The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  45. Finding the appropriate balance was important, since we were making difficult requests of each government. Over the course of Obama’s second term, Chad would lose thirty-six peacekeepers fighting militants in Mali, a country where American diplomats and aid workers operated. Cameroon, meanwhile, had opened its borders not only to Nigerians fleeing Boko Haram, but also to more than half of the refugees who had fled the Central African Republic. At the same time, the militaries in the regional task force were committing serious abuses. Amnesty International had issued detailed reports on the Cameroonian and Nigerian security forces’ violations of international humanitarian law. In the case of Nigeria, for example, Amnesty alleged that the military had extrajudicially executed more than 1,200 people, including at least 640 detainees.

  46. The 65 million people displaced was the highest number since World War II. One reason the number was so high was that conflicts had begun lasting far longer than before. A conflict that ended in 1970 had lasted, on average, 9.6 years. Those that ended in 2014, however, had lasted an average of 26.7 years, meaning many people end up displaced for decades.

  47. In addition to our security interest in refugee resettlement and care, research shows that refugees make positive economic contributions to American society as well. One 2017 study found that since 1975 the median household income for refugees who have been in the US for at least 25 years is significantly higher than overall median household income. The same report also found that refugees start companies at a higher rate than both non-refugee immigrants and the US-born population. Other research has shown that refugees who come to the US as children graduate high school and enter college at the same rate as the US-born population. A 2017 study published by the State Department, which looked at economic data from 1980 to 2010, assessed that “there is no adverse long-run impact of refugees on the U.S. labor market.” Notably, under President Trump, the Department of Health and Human Services prepared a draft report that found refugees brought a net benefit to the economy of $63 billion between 2005 and 2014, although the administration tried to suppress the report’s findings. See “From Struggle to Resilience: The Economic Impact of Refugees in America,” New American Economy, June 2017, https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/from-struggle-to-resilience-the-economic-impact-of-refugees-in-america/; William N. Evans and Daniel Fitzgerald, “The Economic and Social Outcomes of Refugees in the United States: Evidence from the ACS,” NBER Working Paper No. 23498, June 2017, https://www.nber.org/papers/w23498; Ana María Mayda et al., “The Labor Market Impact of Refugees: Evidence from the U.S. Resettlement Program,” US Department of State, Office of the Chief Economist Working Paper, August 2017, https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/The-Labor-Market-Impact-on-Refugees-Evidence-from-the-U.S.-Resettlement-Program-1.pdf; and Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Somini Sengupta, “Trump administration rejects study showing positive impact of refugees,” New York Times, September 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/us/politics/refugees-revenue-cost-report-trump.html.

  48. According to the UN’s refugee agency, the top five refugee-hosting countries in the world today are: Turkey (3.6 million), Pakistan (1.4 million), Uganda (1.1 million), Germany (1 million), and Iran (979,400).

  49. Trump made this false claim on August 31st, 2016 in Arizona, and made similar statements on a number of occasions during the campaign. See “Transcript of Donald Trump’s Immigration Speech,” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/02/us/politics/transcript-trump-immigration-speech.html.

  50. Concerns that groups like ISIS would take advantage of refugee flows grew in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. The attackers were not refugees, and most were European citizens. However, some of them had trained with ISIS in Syria and were able to avoid scrutiny returning home by being part of the influx of refugees occurring at the time. Yet whereas refugees in Europe were then pouring across borders in an unregulated manner, the United States admitted only those who had gone through the lengthy vetting process.

  51. Recall Paul Slovic and the “identifiable victim effect”: our capacity to feel is greatest when considering just one person (in this instance, a two-year-old child). Numbers and statistics, no matter how large, usually fail to spark emotion or feeling and thus fail to motivate action.

  52. The site, which was shut down by the Trump administration, can still be accessed at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/aidrefugees.

  53. The most significant long-term pledge made at Obama’s refugee summit came from World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, who announced a willingness to provide multiyear financing for refugee-hosting countries to improve their public infrastructure and education and health systems. In turn, the World Bank pushed for legal changes that have allowed refugees in many more countries to work legally and send their kids to school.

