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AniCIC 3. 
The Washington Post 
Time to up the ante on Egypt 
David Ignatius 
April 19 -- Samuel Johnson famously observed that the prospect of 
hanging concentrates the mind. The same could be said about 
America's current budget crisis: It should force some hard decisions 
about foreign policy priorities — so that we spend more to support 
the democratic revolution in Egypt and less to seek a military 
solution in Afghanistan. 
Today, the United States is allocating about $110 billion annually for 
the Afghan war, about $3.2 billion for military and economic aid to 
Pakistan, and about $150 million in special assistance to help Egypt's 
democratic revolution. In terms of U.S. national interests, those 
spending levels don't make sense. The pyramid is upside down. 
President Obama should seize this budget-crisis moment of to change 
national security spending for the next fiscal year. The rationale for 
the shower of cash in Afghanistan is to prevent future attacks by al-
Qaeda. But, frankly, a successful, democratic Egypt will be a more 
potent counter to the spread of Islamic terrorism than a stable 
Afghanistan. And a prosperous, democratic Pakistan would be the 
best safeguard of all. 
This is not an argument for pulling the plug in Afghanistan, 
especially at the start of this year's "fighting season." The United 
States should stick to its broad timetable for transferring 
responsibility to the Afghans in 2014. But we should spend less, 
going forward, as we move along the exit ramp. This will mean a 
smaller military footprint, more use of paramilitary forces and more 
emphasis on diplomacy. 
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The time is right for this pivot. Recent weeks have brought new 
outreach to the Taliban. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Feb. 18 
announced a "diplomatic surge" and subtly shifted what had been 
preconditions for Afghan peace talks so that they were instead 
"necessary outcomes." And she hired Marc Grossman, a veteran 
diplomat who strongly favors negotiation with the Taliban, as her 
new Afghanistan representative. The quiet, low-key Grossman may 
have better luck facilitating this process than did his high-voltage 
predecessor, the late Richard Holbrooke. 
There's new momentum from Afghanistan and Pakistan as well. 
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani visited Kabul last 
weekend to meet with President Hamid Karzai. They upgraded plans 
for a "joint peace commission" that, crucially, will include Gen. 
Ashfaq Kayani and Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the chiefs of 
Pakistan's army and intelligence agency, respectively, who 
accompanied Gillani to Kabul. The message is that Pakistan wants to 
help broker a peace deal, now. 
Another push for the Af-Pak peace train is coming from Britain, 
which also wants a prompt start for negotiations. The British are 
working several possible contacts with the Taliban and are circulating 
a plan that they are calling, in classic Anglo-speak, a "non-paper." 
The awkward question, of course, is whether the Taliban are ready to 
play. Some intermediaries have been saying yes, but Grossman wants 
more clarity about who's on the other side. The U.S. wants a Taliban 
representative who can make decisions, who is connected with 
Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, and who will work toward a 
settlement that would include America's three "outcomes" of 
renouncing al-Qaeda, halting violence and respecting the Afghan 
constitution. Grossman hasn't yet found such a negotiating partner, 
but he's looking — with British, Afghan and Pakistani help. 
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Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Kabul, favors 
negotiations in principle, but wants more time to squeeze the Taliban 
for leverage. Petraeus has supported the recent negotiating feelers. In 
the meantime, he's hoping to disarm enough low-level Taliban 
fighters that Omar will have trouble fielding a robust insurgency. 
Petraeus surely won't win a military victory before he is expected to 
hand off command this fall, but it's intriguing to ponder how he 
might oversee the coming phase, which may lean more on 
paramilitary forces, if he should become the next CIA director. The 
CIA will also remain the key point of contact with Pakistan, which is 
the decisive battlefield for combating al-Qaeda. 
Which brings me back to support for Egypt's democratic revolution. 
Simply put, there is no greater priority for U.S. counterterrorism 
policy than helping the Tahrir Square revolutionaries build a strong 
new country that can lead the rest of the Arab and Islamic world 
toward a better, saner future. The Egyptians are going to need help, 
big-time, to repair their damaged economy and their demoralized 
police. 
America needs to put its money where its interests are. That's the 
unifying link between the Arab Spring and Af-Pak: The promise of 
the former must lead us to change our spending mix for the latter, and 
the time is now. 
