Samantha Power
The foreign policy expert on rethinking Iraq, suicide bombers, and Clinton vs. Obama
Even if you’re unfamiliar with Samantha Power, you’ve probably already made up your mind about her. That she serves as a top foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama is supposed to say something about his presidential candidacy: To detractors, Power is an idealist lacking hands-on diplomatic or political experience (ring a bell?), while backers are heartened that a known human rights champion – one who cut her teeth as a war correspondent in the Balkans, founded Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and wrote one of the most influential foreign policy books of this decade, the Pulitzer-winning A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide – would, to use an Obama-ism, be given a seat at the presidential table.
“I haven’t eaten in a day and a half,” she says doggedly, pausing to order a sandwich mid-interview. As she juggled campaign responsibilities and prepared to fly out to L.A. for a February 27 appearance here in support of Chasing the Flame, her new biography of the late U.N. diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, a behind-schedule yet seemingly unflappable Power carved out time to discuss U.S. foreign policy with CityBeat.
–Alfred Lee
CityBeat: How was Sergio Vieira de Mello, the subject of your new book, in some ways the defining figure of the last several decades of foreign policy?
Samantha Power: Well, this is a person who, for 34 years, basically worked no place except violent places and broken places, and moved with the headlines. In the 1970s, the big issues of the day were wars of decolonization and independence, and of course he was posted to Bangladesh, then to Sudan, then to Cyprus, then to Mozambique. In ’81, when Hezbollah blew up the U.S. embassy in the first-ever suicide attack, he was there for that. In ’89, he’s the person who has to negotiate with the Khmer Rouge in order to figure out what to do with Cambodian refugees. Then, in the ’90s, the big issues are ethnic violence, sectarian violence, and he’s the person sent to Bosnia, to Rwanda, to Congo. Then, in the late ’90s, nation building is the issue of the day, and he’s the person who runs Kosovo and East Timor, all of course culminating in his deployment to Iraq, and the fact that he became the victim of the first-ever suicide bomber there. He saw in these broken places insights about how states needed to behave, how governments needed to respond to the world’s worst crises. So, at a time today when we as a country are groping to figure out how to deal with global challenges, how to deal with violent places, to me there’s just no better guide.
In your discussion of Sergio and whatever lessons we can draw from his life, you’ve honed in on this theme of dignity. How does one go from a concept of dignity to a policy of dignity?
First, I wouldn’t shortchange the importance of simply bringing dignity into the room as an idea. In other words, I don’t know that you can build an entire statecraft around dignity, but I think attention to dignity can be a constraint on condescension, on arrogance, on humiliation, on things that too often mark the behavior of governments in conjunction with vulnerable people. When you promote democracy, one can do it in a way that isn’t an affront to people’s dignity. You can give humanitarian aid, but if you remember that people who are living in refugee camps are not living lives they want to live, aren’t living dignified lives, that’s very important. But also, from a strategic perspective, we’re not making as much progress as we could be simply with a greater attention to respecting individuals, respecting other cultures, other models, etcetera. That doesn’t mean deferring to them, it doesn’t mean cultural relativism, or anything like that, it is simply that as we formulate our policies, if we could just sort of remember that there are individuals at stake, that the “human” in human rights is not an abstraction.
This fits into how you see how the U.S. should be dealing with Iraq, moving forward.
My view of any debate about withdrawal is to put Iraqis at the center of our thinking in a way that we who have opposed the war sometimes have not done, and certainly in a way that the administration has rarely done, and what that means in practice is a massive refugee assistance package to countries like Syria, that have taken a million refugees, Jordan, Lebanon, that all have very delicate demographic balancing acts to perform. Most of their borders are completely closed now and Iraqis are trapped. It would entail more attention to war crimes and crimes against humanity in an effort to pull together a list of people who are the most responsible, the leaders of the militia who are doing great harm throughout Iraq, and at least making it more difficult for them to travel and buy weapons and do arms deals. And it would entail giving fair notice to Iraqi civilians about when and how we’re leaving and putting them at the center again of our planning, such that if they want to move from mixed sectarian neighborhoods to homogeneous ones, as tragic as that is, maybe there would be a way that we can facilitate that movement.
Are you a supporter of immediately beginning to withdraw troops?
Yeah. Yeah, I am.
In a July 2007 piece for The New York Times, you explain that conducting proper counterinsurgency by the book, by Petraeus’s counterinsurgency field manual, would take greater military risk, forces and even civilian leadership and support.
There’s not meant to be anything in the piece that suggests staying in Iraq indefinitely in pursuit of the counterinsurgency plan. Part of the recovery of American national security, and frankly the recovery of the U.S. military, which is at its severe bending point if not its breaking point now, is getting out of Iraq and restoring our leadership as best we can, replenishing our armed services, and, as you suggested, bringing civilian expertise into the enterprise of stabilizing failing states, under-governed states, and so forth. So I think you can agree with Petraeus that the civilian capacity of the U.S. government has to be built way up, but not agree with the president’s belief that the Iraq war can be won in the current course. Part of making it clear that we’re leaving is also trying to send a signal to try to expedite political progress in Iraq, but I don’t think you take the counterinsurgency manual and say, “OK, everywhere we’re doing counterinsurgency, let’s continue to do it, and do it this way.”
How would an Obama administration’s foreign policies differ from those of a Clinton administration?
In Washington, there are certain things that are “not done.” One of the things that is “not done” is for a person like Barack Obama in 2002, who has a bright future ahead of him, to stand up and oppose a war that was nationally very popular. I think that’s predictive, not just that he had the judgment to get Iraq right, but that he did it in a way that shows he doesn’t focus-group his way through. Last year as well, he was willing to come out and say that we’re giving Musharraf a billion dollars of unconditional aid, and it’s time to ask what that aid is being spent on. He spoke out on Cuba long before Castro’s resignation – he said that we’ve got to open this, we’ve got to allow family remittances, family travel. He’s said, “I’m willing to sit down with any dictator, and I don’t believe I have to check my principles at the door when I do.” He has taken on an awful lot of the shibboleths of Washington, many of which were devised in earlier times, in very different times, and I think what you have in Obama is someone prepared to live and make judgments in a 21st century world, to adjust to the erosion of U.S. influence in the hopes of restoring it, to understand the rise of China, and to understand the degree to which we need global cooperation for dealing with these global threats. A lot of people say these things, but the advantage of being unbeholden either to general lobbyists or to Washington thinking and to Washington habits is that you can think freshly about the world that you inherit as president. That’s really rare.
Published: 03/05/2008
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