  54. Khaled Omar Harrah, a painter before the war, was perhaps the best-known member of the White Helmets. In 2014, he had spent sixteen hours digging through the rubble of a bombed-out apartment building to save a ten-day-old “miracle baby” named Mahmud. But the month before I sat down with Saleh, the Syrian regime had killed Harrah while he was on a rescue mission in Aleppo.

  55. On a previous visit in 2015, Saleh had briefed the Security Council, saying, “As a patriotic Syrian, I never imagined I would one day ask for a foreign intervention in my country, by land or air. But the lives of innocent women and children that we see dying in our hands every day compel us to ask for any intervention possible to stop the barbaric killing machine led by Bashar al-Assad, including preventing Syrian aircraft from flying, and especially preventing helicopters from hovering above us and dropping these bombs. Before the strongest power on this planet, all I can do is ask that you awaken your conscience and tell me what you are going to do to stop these barrel bombs.” For Saleh’s full remarks from the June 26, 2015, informal Security Council meeting on Syria, see https://diary.thesyriacampaign.org/as-a-patriotic-syrian-i-never-imagined-i-would-do-this/.

  56. The “Caesar photos” provided gruesome and incontrovertible evidence of the widespread murder of detainees by the Syrian government. “Caesar” is the alias of a Syrian defector who worked as a photographer for the Syrian military police and, with the help of a friend, smuggled some 55,000 photos out of the country. The photos, which Caesar and other military photographers had taken between 2011 and 2013, showed the bodies of dead men, women, and children who were starved, beaten, tortured, and executed by Syrian security forces while in government detention facilities. According to Caesar (who escaped from Syria in 2013), he and his colleagues had been instructed to record the images as internal documentation, but he preserved and shared the photos as proof of the Assad regime’s crimes. Multiple investigations, including one by the FBI, have confirmed the authenticity of the images.

  57. President Obama gave this response during an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday on April 10, 2016. He has made related points in interviews with Tom Friedman in the New York Times and Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. I myself believe the flaw in the US approach was not so much a shortage of planning—from 2011 onward, US officials had done extensive planning, but the Libyans rejected most offers of outside support. Instead, as discussed in Chapter 25, I think our mistake was a lack of sustained, high-level diplomatic engagement in the critical 2012–2014 period after the intervention was over and Libyan society began fracturing.

  58. Despite billing himself as staunchly opposed to terrorism, the actual relationship between Assad and ISIS was much murkier. By the end of 2016, the Syrian government was buying so much oil from ISIS that these purchases had become the group’s largest source of revenue; Assad was thus helping sustain the operations of the terrorists that he claimed to be fighting. At various points during the war, ISIS also appeared to be the intended beneficiary of air strikes undertaken by the Syrian military. At the core of this relationship was mutual self-interest: both Assad and ISIS seemed to prioritize attacking the moderate Syrian opposition. For more on these d
ynamics, see Anne Barnard, “Assad’s Forces May Be Aiding New ISIS Surge,” New York Times, June 2, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/03/world/middleeast/new-battles-aleppo-syria-insurgents-isis.html; and Benoit Faucon and Ahmed Al Omran, “Islamic State Steps Up Oil and Gas Sales to Assad Regime,” Wall Street Journal, January 19, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/islamic-state-steps-up-oil-and-gas-sales-to-assad-regime-1484835563.

  59. When North Korea launched another nuclear test that September, I negotiated a second resolution that went further. The new measures banned North Korean exports of copper, nickel, silver, and zinc, and drastically reduced North Korea’s coal exports. Together, these new measures slashed the regime’s revenue by at least $750 million, depriving it of funds it was using to expand its nuclear program while its citizens starved.

  60. See “Where We Fight,” Costs of War Project, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, January 2019, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/.

  Index

  The pagination of this digital edition does not match the print edition from which the Index was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.

  NOTES: “n” with a page number indicates a cited footnote. “SP” refers to Samantha Power.