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Anicic 4. 
The National Interest 
Samantha and Her Subjects 
Jacob Heilbrunn 
April 19, 2011 -- HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION—the 
conviction that American presidents must act, preemptively if 
necessary, to avert the massacre of innocents abroad—is steadily 
acquiring a new prominence in the Obama administration. For 
America's foreign-policy elite, it is a precept that provides a way to 
expiate the sins of the past, either bellicose action (Vietnam) or 
complacent inaction (Rwanda). It not only holds out the expectation 
of protecting endangered civilians but also the promise of acting 
multilaterally to uphold international laws. 
Yet the consequences of such intervention have rarely been more 
vexing. As the world's leading military power—it devotes more to 
defense than the next ten biggest-spending countries combined—
America finds itself lurching from conflict to conflict, often with 
little idea of how they will end, other than the hope that the forces of 
righteousness will prevail, even as Washington becomes 
progressively more enmeshed in local disputes. In its quixotic quest 
to create a global and irenic order by force, it is flouting 
Shakespeare's admonition that it is best to "fling away ambition: By 
that sin fell the angels." 
This is particularly so in the Middle East, where the Obama 
administration and, to a lesser degree, Europe face nothing less than a 
potential cataclysm of engagements, until the entire region is in 
tumult. The result is a self-reinforcing doctrine of permanent 
revolution. In creating, or abetting, chaotic conditions, it becomes 
necessary to intervene again and again, all in the name of averting 
further chaos. 
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These incursions embrace the idea—some more, some less—of 
humanitarian intervention. The conceit is that when America 
intervenes, it is not doing so on the basis of sordid national interests 
but, rather, on the grounds of self-evidently virtuous human rights or, 
in its most extreme case, to prevent genocide. This development—to 
call it a mere trend would be to trivialize its true import—has been a 
long time in the making. 
Indeed, in an essay published in The National Interest (now reprinted 
in The Neoconservative Persuasion), Irving Kristol contended that 
human rights had become a kind of unquestioned ideology. Kristol 
traced its origins back to the debates between William Gladstone and 
Benjamin Disraeli over intervention in the Balkans, when the Turks 
massacred some twelve thousand Bulgarians. The realist Disraeli, 
who sought to check Russia, was unmoved by Gladstone's 
humanitarian appeals to endorse self-determination for the Balkan 
states. But perhaps an even earlier instance came in the lead-up to 
British involvement in the Crimean War, revolving as it did around 
the "Eastern Question"; the Turks and Russians could fight it out for 
influence in the Mediterranean—and the French could get in their 
squabble over Catholics, without much bother to the Brits. As liberal 
politician John Bright argued on March 31, 1854, in his great speech 
to Parliament against squandering power in foolish adventures 
abroad: 
How are the interests of England involved in this question? . . . it is 
not on a question of sympathy that I dare involve this country, or any 
country, in a war which must cost an incalculable amount of treasure 
and of blood. It is not my duty to make this country the knight-errant 
of the human race, and to take upon herself the protection of the 
thousand millions of human beings who have been permitted by the 
Creator of all things to people this planet. 
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Transforming the United States into a knight-errant, though, is at the 
heart of liberal internationalism. As in nineteenth-century Britain, so 
in modern America; just as with Gladstone, the current manifestation 
of this impulse first became apparent in the Balkans, when NATO 
established a no-fly zone there, during the bombings of 1995. And so 
a new generation of liberal hawks emerged, overcoming the 
discomfiture associated with the use of force in Vietnam, seeing 
themselves as divine intervenors for mistreated ethnic minorities 
abroad. It amounted, in some ways, to a multicultural foreign policy, 
or at least one that sees America as key to creating a new democratic 
order. Madeleine Albright, for example, announced during the 
Clinton administration, "If we have to use force, it is because we are 
America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see 
further than other countries into the future." 
The hubris of ascribing a unique percipience to the United States was 
hardly confined to Albright. It also amounted a fortiori to the credo of 
the George W. Bush administration, which witnessed a fusion of 
neoconservatives and liberal hawks. "Damn the doves," Christopher 
Hitchens announced in the conservative London Spectator in 2001 as 
the United States readied to topple Saddam Hussein. While in 
Dissent, Michael Walzer declared that the Left was being "stupid, 
overwrought, grossly inaccurate" and should accept America's 
imperial status, modeling any opposition to the Iraq invasion on the 
Little Englanders during the Boer War. 
