Samantha Power, the former Obama foreign policy aide who reportedly will replace Susan Rice as U.N. Ambassador, stated in an April 2002 interview that "external intervention" may be necessary to foster Middle Eastern peace.
Power made her remarks after being hypothetically asked how she would advise the president to monitor a situation in the Middle East if one side moved toward genocide.
"In the Palestine-Israeli situation, there's an abundance of information and what we don't need is some kind of early warning mechanism there," she said. "What we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line in service of helping the situation, and putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import. It may more crucially mean sacrificing or investing literally billions of dollars not in servicing Israel's military but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, investing billions of dollars it would probably take also to support what I think will have to be a mammoth protection force."
Power also made an unsubtle reference to the pro-Israel lobby with her statement that "putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import," as Hot Air's Ed Morrissey wrote in 2008:
For those who may not catch the reference, Power means the Joooooos. And why would that alienate the Jewishcabalthatsecretlyrunseverything? For one thing, Power wants to spend billions on bolstering Palestinian military strength, instead of spending it on helping the Israelis to defend themselves. Bear in mind that this interview takes place about seven months after 9/11, when people supposedly still knew how dangerous radical Islamist groups like Hamas and al-Qaeda were. Power wanted to send them money and stop funding Israeli efforts to fight them.
Even more ridiculously, Power’s ultimate aim is to send a massive American or Western force into Israel to stop what Power apparently sees as an Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. She specifically states that the force has to be "massive", not like a Srebrenica- or Bosnia-sized force. Why would it need to be so large? In order to neutralize the Israeli Defense Force, and protect the forces of Fatah and Hamas.