The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  5. In her 2005 book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote about Abraham Lincoln’s appointment of political adversaries to key positions in his administration. After wrapping up the Democratic nomination in 2008, Obama had cited President Lincoln’s approach as a model, noting that “Lincoln basically pulled all the people he’d been running against into his Cabinet. Because whatever personal feelings there were, the issue was, ‘How can we get the country through this time of crisis?’ ”

  6. In 2004, the year after the Iraq War began, the US took in only 66 refugees from Iraq. In 2006, Sweden, a country of nine million, accepted 8,950 Iraqi refugees, while the United States, a country of 300 million, accepted 202. Even as displacement soared, our numbers remained miniscule. This changed in 2008, when President Bush signed into law the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act, making it easier for certain Iraqis (like those who had worked for the US military and their families) to come to the United States. Prior to this law, which passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, the Bush administration had admitted some 2,400 Iraqis since the beginning of the war. But in 2008, more than 14,000 Iraqis made it to the US.

  7. In 2008, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Genocide Prevention Task Force, chaired by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former secretary of defense William Cohen, had recommended the creation of this position in its report “Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers,” https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20081124-genocide-prevention-report.pdf.

  8. Presidential Proclamation 8697, issued in August of 2011, banned entry into the United States of those people who the State Department determined had been involved in “war crimes, crimes against humanity or other serious violations of human rights.” Five years later, during the final month of his presidency, Obama would sign the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act into law. This legislation further expanded the Executive Branch’s toolkit by authorizing the President to impose visa bans on those responsible for extrajudicial killings and torture. The law also granted the President power to impose targeted sanctions on individuals found to have committed human rights violations or “acts of significant corruption.”

  9. The story of the search for Mladić is detailed in Julian Borger, The Butcher’s Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World’s Most Successful Manhunt (New York: Other Press, 2016), pp. 139–149, 283–307.

  10. Damien McElroy, “Ratko Mladić arrested: Europe’s most wanted man seized in Serbia,” The Telegraph, May 26, 2011, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/serbia/8539630/Ratko-Mladić-arrested-Europes-most-wanted-man-seized-in-Serbia.html.

  11. The Bush administration had begun providing logistical support to the Ugandan military for counter-LRA operations, but after President Obama took office, young activists, including those from Invisible Children, secured the passage of congressional legislation, which mandated the President to develop a more far-reaching strategy for defeating Kony’s army.

  12. When the Obama administration took office in 2009, the only UN resolution that contained the words “sexual orientation” was one condemning extrajudicial execution on a range of grounds. In 2010, we had to fight just to preserve the reference when it came up for a vote in the General Assembly. Although we ultimately prevailed, Zimbabwe’s ambassador claimed that including it would bring the UN a step closer to accepting bestiality.

  13. The US government added Libya to a list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1979 and closed its embassy in Tripoli in 1980. During the 1970s and 1980s, Qaddafi sent arms to groups as varied as the Irish Republican Army and the Basque militants of ETA, and he provided terrorists access to training camps in Libya. The Libyan government also aided and participated in several terrorist attacks that killed Americans, including the 1986 bombing of a German nightclub, the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, and the 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772. Qaddafi later curtailed his support for terrorism and sought closer ties to the West by ending his nuclear weapons program. As a result, in 2006 the Bush administration removed Libya from the terrorism list and resumed full diplomatic relations.

  14. Mike Elkin, “Libya: Recovering from the horror, waiting for more,” Inter Press Service, March 2, 2011, http://www.ipsnews.net/2011/03/libya-recovering-from-horror-waiting-for-more/; and Adrian Blomfield, “Libya: Rebels in desperate battle to hold ground,” The Telegraph, March 2, 2011, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8357934/Libya-rebels-in-desperate-battle-to-hold-ground.html.