Then, as the insurgency developed, the alliance melted away. A 
notable defector was Peter Beinart, who first wrote a book calling for 
a nationalistic Democratic Party, then issued a second one taking it 
all back. 
Now the alliance between liberal hawks and neocons is returning, 
epitomized in an open letter sent to the White House in February 
2011 by the Foreign Policy Initiative (successor to the Project for the 
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New American Century), demanding that President Obama act to 
avoid a humanitarian disaster in Libya. Signed by Paul Wolfowitz 
and William Kristol as well as Martin Peretz and Leon Wieseltier, the 
old gang was back together again. Robert Kagan declared Obama's 
speech on Libya to be "Kennedy-esque," the ultimate term of neocon 
approbation. Intellectuals as a class have become habituated to 
demanding military action to make up for America's failure to 
prevent various atrocities and genocides. As David Rieff observed 
with vexation: 
This war—let us call it by its right name, for once—will be 
remembered to a considerable extent as a war made by intellectuals, 
and cheered on by intellectuals. The main difference this time is that, 
particularly in the United States, these intellectuals largely come from 
the liberal rather than the conservative side. 
No doubt the Obama team was itself torn on the issue of intervention. 
It entered office emphasizing realist tenets. Now it is jettisoning 
them. The intellectual incoherence of the White House was 
epitomized by a statement from Deputy National Security Adviser 
Ben Rhodes: 
What we are doing is enforcing a resolution that has a very clear set 
of goals, which is protecting the Libyan people, averting a 
humanitarian crisis, and setting up a no-fly zone. Obviously that 
involves kinetic military action, particularly on the front end. 
But Washington is not "getting into an open-ended war, a land 
invasion in Libya." 
The plan, however, seems to be for America to act as an arsenal of 
freedom rather than to promote its own domestic welfare. Today this 
Wilsonian doctrine is sold as a form of atonement for past 
wrongdoings—that, unless we intervene decisively in what is often a 
civil war to tip the balance of the scales to one side, America will 
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once again have blood on its hands. Never again, in other words, will 
become ever again. 
IT WOULD be hard to think of a more ardent promoter of this 
doctrine than Samantha Power. Power is not just an advocate for 
human rights. She is an outspoken crusader against genocide. She has 
referred self-deprecatingly to herself as the "genocide chick." She has 
made it her life's mission to shame American statesmen into action 
and to transform U.S. foreign policy. And as she seeks to create a 
new paradigm, she is becoming a paradigmatic figure. She is a 
testament to the collapse of the old foreign-policy establishment and 
the rise of a fresh elite. This elite is united by a shared belief that 
American foreign policy must be fundamentally transformed from an 
obsession with national interests into a broader agenda that seeks 
justice for women and minorities, and promotes democracy whenever 
and wherever it can—at the point of a cruise missile if necessary. The 
same century-long progressive expansion of the democratic franchise 
that has taken place at home is also supposed to occur abroad. She is, 
you could say, the prophet armed. 
Along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador 
Susan Rice, Power has become closely—and publicly—identified as 
one of the advisers most responsible for pushing Obama to intervene 
in Libya. It is a stunning turnabout. Power served then-Senator 
Obama as a top aide on foreign policy, taking a leave of absence from 
the Kennedy School at Harvard. But during the presidential 
campaign, Power announced that Hillary Clinton (not yet in Barack's 
employ), who had been relentlessly bashing her boss, was a 
"monster." A furor erupted. Power resigned. Her career with Obama 
was over. 
Only it wasn't. The late diplomat Richard Holbrooke, a close friend, 
called her "mesmerizing." Once Obama was elected, she landed a 
post as a senior adviser on the National Security Council, where she 
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29 
has become an increasingly influential and distinctive voice. Her rise 
there is even more astonishing given that National Security Adviser 
Tom Donilon was a deputy to Warren Christopher in the Clinton 
administration—and Power bitterly assailed that secretary of state for 
his dithering over Bosnia. 
Power, unlike many liberal hawks, was an opponent of the Iraq War. 
