Pundits either have poor memories or they don’t understand how to draw proper parallels. How did the threat of ground invasion topple Milosevic? It didn’t. It may have caused him to withdraw from Kosovo, but even if this threat played an outside role in his decision, he certainly didn’t step down for more than a year—and only then when he lost an election. So even if the parallel was valid, all we could conclude is that the threat of ground troops would guarantee that Qaddafi agree to partitioning his country. If that’s what Mr. Hirsh means, well then let’s talk about that—is it worth potentially putting our soldiers’ lives on the line to partition a north African country.

The way this reasoning is both muddled and ahistorical… you really can’t get a more textbook example of mission creep if you tried.

The latest issue of The National Interest features a somewhat strangely disjointed profile of Samantha Power.

Two highlights. First, a personality trait worth noting:

She produces a morality play rather than a conventional history. In a sense, Power, you could argue, is addicted to hero worship, beginning with Raphael Lemkin and ending with Obama. In fact, in her acknowledgments, she observes that she offered “whatever help I could to Barack Obama, the person whose rigor and compassion bear the closest resemblance to Sergio’s that I have ever seen.”

Second: Did you know that a young Walter Lippmann drafted Wilson’s 14 Points? That explains a whole lot.