Oh, You Mean I Had to Say "Genocide" After I Became President?

The sun rises in the east, spring follows winter, and a new American president is backing away from his campaign pledge to refer to the Ottoman-era Turkish genocide of Armenians as a "genocide," because the White House is "fearful of alienating Turkey when U.S. officials badly want its help." The L.A. Times has the expectations-lowering story.

Obama's campaign promise–his "principled commitment to commemorating" a "widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence"–is here. Obama foreign policy guru Samantha Power makes a direct plea to Armenian-Americans about genocide-recognition and other issues in this video:

I wrote about the fascinating politics of saying "genocide" for the L.A. Times in 2007.