When I hosted a panel with her in 2004 at UCLA that included 
journalist James Mann and scholar Chalmers Johnson, I asked how 
she was able to reconcile her espousal of humanitarian intervention 
with failing to put a stop to Saddam Hussein's depredations. Her 
response? The Bush administration was not acting multilaterally and 
Saddam's actions, at that point, didn't meet the definition of genocide 
even if they had in the past. It is an answer that I never found fully 
satisfactory, at least for someone who was otherwise championing the 
cause of stopping mad and bad dictators around the world. 
Indeed, absent Power, Obama may not have intervened in Libya. 
Obama now uses arguments to justify the intervention that are 
somewhat redolent of Bush's about Iraq. Power has almost single-
handedly revived the alliance between liberal hawks and neocons; as 
one of the chief promoters of the Iraq War, Fouad Ajami, declared in 
the Wall Street Journal: 
In Bosnia, as in Libya a generation later, the standard-bearer of 
American power had a stark choice: It was either rescue or calamity. 
Benghazi would have been Barack Obama's Srebrenica, the town that 
the powers had left to the mercy of [General] Ratko Mladic. 
An icon among the human-rights lobby, she has made it her personal 
crusade to ensure that American presidents act decisively to forestall, 
impede or halt the murder of civilians abroad. When President 
Obama gave his speech at the National Defense University in March, 
he explained military action in Libya protected the innocent; he was 
channeling Power: 
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To lend some perspective on how rapidly this military and diplomatic 
response came together, when people were being brutalized in Bosnia 
in the 1990s, it took the international community more than a year to 
intervene with air power to protect civilians. 
In fact, a few hours before Obama's speech, Power herself told an 
audience at Columbia University, in words that anticipated Obama's, 
that "in the Balkans it took three years for the international 
community to use air power to prevent heavy weapons from firing on 
civilians. In Libya it took a little more than a month." 
The invocation of Bosnia was not adventitious. It has become the 
siren song of liberal interventionists. Part of the legend of Power is 
her first mission to Bosnia, where she filed reports for the Boston 
Globe and other publications about Serbian belligerence and Western 
inaction. Power became the anti—Rebecca West—where West 
lionized the Serbs standing up to fascism in the 1930s in her book 
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Power became a heroine chastising 
America and Europe for their lassitude in confronting contemporary 
fascist impulses from West's former freedom fighters. This was, at 
bottom, a new Spanish Civil War for Power and her cohort—a 
chance to choose sides, to experience good and evil, not vicariously 
but up close, and to denounce it. It is important to remember that 
when Power traveled to Bosnia, she frequently met with and 
chastised government officials, including Ambassador Peter 
Galbraith, for not doing more against Serbian iniquities (a favor he 
returned as Obama hesitated about intervention in Libya). Not for her 
the Weberian Wertfreiheit, or objectivity, that American newspapers 
inculcate. Power epitomizes an older model—the crusading 
journalist. 
BUT POWER'S journalistic triumphs were a dress rehearsal for her 
next career as a professor and author of "A Problem From Hell": 
America and the Age of Genocide, which won a Pulitzer Prize. 
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It is a bold effort. Stylishly written, packed with vignettes and sharp 
portraits, it essentially rewrites much of twentieth-century American 
history in the shadow of genocide. She observes that, again and 
again, Western powers looked away from massacre. The problem, 
she famously declared, wasn't that America's policy failed. It was 
that it worked. Reticence about protesting mass murder was a 
constituent part of America's hard-nosed, realist approach to foreign 
affairs. What is missing from Power's work, however, is a political 
context. There seems to be the assumption that Washington can 
always be on the right side of history—that American presidents can 
ignore domestic and international considerations simply to plunge 
into conflicts on the side of the beleaguered whenever they feel like 
it. 
It is also notable that Power, in her extended case studies of genocide, 
ignores some of the biggest examples of the past century. There is no 
mention of Stalin's man-made Ukrainian famine. There is no mention 
of Mao's Cultural Revolution, which killed tens of millions. 
