U.S. President Barack Obama?tapped Susan Rice, ambassador to the United Nations, to be the next national security advisor on June 5. [Photo/Xinhua]

President Obama's team has a new look following the designation of Susan Rice to succeed Tom Donilon as U.S. National Security Advisor and the nomination of Samantha Power to succeed Susan Rice as UN Ambassador. Both women are Obama confidants and appear to have captured the imagination of the U.S. media. The New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd has variously described them as the Amazon Warriors of Greek mythology, Lady Hawks, the Valkyries of Norse mythology, and the Durgas, Hindu Goddesses with multiple arms carrying weapons and riding lions. All of these are fierce female warriors, so is Obama making a foreign policy statement?

This has not been an overnight transition, however. In an article in the New York Times, Dowd wrote: "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." That was more than two years ago. And the war was to topple Qaddafi.

There is no question that both Rice and Power are aggressive liberal interventionists. When Rice served as Clinton's director for international organizations and peacekeeping during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, she was emotionally seared by America's inaction. She declared: "I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required."

The Obama administration has consistently accused Bashar al-Assad's government of killing its own people. It is dragging its feet in offering lethal aid to the Syrian rebels because their fighting is primarily done by Al Qaeda affiliates. Will Rice urge Obama to intervene more aggressively in Syria? Rice, Power and Secretary of State Kerry are all predisposed toward offering more support to the Syrian rebels. But "humanitarian intervention" is often an excuse for imperialist aggression. The real reason why the United States wants to oust al-Assad is to deprive Iran and Russia of their important ally and dominate the Middle East. Humanitarian intervention only serves as a cover.

Clinton bombed Kosovo also on the pretext of humanitarian intervention. The bombing killed more innocent civilians than "legitimate targets" and the true purpose of the action was to deprive Russia of its last ally in Europe, Serbia.

These and other examples of U.S. "humanitarian intervention" require us to take this pretext for action with a large grain of salt.

Samantha Power was a senior advisor to then Senator Barack Obama until March 2008, when she was forced to resign from his presidential campaign after calling Obama's presidential rival Hillary Clinton a "monster."

From 1998 to 2002, she served as the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where she later served as the Anna Lindh Professor of Global Leadership and Public Policy.

She also wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," so she is another strong humanitarian interventionist. Obama, on nominating her UN Ambassador, said: "[She is] one of our foremost thinkers on foreign policy. She showed us that the international community has a moral responsibility and a profound interest in resolving conflict and defending human dignity."

Really? Power is to serve as UN Ambassador subject to senate approval. The famously intemperate Power has written extensively on the limits and failures of the UN. What does she propose to do about it? She told a Harvard audience in 2004 that the UN was as marred by international distrust and suspicion as the U.S., making it difficult to sanction international relief and intervention in humanitarian disasters. She said: "The guardian of international law legitimacy is itself seen to be something of a relic." What is needed, she argued, is a reinvestment in the UN. This would once again make the UN a body through which the U.S. expresses foreign policy in order to start "restoring the legitimacy of U.S. power."

The implications of this, surely, are clear to all.

The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

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