Having written favorably during the campaign about Obama foreign policy adviser Susan Rice, I wanted to express my delight over her appointment as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Just as John Bolton represented the worst that America had to offer the organization, Rice represents the best.
John Nichols of The Nation says otherwise and is bashing Rice already — this from a man who lionized George Galloway in 2005, and praised the insufferable hippie ramblings of Alice Walker more recently.
Jeremy Scahill echoes Nichols’s critique and adds something of his own:
Rice has also been hawkish on Darfur, calling for “strik[ing] Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets”.
Wow, to suggest the international community should shield Darfur civilians from the Sudanese military — how very monstrous.
Look, of course there are vigorous debates about the merits and pitfalls of intervention. If Rice’s position on Darfur is flawed, we should be willing to listen to people who can explain why. But one can only laugh at this statement from Scahill, who believes the wrongness of striking Sudanese military targets is completely self-evident, requiring no elaboration whatsoever, prima facie evidence of Susan Rice’s moral unfitness.
Scahill authored a book on Blackwater, and bravo to him for shedding light on military privatization and that whole sorry story. But Susan Rice knows more about Africa than Scahill would likely know in three lifetimes.
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