Perhaps this is because these cases don't quite fit with her theory that 
the American government's deliberate indifference has invariably 
been key in the failure to stop mass deaths. Rather, many on the 
American and British left were bedazzled by what they saw as 
Communist dictatorships greatly leaping forward, whatever the 
human toll might be. It was active blindness on the part of these 
intellectuals, a shameful historical legacy that nothing can efface. As 
Saul Bellow once observed, "A great deal of intelligence can be 
invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." 
The true strength of Power's book is as a literary work, a ringing and 
idealistic call to arms. It does not merely recount. It instructs its 
reader what is to be done. Power's work begins with a bang—the 
1921 assassination in Berlin of Mehmed Talat, the former Turkish 
interior minister who presided over the massacre of Armenians. It 
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32 
was one of the few actions, as Power notes, taken to punish the 
Turks. Woodrow Wilson, eager to remain neutral in World War I, 
had resisted the calls of his ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, 
Henry Morgenthau, to protest the killings of Armenians. Power 
castigates Wilson for refusing to "declare war on or even break off 
relations with the Ottoman Empire." She would have taken America 
onto the European battlefields—and into the bloodbath—far earlier. 
In going to war against Germany, Wilson told Congress, "it seems to 
me that we should go only where immediate and practical 
considerations lead us and not heed any others." According to Power, 
"America's nonresponse to the Turkish horrors established patterns 
that would be repeated." 
What Power does not discuss is Wilson's conduct of the war, namely 
his decision to intervene after he had promised Americans he would 
not. If anything, Wilson, who promised the war to end wars, was 
wildly idealistic, anything but a hardened realist, someone who was 
bamboozled during the Paris peace negotiations by his French and 
British counterparts, the champion of the League of Nations, whose 
headquarters in Geneva became a testament to fecklessness during 
the 1930s. It seems peculiar to condemn Wilson for not having been 
idealistic enough. 
When it comes to World War II, Power has a far stronger case to 
make. The wartime Allies, confronted with the crime of the century, 
focused on battling Nazism rather than exposing its genocidal 
campaign against the Jews and other ethnic and religious minorities. 
Her hero is the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who invented 
the neologism "genocide." He was pivotal to the new United Nations' 
adoption of a convention declaring genocide a violation of 
international law, though America refused to sign it for four decades. 
Now it provides a basis for military intervention. 
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Which returns us to Bosnia yet again. Power does an excellent job of 
limning the reluctance of the George H. W. Bush administration to 
intervene. As then—Secretary of State James Baker famously put it, 
"We don't have a dog in this fight." Instead, to quell charges of its 
heartlessness, the White House sent American troops to Somalia in a 
humanitarian venture—a disastrous decision that got America bogged 
down in a bloody civil war. Next, the Clinton administration came 
under fire for doing the same sort of hand-wringing over Bosnia as its 
realist predecessor—surely the Left could be counted on for 
compassion? Yet then it remained reticent about Rwanda, allowing 
the Hutus to conduct mass killings of hundreds of thousands of 
Tutsis. 
Power's verdict is withering: 
The real reason the United States did not do what it could and should 
have done to stop genocide was not a lack of knowledge or influence 
but a lack of will. Simply put, American leaders did not act because 
they did not want to. They believed that genocide was wrong, but 
they were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or 
domestic political capital needed to stop it. 
Power hopes to once and for all turn the tide against American 
lassitude, against the Democratic slogan propounded by presidential 
hopeful George McGovern in the 1972 campaign—"Come Home, 
America." Liberals were then opposed to Ronald Reagan's support 
for the Nicaraguan contras, even though he portrayed that partly as a 
humanitarian venture, pointing to the human-rights abuses 
perpetrated by the Sandinistas. Reagan, for all the bellicosity, was 
loath to send American troops into combat, withdrawing them from 
Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in 1983. 
What Power overlooks, or minimizes, is the political context of a 
country in which the term "no more Vietnams" carried, and continues 
to carry, great political weight. It is these old thought patterns that 
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Power wants to refashion, turning the United States into a nation that 
wields force wherever it deems fit—not for security, but for the 
betterment of others, secure we will not squander resources because 
of the justness of our cause. 
Power has a penchant for dramatizing history through people rather 
than considering broader forces. She states in the acknowledgments 
to "A Problem From Hell" that a friend from Hollywood advised her 
to create a drama by telling the story through characters. And that is 
what she did. 