  15. Martin Fletcher, “Just 30 miles from Tripoli, the defiant town that dares to humiliate Gaddafi,” The Times, March 7, 2011, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/just-30-miles-from-tripoli-the-defiant-town-that-dares-to-humiliate-gaddafi-qsppc8bc66d; reporting from Alex Crawford of Sky News, recounted by Samer al-Atrush, “Kadhafi forces accused of ‘massacre’ as battles rage,” AFP, March 6, 2011; and Crawford interviewed on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, March 10, 2011.

  16. Qaddafi himself made contradictory statements about his intentions. In his February 22nd televised address to the Libyan people, he stated, “Any Libyan who holds a weapon against Libya, his punishment is execution.” Later, on March 17th, as his forces closed in on Benghazi, he again made ominous threats but also claimed that if a person handed over his weapons, “whatever he did previously, he will be pardoned, protected.” Given Qaddafi’s penchant for lying and his previous treatment of opponents, opposition supporters in Benghazi did not trust his last-minute assurances.

  17. We rightly never discussed polling data in the Situation Room. However, the media reported varying degrees of support for the different potential US military actions in Libya. As is typical, opinions differed depending on how questions were asked. An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted March 10th–March 13th found 72 percent of Americans supportive of a US-enforced no-fly zone, while a poll conducted by CNN on the same days, but with different phrasing, found only 56 percent in favor of this option. Meanwhile, the same CNN poll showed that 74 percent of Americans preferred that the United States “leave it to international organizations or allies” to take the leading role in Libya. A week later, a CNN poll found that 77 percent of Americans believed it was either “very important” (34 percent) or “somewhat important” (43 percent) to make “the removal of Moammar Gadhafi from power in Libya” a foreign policy goal of the United States.

  18. George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), p. 81.

  19. In July 2011, Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Jeff Feltman, US Ambassador to Libya Gene Cretz, and NSC Senior Director for Strategic Planning Derek Chollet met with Qaddafi’s advisers in Tunis, Tunisia, for close to three hours.

  20. NATO intensified its bombing of military targets in Tripoli in mid-August. Rebel sleeper cells within the city activated on August 20th, setting in motion a series of defections among pro-Qaddafi troops, and rebel forces from outside the capital began streaming into Tripoli. By August 23rd, the rebels had assumed control of most of the capital and had seized Qaddafi’s central compound. Qaddafi himself remained on the run for two more months before he was seized and murdered in October of 2011.

  21. MKULTRA ended only when CIA director Richard Helms retired and destroyed most of the materials related to the program, but its sordid history emerged in a series of Senate hearings in the mid-1970s.

  22. Countries like Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, and South Africa have been lobbying for years to be given permanent Security Council seats, but negotiations over reforming the Council’s membership have always broken down. For the composition of the Security Council to be altered, two-thirds of the member states of the United Nations, including all the Council’s permanent members, would need to ratify the change to the UN Charter. In the United States, this would entail securing approval by two-thirds of the Senate. As a result of these high thresholds and the inability of memb
er states to agree on precisely how the Council should be modernized, it has only been reformed once, in 1965, when member states came together to expand the number of nonpermanent seats from six to ten.

  23. Many countries spend vast sums campaigning for seats on UN bodies, engaging in vote swapping and vote buying. Winning a two-year Security Council term is particularly coveted. Although amounts are hard to verify, countries typically spend millions of dollars on the events, receptions, and lobbying that precede a vote. Over the last decade, countries have reportedly spent anywhere from $4 million (Sweden) to $25 million (Australia) campaigning to win a Security Council seat.

  24. The five permanent members have used their veto power a total of 288 times. This number does not correspond to the number of resolutions vetoed, as more than one permanent member sometimes vetoes the same resolution. The USSR/Russia has cast the most vetoes (141), followed by the United States (83), the United Kingdom (32), France (18), and China (14).