  Abdić, Fikret, 67, 70

  Abdullah, king of Saudi Arabia, 287

  Aboulatta, Amr, 462

  Abramowitz, Mort, 50–61, 69–71, 73, 79, 85, 87, 100, 105–106, 108, 111, 116, 124, 202, 255, 326, 350, 516

  “Adnan” (participant in Security Council meeting on anti-LGBT terror), 523–524

  Afghanistan, 96, 221, 248, 261, 298, 310, 352, 404, 469–470, 485, 493, 549

  Africa. See also specific countries

  LGBT rights and, 277–278, 280–281, 424–425

  responses to conflict in Darfur, 225–226

  UN ambassadors from, SP’s family and, 461–462

  African Union, 141, 142, 308, 422

  aidrefugees.gov, 498

  AIPAC, 376

  Al-Anon, 159–160, 161, 252, 253

  Albright, Madeleine, 101, 267, 464, 465, 492, 533

  Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), 124, 158–159, 178, 546

  alcoholism, 6–7, 9, 10–11, 31, 38, 124, 158–159, 546

  alert channels for atrocities, 268–269

  Al-Hamdo, Abdulkafi, 539

  Allison, Graham, 122–123

  al-Qaeda, 96, 132, 173, 264, 472, 491n, 510

  al-Shabaab, 491n

  Alzayat, Wa’el, 493

  American Jewish World Service, 141

  Amos, Valerie, 435

  Angela’s Ashes (McCourt), 74[[EN]]75

  Annan, Kofi, 349

  Anti-Defamation League, 503

  Anxiety, 47, 116–117, 125–127, 157–159, 177–178, 186, 247

  Arab League, 291–292, 301, 303, 307

  Arab Spring. See Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia

  Araud, Gérard, 349, 393

  Armenian genocide, 121, 127–128, 234–244, 246, 249, 332, 429

  al-Assad, Bashar, ix–x, 360–378, 381–386, 388–390, 494, 499–507, 510, 514–515, 540. See also Syria

  Atlanta, 28, 36–37. See also Lakeside High School, Atlanta

  The Atlantic, 142, 512–513, 514–515

  Atrocities Prevention Board, White House, 268–269

  The Audacity of Hope (Obama), 165–166, 167, 168

  Axelrod, David, 176, 189, 203, 263

  Ayotte, Kelly, 520

  Bach, Amy, 125

  Balkans. See Bosnia; Croatia; Banja Luka; Slovenia; Sarajevo; Srebrenica; Zagreb; Žepa

