Obama Sent to War by Three Women

The Clinton administration found an Amazon warrior in Madeleine Albright — a lady hawk, a Valkyrie, a Durga (Hindu goddess). After she was appointed U.S. ambassador to the U.N., she was rumored to have said to General Colin Powell, who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Her words on this and on other occasions were an open and firm testimony of her support for a military intervention by NATO in former Yugoslavia, which finally took place in the spring of 1999. In a very strange twist of fate, Albright was the first woman in United States history to become the head of diplomacy when she was appointed Secretary of State.

In the Bush administration, the attributes we mentioned in the case of Madeleine Albright can apply to Condoleezza Rice. It is indeed well known that, during her time as National Security Adviser, she pushed for the invasion of Iraq of March 2003, together with President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Later on (in January 2005), Rice also became Secretary of State. She was the second woman and the first African-American woman to hold this position in the U.S.

Barack Obama, the first African-American person elected to the White House, also found himself in a position similar to Clinton’s and Bush’s — except that, in his case, the media mentions three such lady hawks. While commenting on the topic, Maureen Dowd, a famous columnist for the New York Times, was very pleased to find that it was the women in President Obama’s close entourage who persuaded the head of the White House to opt for the military intervention in Libya. In fact, Dowd also published a very engaging article on this topic. “There is something positively mythological about a group of strong women swooping down to shake the president out of his delicate sensibilities and show him the way to war,” she wrote.

It is strange, to say the least, to see the female diplomats as hawks and the military as doves, but that is what happened in the White House when the U.S. decided to join the coalition formed by France in order to launch a military intervention against Gadhafi. The three Amazon warriors, lady hawks, Valkyries or Durgas are the following: Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and former adviser on Africa to President Bill Clinton; Samantha Power, former member of the national security team and author of a book on the genocide in Bosnia; and Hillary Clinton, who succeeded Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice in the Department of State. Some sources also mention Gayle Smith, another national security specialist who also acted as one of President Clinton’s advisers on Africa after the massacres in Rwanda.

It is interesting to point out that Obama had repeatedly stated that he would not be easily persuaded to become involved, not even in launching limited air attacks on Libya. As we all know, Obama harshly criticized Bush’s involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and was eager to denounce the negative consequences of these wars during the electoral campaign. That was the reason why he did not believe that it would bode well to open a new front, which would have been the third in a Muslim country and the second in an Arab country, when his actions in the White House were so much directed at extricating the U.S. from the other two war zones. Obama kept repeating that it seemed unreasonable from a military standpoint, that it would not be popular with voters (we should not forget that this is a pre-election year and that Obama wants a new term in the White House), as well as counterproductive at a time when he intended to reopen the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Nevertheless, Rice, Power and Clinton, the three Amazon warriors, succeeded where Sarkozy, in spite of his phone calls, and British Prime Minister David Cameron failed. T.V. channels worldwide showed Rice with her hand raised high toward the ceiling of the Security Council room as she voted on Resolution 1973 authorizing the bombardment of Libya. Did Susan Rice, 47, want to make up for the fact that, in 1994, she failed to convince President Bill Clinton to take further actions in order to stop the massacre in Rwanda, and 500,000-800,000 died?

Samantha Power, 41, has an interesting background as a journalist. From 1993 to 1996, she was the special correspondent of the Boston Globe to former Yugoslavia, and covered the massive failure of the Blue Berets, who were unable to prevent the brutal attacks by Serbians, led by Ratko Mladić, against civilians in Bosnia. After the Srebrenica massacre of July 1996, she wrote a book that received the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. She is currently part of Obama’s team and a member of the National Security Council. Her position on Libya is clearly marked by her memory of the Srebrenica massacre.

However, no matter how influential Rice and Power might have been, they could not have persuaded Obama to enter the war in Libya unless they had Hillary Clinton on their side. Just like Obama, Hillary was said to have been reluctant to join the Libyan intervention at first, similarly to her husband in the case of Rwanda, but she changed her position two days before the vote in the Security Council. At a G8 meeting in Paris, she met one of the representatives of the Libyan rebels, as well as the Emir of Qatar and the envoys of several Arab countries, all of whom apparently pleaded the cause of the Libyan people and warned her about Gadhafi’s insanity. That night, she managed to persuade Obama to radically change his position and asked Ambassador Susan Rice to draft a tougher resolution for the Security Council, which included air attacks. Under these circumstances, there was talk in Washington about the fact that President Obama, a cerebral individual, chose passion and emotion (the human rights invoked by Samantha, Susan and Hillary) over reason and strategic thinking (promoted by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Tom Donilon, National Security adviser).

Maureen Dowd also wrote in her New York Times article that it would be interesting to draw a parallel between Obama and W. (Bush) regarding a possible attack on Iran. Presidential candidate Obama stated at the time: “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” Nonetheless, we saw both men deliberately start wars and make decisions that were based more on impetuosity and impulse than on discipline and rigor.