – leading from behind takes on new meaning, now that an ‘atrocities board’ has been created.
Never mind that real atrocities have risen exponentially, under the ‘watchful’ eyes of The One. In fact, his delicate, female surrogates ( Samantha via her R2P; and Valerie via her conferring with an actual INTERPOL felon in Iran, who happens to be an old family friend of the Jarrett’s from their days in Iran; jaw jawing at the behest of the Islamist-in-Chief, only to garner assurances from the mullahs to temporarily halt their killing program)are awash in so much blood, their actions would lead regular folks to jail cells for several lifetimes.
But no matter. The Thug-in-Chief created a ‘Board’. More to the point, how about those who have died at the hands of his Racialist AG, you know, the guy who oversaw gun running, via shipments of weapons to drug cartels where hundreds of innocents have died in Mexico, let alone agents guarding U.S. borders?
Again, not a problem, just gum under their shoes. However, there are some real human rights advocates who admire The One – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/10/22/world-leaders-openly-endorsing-the-radical-in-chief-are-the-most-vile-dregs-in-the-international-arena-why-are-they-simpatico-to-dear-leader-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/, and this is why they are endorsing him for a second term.
How delightful. Surely, they too have their ‘Boards’.
Let’s assume for the moment that this is on the up-and-up. I know. Still, if I were to assume this info is “good” then I have to ask, what do they know that I do not?
Look at the titles! “Atrocities Prevention Board”. “Assistant Secretary of State for Conflict and Stabilization Operations”. “Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice”. “Assistant Secretary, Bureau of International Organization Affairs”.
I don’t know about you, folks, but those titles scare the crap outta me. Seriously. Look at what they’re hinting at: a global criminal justice system as a cog in an organized international bureaucracy that reports to the executive branch. Again, this time with the appropriate title in square brackets, “[ ]“:
A global criminal justice system [Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice"] as a cog in an organized international bureaucracy [Bureau of International Organization Affairs] that takes orders from the executive branch [Assistant Secretary of State for Conflict and Stabilization Operations. All in some weird way contributing to an effort to prevent some kind of global atrocity [Atrocities Prevention Board]. And, presumably, skipping any Congressional oversight.
Hillary Clinton: “But the fact is a body such as this can drive the kinds of institutional changes that we envision.”
This is bad.
I agree, Chris! Setting up such a Board is total nonsense. The question is why? Looks like O is setting up a bureaucracy for a dictatorship. This group certainly isn’t doing anything as atrocities continue. Just look at what Muslims are doing to Christians in the Middle East, Africa and the Far East.