Great Throughts Treasury

"With deep regret, I am resigning from my role as an adviser the Obama campaign effective today. Last Monday, I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor and purpose of the Obama campaign. And I extend my deepest apologies to Senator Clinton, Senator Obama and the remarkable team I have worked with over these long 14 months"

"With Nuremberg going so far as to try European officials for crimes committed against their own citizens, future perpetrators of atrocities ? even those acting under explicit state authority ? could no longer be confident that their government or their borders would shelter them from trial."

"Zimbabweans are severely malnourished, and deaths from starvation occur even in the cities. The country has not yet suffered nationwide famine only because international donors have stepped in."

"Yet, despite the propitiousness of circumstance, mass atrocity was rarely met with reprisal. The reasons for this are numerous -- some familiar but many surprising. The most common justification for non-intervention is that, while leaving genocide alone threatens no vital American interests, suppressing it can threaten the lives of American soldiers. But this does not explain the American failure to condemn genocide or employ non-military sanction. Moreover, if it was so very obvious that the story ended there and that, by definition, "mere genocide" could not pass a Pentagon cost-benefit analysis, it is unlikely that Americans would be so vocal and persistent in their legal and moral commitments to prevent "another genocide." American leaders say they are simply respecting the wishes of the American people, who have elected them, first and foremost, to fulfill the American dream of equality and freedom for all at home. Though this claim conforms with our intuitions and with the mounting data that the American public is becoming ever more isolationist, it may be misleading. Polls taken during the Bosnian war indicated that, while most Americans opposed unilateral American intervention or the deployment of U.S. ground troops, two-thirds supported American participation in multilateral efforts -- flying in humanitarian air-drops or bombing Bosnian Serb positions. In the Iraqi case, likewise, a Gallup poll reported that 59 percent of Americans thought the coalition should have continued fighting until Hussein was overthrown and 57 percent supported shooting down Iraqi gunships targeting the Kurds."

"You know, there is a long tradition in the U.S. of promoting elections up to the point that you get an outcome you don't like. Look at Latin America in the Cold War."

"With so much confusion about the precise nature of the KR reign, apathy became justified by what journalist William Shawcross later called 'propaganda, the fear of propaganda and the excuse of propaganda.'"