  25. Six years later, the Global Public Policy Institute think tank in Berlin released a report identifying at least 33 incidents of chemical weapons use in Syria between December 23rd, 2012, and August 20th, 2013. The study’s authors were not able to confirm all the reported incidents with the highest degree of confidence, but their extensive research indicates that more attacks took place than the US government was aware of at the time. See “Annex: List of Confirmed Incidents (2012–2018)” in Tobias Schneider and Theresa Lütkefend, “Nowhere to Hide: The Logic of Chemical Weapons Use in Syria,” Global Public Policy Institute, February 2019, https://www.gppi.net/2019/02/17/the-logic-of-chemical-weapons-use-in-syria.

  26. The Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein was the last country to use chemical weapons on a large scale. Saddam’s forces deployed them in the 1980s both against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War and against Iraqi Kurds. The deadliest and most notorious chemical attack against the Kurds occurred on March 16th, 1988, in the town of Halabja, where Iraqi bombs containing mustard gas, sarin, and VX gas killed five thousand Kurds and injured thousands more.

  27. The War Powers Resolution came into force, during the Vietnam War, in 1973. Nonetheless, President Reagan deployed US troops to Lebanon in September of 1982 as part of a multinational peacekeeping effort, arguing that the troops were not engaged in “hostilities,” despite sustaining casualties and being equipped for combat. US forces remained in Lebanon for almost a year until Congress retroactively authorized their presence under the War Powers Resolution. President George H.W. Bush sent American troops to Somalia beginning in December of 1992, and a subset of these troops remained under President Clinton, with the last not leaving until March of 1995. Clinton’s advisers assessed that their “intermittent military engagements” were not “sustained hostilities” and were therefore in compliance with the 60-day deadline imposed by the War Powers Resolution. Without congressional authorization, the Clinton administration waged an air campaign in Kosovo, which lasted 78 days. Clinton’s lawyers argued that Congress’s funding of the military effort showed that it “clearly intended to authorize continuing military operations in Kosovo.” During the Libya intervention, Obama administration lawyers contended that the operation’s “limited military mission,” “limited exposure for US troops and limited risk of serious escalation” with “limited military means” meant the United States was “not in hostilities of the kind envisioned by the War Powers Resolution that was intended to trigger an automatic 60-day pullout.”

  28. See “Government Assessment of the Syrian Government’s Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013,” August 30, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/30/government-assessment-syrian-government-s-use-chemical-weapons-august-21.

  29. Ambassador Rice and Secretary Clinton maintained a professional relationship during Obama’s first term, but previous UN ambassadors and Secretaries of State had clashed. For example, Secretary of State Alexander Haig reacted to President Reagan’s selection of Jeane Kirkpatrick as UN ambassador by reportedly exclaiming, “I don’t know how anybody expects that I will work with that bitch.” He would go on to accuse Kirkpatrick of being generally “temperamental” as well as “mentally and emotionally incapable of thinking clearly.” Peter Collier, Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick (New York: Encounter Books, 2012), p. 118.

  30. As soon as it became clear that the Assad regime had illicitly retained certain capabilities and supplies, I and others in the administration called on Syria to fully comply with its commitment to end its chemical weapons program. I raised the issue repeatedly in Security Council consultations and through diplomatic channels. I was authorized to publicly make clear our grave concern over what we called the “discrepancies and omissions in Syria’s original declaration.” Other administration representatives registered similar concerns, including our delegation to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. See “United States of America: Statement at the 82nd Session of the Executive Council,” Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, July 12, 2016, https://www.opcw.org/ec-82.

  31. This study is the most detailed assessment of the US response to the CAR crisis, providing a critical look at our policies and offering a number of lessons for future atrocity prevention efforts. See Charles J. Brown, “The Obama Administration and the Struggle to Prevent Atrocities in the Central African Republic,” Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, November 2016, https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20161116-Charlie-Brown-CAR-Report.pdf.

