"Getting through these dark times"
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Foreign policy whiz Samantha Power sheds light on a legendary diplomat killed in Iraq, advising Barack Obama and how America can emerge from the Bush era."
Feb. 18, 2008 |
In 2003, Samantha Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her book "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," in which she chronicled the United States' responses to the major genocides of the 20th century. But that's just one of her accomplishments. Power, 37, is a Harvard professor and founder of that university's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She is a prominent voice on stopping the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, and addressing numerous trouble spots around the world...
...Beneath her sense of humor is a fierce idealism and dedication to improving world affairs. Now, Power is immersed in what she considers the toughest challenge yet in her action-packed career: serving as a senior foreign policy advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
The demands of that job have only risen since she first began working for Obama when he joined the U.S. Senate in 2005. But Power also found time to produce another book, published last week: "Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World." The new volume is a biography of the revered United Nations envoy -- once described as a cross between Bobby Kennedy and James Bond -- who was killed in the catastrophic bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad by insurgents during the early stages of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The book is also a treatise on why the world needs the U.N., and the lessons Vieira de Mello learned throughout his career, now more than ever.
...During Vieira de Mello's career with the U.N., as Power details, he met with members of the Khmer Rouge and Serbian genocidaires, his attempts to broker peace with the latter earning him the nickname "Serbio." Power says she sees a strong synergy between Vieira de Mello's principles and Obama's concept of foreign policy -- with their emphasis on justice, human rights, security and, perhaps most controversially, direct diplomatic engagement with foreign adversaries.
...[Salon Q:] How did you end up working for Sen. Obama?
[Samantha Power A:] His office called me when he began serving in the U.S. Senate in early 2005. He had just read "A Problem From Hell" and wanted to meet to discuss fixing American foreign policy. I thought, "Well that's interesting -- clearly he's in some other league." I mean, who spends Christmas reading a dark book on genocide? No other politician had ever contacted me to discuss it.
We were supposed to meet for only an hour but ended up meeting for three or four hours at a steakhouse. Suddenly it was almost midnight and I heard myself saying to him, "Why don't I just quit my job at Harvard and work in your office for a year or whatever?" I didn't even know what I was proposing, but he said, "Great."
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In light of all the questioning of Obama's "experience," you've said he has dirt under his fingernails, and that he would bring a new America to the world. How would he do that?
The idea that he doesn't have experience is nuts to me. He's a constitutional law professor. I happen to miss the Constitution; I thought it was a good document. That's a huge component of being a president when you're combating terrorism and you're trying to restore American values.
The fact that he used to work in the inner city, that's the dirt under his fingernails. If people are an abstraction to you, it's going to show. If you're living with people, if you're working in the inner city, you see the human stakes of it all. He's also worked abroad, so he's comfortable crossing boundaries.
You've said that the Bush administration has diminished the U.S. government's credibility among its own citizens. Can the next president fix that?
I don't think the next president can just show up and have it restored. Whoever wins is probably going to win by a narrow margin. One of the reasons Obama is so appealing to me is that he doesn't take the American people for granted; you don't stop having this conversation when you enter the White House. None of the major foreign policy challenges on the horizon can be tackled if we don't have a thick domestic base. We can't do foreign aid, we can't get out of Iraq, succeed in Afghanistan, close Guantánamo and end torture policy without actually talking to people about the costs of that.
...You've talked about what a great teacher Vieira de Mello is. What has he taught you?
I think Sergio makes me see dignity. His great line, and actually my favorite line in the whole book, is, "Fear is a bad adviser." I love that. It's so simple. And then that humility and curiosity are very important -- but also a sense of fallibility without paralysis.
I think Obama has all those things in spades. I like to think that as I get older I'm getting better at spending time with people who have qualities that make them worth spending time with. My decision to leave Harvard and go work on foreign policy, in the minority party in the U.S. Senate at that time, it was a terrible year. Obama was great, but you couldn't get anything done. It was the worst year of my professional life, but it was the education of Samantha Power. You spend time with Obama and you learn things. And hopefully I could bring a little bit of what I learned from Sergio to him as well.
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