  Ban Ki-moon

  childhood of, 347

  courtesy call to Obama by, 224, 227

  LGBT UN staff benefits and, 422

  Libyan revolution and, 300

  SP presenting credentials to, 348–349

  UN inspection mission in Syria and, 367, 372–373

  Banja Luka, 79–81, 83

  Barks-Ruggles, Erica, 228n

  Barros, Cristián, 523

  Baseball. See also Boston Red Sox; Pittsburgh Pirates; Washington Nationals

  SP collecting cards, 22

  SP’s following and playing, 20, 21, 27, 40, 71, 115, 124, 136, 353, 407, 545

  SP making time with Declan for, 474–476

  al-Bashir, Omar, 135, 225

  basketball

  discussing with Obama, 145, 194

  National Basketball Association (NBA), 407

  SP’s following and playing, 27, 35, 37, 39, 43, 115, 254, 330, 468

  SP’s play-by-play coverage of and reporting on, 40

  Bat Cave and bats, 157, 177, 186, 313, 323, 384, 421, 469

  Beck, Glenn, 231

  Beijing Five, 518, 519

  Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine, 287, 290

  Benghazi, Libya, 289–290, 294–296, 297–302, 302–305, 307, 308, 310–311, 477

  Berlin, 56, 493, 495

  Berlin Wall, 43, 54, 354, 403, 493

  Biden, Joe, 237, 270, 284, 298, 341–342, 376, 377, 394

  Bihać, Bosnia, 66–67, 69, 70

  bin Laden, Osama, 172, 218n

  Birwe, Toussaint, death of, 479–485, 487–488

  Bitar, Maher, 493

  Biya, Paul, 473, 477, 485

  Blinken, Antony, 505–506

  Blitzer, Wolf, 200

  Bloomberg, Mike, 528

  Boehner, John, 445

  Boko Haram, 471–474, 476–481, 485–488, 486n, 488n

  Bolling, Eric, 444

  Bolton, John, 328, 328n

  Bono, 181

  Boozman, John, 380

  Bosnia

  Abramowitz and Cuny and aid to, 54–58

  pursuing war criminals from, 270–273, 272n, 275, 428

  SP’s 1993 trip to, 65–67

  Srebrenica massacre anniversary and, 269–270, 428–431

  UN Security Council’s arms embargo on, 78–79

  US-brokered cease-fire in, 83–84

  women as war correspondents in, 81–82

  Bosnian Serb militants

  former Yugoslavia and, 54–55, 54n

  Sarajevo siege by, 55, 57, 63, 77, 88–91, 95, 106

  US response to Sarajevo shelling by, 77–78, 106, 107

  Žepa assault by, 101, 101n

  Bosnian war. See also Sarajevo; Srebrenica; Žepa

  air strikes and end to, 106, 107, 146

  differences between Holocaust and, 119n

  ethnic cleansing during, 83, 107, 119n

  Gourevitch on Rwandan genocide and, 120–121

  Milošević and, 54–55, 548

  Moore questions SP on, 59

  Rohde’s abduction and, 111–114

  Rohde’s evidence of atrocities in, 101–103, 430

  Sarajevo siege and, 56–58, 77–78, 85, 88–92, 97, 106, 107

  Serbian shelling in Sarajevo, 77–78, 86, 91, 94, 106

  SP’s co-authored op-ed on international diplomacy on, 62–63

  SP covering Churkin as Russian envoy during, 404–405

  SP’s first story on, 70–71

  SP’s press credentials for, 63–65

  Boston Globe, 85, 100, 325

  Boston Red Sox, 124, 136, 143, 167–168, 170–171, 259, 386

  Bouazizi, Mohamed, 288, 551

  Boureima, Boubacar, 461

  Bourke, Edmund or “Eddie.” See also Delaney, Vera and Eddie Bourke

  after SP’s UN appointment ended, 546

  as an inspiration to SP at the UN, 395

  babysitting, 322–323, 366, 459

  character of, 17–18

  engagement with SP’s work and community, 77, 85, 99, 134, 163, 250, 339, 407, 439–440, 461, 492, 497, 499, 504, 542

  Kuwait and, 12–13, 17

  phone call with Obama, 322–323

  Pittsburgh, getting to know in, 16–19, 21

  support for SP when reporter, 85, 99

  walking SP down the aisle, 197

  Brantly, Kent, 434–435

  Breakdown in the Bal
kans (Power), 59–60, 62, 63, 320

  #BringBackOurGirls campaign, 472

  Brooks, David, 265

  Brooks, Sally, 37, 280, 330

  Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 33–34

  Brownback, Sam, 162

  Buhari, Muhammadu, 485

  Bull Durham (film), 353

  Bunning, Jim, 231

  Burma, 313–320, 316n

  Burundi, peacekeeping troops to CAR from, 393

  Bush, George H.W. and administration, 51n, 58, 285

  Bush, George W. and administration, 132–133, 140–141, 142–143, 146, 160, 163, 173, 206, 235, 260, 270, 273, 276, 329, 397, 409, 492, 494

  Bushnell, Prudence, 118

  Camara, Fanta Oulen, 451–452

  Cameron, David, 376n

  Cameroon, 471, 473–474, 476–479, 480–484, 487–488

  Camus, Albert, 70, 450–451

  Capa, Robert, 471

  Carlson, Tucker, 182

  Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 50–61, 466, 516. See also Abramowitz, Mort

  Carr, Greg, 123

  Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard, 123, 123n

  Carruthers, Richard, 67–68

  Castro, Fidel, 324, 357

  Castro, María

  Declan on 2016 election and, 536

  logistics for moving to New York and, 336, 343

  naturalization and, 490–492

  navigating UN General Assembly, 525–526

  Power–Sunstein family and, 250, 326, 336, 339, 343, 458–460, 490, 493, 499, 531–532, 542, 544

  Catholic Church, 13–14, 21–22, 145

  CBS, Atlanta affiliate (WAGA), 40–41, 61

  Center for American Progress, 380–382

  Center for Consumer Freedom, 231

  Center for Security Policy (CSP), 329, 329n

  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 436–437, 445, 451

  Central African Republic (CAR), 275, 391–392, 393–394, 468, 473

  Chad, 135, 137–138, 471, 473–474, 485, 487–488

  Chalfant, Sarah, 122, 129