  32. In the 1980s, when Vitaly worked at the Soviet embassy in Washington, he became the first Soviet diplomat to appear regularly on American television. In one telling C-SPAN clip from 1985, a caller, impressed with Vitaly’s interview, said, “I think you’re sort of Western-looking and a real sharp guy. How about defecting? We’d love to have you.” Grinning, Vitaly replied, “I’d advise you not to spend all your time waiting for that to happen. Your life will be wasted, Madame.”

  33. The films Vitaly appeared in were titled Blue Notebook (from 1963, about Lenin on the eve of the October Revolution) and A Mother’s Heart (from 1965, about Lenin’s mother and her love for her children).

  34. Ukraine ranked 144th out of 175 countries on Transparency International’s corruption index—the lowest of any European country. The pillaging by Yanukovych and his cronies had left the country tens of billions of dollars in debt. Ukraine’s prosecutor general later estimated that, between 2010 and 2014, Ukrainian officials stole a fifth of their country’s output.

  35. Although the UN General Assembly lacks the enforcement authorities of the Security Council, it has the authority to make legal pronouncements and to direct the UN secretary-general and UN staff to follow them. Some votes in the UN General Assembly require a simple majority and others a two-thirds majority of “those present and voting.” An absence has the same weight as an abstention; both reduce the number of total votes needed to win. In this case, a simple majority was required.

  36. In doing so, Russian forces seized billions of dollars of Ukrainian government properties and military equipment, and the Russian authorities mandated that Crimeans take Russian citizenship or forgo receiving government services and assistance.

  37. The US and EU sanctions had a measurable impact on the Russian economy, which entered a two-year recession in 2014. The Russian ruble lost more than 50 percent of its value against the dollar, and foreign investment slowed considerably. By making the sanctions “targeted,” the administration hoped to impose costs on the Russian leadership and other powerful entities and individuals connected to the Kremlin, who in turn would have incentive to pressure Putin to de-escalate the crisis. In addition to sanctions, the United States and its partners in the G-8 grouping of leading industrialized nations suspended Russian participation.

  38. Steven Hatch, an American doctor who participated in the Ebola response in Liberia, makes a credible case that the attention Trump generated with his E
bola commentary helped set the stage for his presidential campaign and provided him with a blueprint for how stoking fear could be marshaled for political gain. See Steven Hatch, “How the Ebola Crisis Helped Launch Donald Trump’s Political Career,” Mother Jones, April 3, 2017, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/04/trump-ebola-tweets/.

  39. The model used by the CDC to assess a worst-case scenario of 1.4 million Ebola infections was not universally embraced. Some scientists and academics questioned the CDC’s underlying assumptions, such as the likely number of unreported cases.

  40. Victor Luckerson, “Watch How Word of Ebola Exploded in America,” Time, October 7, 2014, http://time.com/3478452/ebola-twitter/.

  41. Critically, research has documented that women tend to have less self-esteem than men—a “confidence gap” that therefore creates disparities and disadvantages for them in professional settings. See Kay and Shipman’s The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance—What Women Should Know (New York: HarperCollins, 2014).

  42. Back in 1945, the United Kingdom sent two female delegates to San Francisco as part of the team negotiating the text of the UN Charter. Overall, only eight women were present among the 850 delegates. Frustrated that reporters kept asking them what it was like to be woman delegates, the two British women, Florence Horsbrugh and Ellen Wilkinson, would reply, “We are not ‘women delegates.’ We are delegates of our country and ministers of our government.” See Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade (New York: Macmillan, 1954), p. 349.

  43. Collier, Political Woman, p. 161.

  44. Seven women ran for the positon, more than twice as many women than in all the previous elections for secretary-general combined. But in the end, former Portuguese prime minister António Guterres was the candidate who rallied the most enthusiastic support, and the only one who won the necessary backing of the Security Council’s five permanent members. In his campaign, Guterres promised to prioritize promoting women’s equality at the UN. As of 2018, he had achieved full gender parity among UN senior managers for the first time in the organization’s history. Nonetheless, the male-dominated culture at the UN will take generations to reform.