Might R2P also be invoked by Israel’s enemies to target the Jewish State in its war of national survival against the Palestinians? This has already become a reality. Michael Rubin, writing at Commentary Contentions, reports that the Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arnç said last week, “We wish that the United Nations had made such resolutions and countries had taken action in the face of incidents in Gaza, Palestine and the other regions.”
Does this explain the surprising decision of the Arab League to allow for R2P to be invoked for Libyan intervention? Recall that the Arab League, the African Union, and numerous other regional developing world organizations originally opposed the concept of R2P. Could the prospect of a UN intervention in Gaza have encouraged the Arab League to back the Libyan adventure?
Even if it didn’t, you can rest assured that the next time Israel feels compelled to defend itself by going into Gaza and taking out terrorists who are attacking it, the League will be crying out for an international response to the “atrocities.” It will contend that Israel is not living up to its “responsibilities” to protect Palestinians. Such an argument will convince many — especially those who are predisposed to hate Israel in the first place. The US will then be in the unenviable position of being forced to veto such action in the Security Council, opening itself up to charges of hypocrisy.
Would we veto such a resolution? With NSC adviser Samantha Power‘s influence on Obama, it is highly questionable. Power is an avid R2P advocate; her 2002 book on the issue, A Problem from Hell, so affected Obama that he invited Power to join his Senate staff as a foreign policy fellow. She also briefly served on his campaign foreign-policy brain trust.
Power is also credited with influencing the president to adopt R2P as part of his foreign policy. But it is her views on Israel that should concern us most of all. She has a long record of antipathy toward the Jewish State. In a widely scrutinized interview with UC Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies, Power said that “a mammoth protection force” through an “external intervention” were “required” to impose a settlement between Israelis and the Palestinians. Her rather rambling and convoluted statement on the conflict clearly accused Israel of human rights violations, which warranted (R2P) intervention in the same way that the Rwandan genocide did. Such an action “might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import” and would involve sacrificing billions the U.S. spends “servicing” the Israeli military to “invest” in a Palestinian state. Clearly, Power is someone who would readily impose a R2P solution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But with her anti-Israeli disposition so apparent, one shudders to think what this would actually look like.
Other advocates of the R2P doctrine include numerous Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), which promote it for ideological reasons and also because of UN grants and funding. The International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect brings together many of these NGOs under one umbrella, where they can be more effective in both lobbying the UN and shaking the international money tree. The list of members is a Who’s Who of internationalists, one worlders, and leftist Utopians, including Oxfam, Citizens for Global Solutions, the International Crisis Group, the World Federalist Movement, Human Rights Watch, and The Stanley Foundation.
What all those groups have in common is a desire to destroy or vastly curtail the sovereignty of nations. And rising above all of them as chief financier and inspiration are George Soros and his Open Society Institute.
There is little doubt that Soros recognized early the kind of power that a vast, worldwide movement could exert and bring him closer to his dream of radically changing the scope of national sovereignty, thus allowing for a new economic and financial system to take hold. He calls himself a “stateless statesman,” which is a good description of how he wants the rest of us to live.
In addition to being the primary funder of The Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect, the Open Society Institute also heavily supports other NGOs that belong to the R2P coalition, including the International Crisis Group (ICG)and Human Rights Watch.
You don’t have to connect too many dots to discover Soros’ influence on the Obama administration. Samantha Power served on the executive committee of the ICG along with Soros until she left for the UN in 2009. And several members of the Obama foreign policy team were employed by the Center for American Progress – another Soros funded think tank.
The future of R2P is now. The situation in the small African country of Côte d’Ivoire is spiraling out of control and headed for civil war with the potential for atrocities and mass civilian casualties. Several nations, including the African Union and NGOs involved in the R2P movement, are already calling for military intervention, while the UN has expressed its “alarm” at the deteriorating situation.
Meanwhile, Bashar Assad is killing demonstrators in the streets of Syria, and the world does nothing. Clearly, R2P needs a little fine tuning. The ICISS and UN panel on R2P both advanced the notion of “thresholds” that would have to be crossed before action was contemplated, but the UN has yet to adopt any hard and fast rules about intervention.
Until they do, the Security Council will be fumbling in the dark, confused and hesitant to proceed. But the real danger will come if they ever do get their act together and begin to intervene in the world’s trouble spots in earnest. Given R2P’s broad mandate, which includes “starvation and disease” as responsibilities of member states, the list of countries that would be ripe for intervention is growing considerably. For the proponents of R2P, this is not accidental.
Rick Moran is blog editor of The American Thinker, and Chicago editor of PJ Media. His personal blog is Right Wing Nuthouse.
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