AS HER other tome about the United Nations official Sergio Vieira 
de Mello—Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World—
makes clear, however, Power champions her own kind of great-man 
history in which a lonely hero stands up for truth, justice and the 
international way. 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." 
This seems excessive. Vieira de Mello was a Brazilian United 
Nations bureaucrat. He served the UN in a number of hot spots—East 
Timor, Rwanda, Cyprus, Cambodia, Lebanon and the Balkans (where 
Power first met him in her capacity as a journalist). He was a UN 
high commissioner for human rights and was murdered along with 
twenty other members of his staff in August 2003 when he was the 
secretary-general's special representative in Iraq. He served bravely. 
Perhaps he would have become secretary-general. But to elevate him, 
as Power does, into the stuff of legend defies credulity. For her Vieira 
de Mello serves as a beacon, a symbol of what true internationalism 
might accomplish. 
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As Power portrays it, Vieira de Mello is everything the United States 
was not under George W. Bush—dignified, restrained, attentive to 
local conditions, eager to negotiate with foreign tyrants. His death in 
the bombed-out Canal Hotel serves as a sign of the blundering 
malignancy of the land of the free. Obama, like Vieira de Mello, is 
supposed to personify the better side of America. He represents 
patience and understanding, and a readiness to negotiate with 
authoritarian leaders when necessary rather than refusing to deal with 
them at all. 
But as Michael Massing observed in an incisive review in the June 9, 
2008, issue of the Nation, Vieira de Mello actually reflected many of 
the worst traits of the UN. According to Massing: 
While she presents him as embodying the UN system at its best—its 
dedication to humanitarianism, multilateralism and dialogue—a 
strong case can be made, based on the evidence she presents, that he 
represented the UN system at its worst—its timidity, mediocrity and 
zeal for self-protection. 
Instead of being a crusader, Vieira de Mello was ready to 
compromise. For example, Power writes that when it came to 
protecting the rights of Vietnamese boat people, 
he could have gone to greater lengths to use his pulpit at [the UN's 
refugee agency] UNHCR to try to ensure that the Vietnamese were 
more fairly screened in the camps and were better treated en route 
back to Vietnam. This was the first of several prominent instances in 
his career in which he would downplay his and the UN's obligation 
to try to shape the preferences of governments. By the 1980s he had 
come to see himself as a UN man, but since the organization was 
both a body of self-interested governments and a body of ideals, he 
did not seem sure yet whether serving the UN meant doing what 
states demanded or pressing for what refugees needed. 
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36 
Such tentative statements, as Massing observes, are acutely at odds 
with the fire-breathing Power of "A Problem From Hell." There she 
denounced statesmen for doing what Vieira de Mello did. This raises 
the question of whether Power is willing to make any accommodation 
necessary to cater to her own new boss. 
Nor did the role that Vieira de Mello played in Bosnia turn out any 
better. It's hardly a secret that the UN disgraced itself in the Balkans, 
where it served as a de facto accomplice to the Serbs. Power recounts 
that Vieira de Mello was touring the former Soviet Union while 
Serbian General Ratko Mladic 
presided over the systematic slaughter of every Bosnian man and boy 
in his custody, some eight thousand in all. When the Serb mass 
graves were discovered six weeks later, Vieira de Mello was stunned. 
"I never thought Mladic was this stupid," he said, projecting his own 
reverence for reason onto one who clearly observed different norms. 
"The massacre was totally unnecessary." 
(What massacre, incidentally, is necessary?) In this telling, Vieira de 
Mello, who sought to curry favor with leading Serbs, sounds less like 
an international statesman than a gullible technocrat. Power's implicit 
criticisms of Vieira de Mello suggest, as Michael Massing notes, that 
she is wrestling with the contradictions of espousing an idealistic 
credo and implementing a policy. (Such would seem to be the case, 
for example, when she defends Obama administration policy on 
Guantanamo Bay, wildly at variance as it is with the president's 
promises circa 2008 to shutter the detention facility promptly.) 
Power recounts other less-than-inspiriting episodes. She notes that in 
1999, after the Washington Post reported that several UN weapons 
inspectors in Iraq were sending information to the Clinton 
administration, Vieira de Mello almost resigned. Fabrizio 
Hochschild, his special assistant, thought that some kind of demarche 
to Richard Butler, the head of the UN inspections team, was required. 
