[Peace-discuss] Humanitarian imperialism

[C. G. Estabrook]

[If you're US foreign policy planners named "Power" and "Slaughter," you may be 
disposed from that reason alone to recommend killing - "from the best possible 
motives." Or maybe it's simply female sympathy for (some) victims - that happens 
to serve US imperial interests...]

>From <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/weekinreview/06protect.html?_r=1&hp>:

...Mr. Obama has told his staff to study previous uprisings in Eastern Europe, 
the Middle East and Southeast Asia for lessons about how they unfolded and what 
role the United States played. He won’t lack for impassioned advice: Among his 
staff members is Samantha Power, a human-rights expert who won a Pulitzer Prize 
for a book chronicling American foreign-policy responses to genocide.

Former officials are also taking up the call. Anne-Marie Slaughter, who recently 
resigned as the State Department’s director of policy planning, said in a tweet: 
“The international community cannot stand by and watch the massacre of Libyan 
protesters. In Rwanda we watched. In Kosovo we acted.”

Ms. Slaughter, a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and 
International Affairs at Princeton, said winning support for a no-flight zone in 
the United Nations Security Council would be tricky, given Russian and Chinese 
resistance. Instead, she favors a request by a provisional government in Libya, 
endorsed by the African Union and the Arab League.

The trouble is figuring out who might make up such a government...