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37 
But he was, Power reports, "taken aback when he saw Vieira de 
Mello greet Butler on his next visit as if nothing had happened. No 
matter how great his outrage, Hochschild noted, Vieira de Mello 
remained as reluctant as ever to make an enemy." There can be no 
doubting that Vieira de Mello's extensive experience in war zones 
would have made him a valuable adviser, if the Bush administration 
had been disposed to listen to his advice, which it was not. He had, as 
Power observes, frequently "watched as promising postwar 
transitions collapsed because of a failure to fill the security void." 
Power's assumption appears to be that given the right approach, Iraq 
might not have degenerated into sectarian warfare. There can be no 
doubting that the Bush administration botched the occupation. But it 
is unclear such interventions ever turn out well. It is not just the 
hubristic evildoers on the right who fail to build up new and better 
societies in the wake of war; incursions of this sort may simply be 
doomed. Doesn't Iraq, in fact, cast further doubt on the efficacy of 
so-called humanitarian ventures? 
NOW POWER is behind the rush to fill the security void in Libya. 
As Secretary Clinton told ABC News in March: 
We learned a lot in the 1990s. We saw what happened in Rwanda. It 
took a long time in the Balkans, in Kosovo to deal with a tyrant. But I 
think . . . what has happened since March 1st, and we're not even 
done with the month, demonstrates really remarkable leadership. 
Power provided the tutorials these past years, both to Obama and to 
an entire class of liberal hawks. She may be the most influential 
journalist-turned-presidential-adviser since a young Walter Lippmann 
drafted the Fourteen Points for Woodrow Wilson, only to become a 
chastened realist after the Treaty of Versailles made a mockery of 
Wilsonianism and the internationalist dream. 
Perhaps Power's next destination is to become United Nations 
ambassador. Maybe she will follow in the footsteps of Madeleine 
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Albright and ultimately become secretary of state. In his memoir, The 
Audacity of Hope, Obama observed that Power "combed over each 
chapter." Now she has begun to exercise the same influence over his 
approach to foreign affairs. Obama entered office, like George W. 
Bush, promising to repudiate the arrogance of his predecessor, only 
to be seduced by the lure of militant democracy. 
Power's argument that there is a coincidence between humanitarian 
intervention and American national interests marks a profound shift 
in justification for military action. Rhetorically, she espouses a move 
away from fighting Islamic terrorism to battling aggressors under the 
banner of humanitarian intervention. This is supposed to mark a 
fundamental break with the Bush administration, whose approach to 
confronting terrorism she denounced in a lengthy essay in the New 
York Times in 2007. Whether it amounts to one in practice is another 
matter. 
Even Obama didn't try to argue that genocide was taking place in 
Libya. Instead, this was a preemptive strike (ah, how redolent again 
of the 2003 Iraq invasion) against a potential massacre, one that 
would have profound implications for the region. It was in America's 
national interest to intervene. And so he plunged the United States 
into a new conflict. Where does Power draw the line? The bar for 
preventing genocide may well have been set too high in the past, as 
she argues. But she, in turn, may be setting it too low, providing an 
ideological smokescreen for the use of American military force in 
dubious circumstances, something she never adequately addresses. 
She runs the risk of exposing America to the charge of hypocrisy for 
not intervening in countries where brutal mistreatment of the local 
population is taking place, as in Zimbabwe, while providing a 
validating and dangerously palatable logic for American 
overextension. Power's solution to the conundrum that has bedeviled 
the Democratic Party since Vietnam—when to sanction the use of 
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force abroad—is to support wars of national liberation. This is likely 
not a solution at all. 
In a speech in 2006, Power told graduating students at Santa Clara 
University Law School "to demand that our representatives are 
attentive to the human consequences of their decision making." The 
new round of engagements abroad by the Obama administration may 
well come to be seen as the last glimmerings of American hubris. 
"Kings can have subjects," George F. Kerman once observed, "it is a 
question whether a republic can." 
It would be no small irony if, in her zeal to reshape American foreign 
policy in the image of liberal internationalism, Power were to usher 
in its demise. 
Jacob Heilbrunn is the author of the newly released, They Knew They 
Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons, and a senior editor at the 
National Interest. 
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