No Time to Go Wobbly, Barack

[obamian]

Samantha Power is a tall, rangy redhead with the purposeful gait of the athlete she once wanted to be. She has a husky voice and often speaks in excited rushes of ideas, the words tumbling over each other. What animates Power more than anything else is her Cause, her “dream of American power being harnessed for good.” She was haunted by her experience during the Bosnia war in the early 1990s, when, stringing for the Washington Post, she reported on the Serb attack on Srebrenica before the massacre of Bosnian Muslims there, but failed to get a story in the paper. Later she discovered, to her shock, that the tepid and slow response to the Balkans slaughter was in fact our best humanitarian effort ever, “the most robust of the century.” The United States—the avatar of freedom, the beacon of human rights, the city upon the hill—“had never in its history intervened to stop genocide,” she later wrote.

Subscribe Online & Save 33%A sometime journalist, wonk, and professor of government at Harvard University, Power spent the rest of the 1990s propounding the idea that, under the leadership of the United States, the international system would soon advance to the point at which it would no longer tolerate atrocious human rights abuses, especially genocide. Her 600-page book on the subject, “A Problem From Hell,” was turned down by nearly every major publisher. But after it won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2003, Power became a celebrity, at least within that intellectual demimonde of policy makers, academics, and think-tankers stretching from Washington to Harvard Square, and points beyond.

Power’s Pulitzer was awarded in April 2003, just as the looting began to rage in the streets of Baghdad, providing the first glimpses of the nightmare that Iraq was to become. And as the months passed, Power watched her interventionist dreams turn to dust. In just a few years, she believed, President Bush had squandered the efforts of half a century, in which Washington carefully nurtured an international system and worked its way, fitfully, toward a vague doctrine of global leadership. While Bush talks of freedom, democracy, and human rights, most people see a savage, botched occupation, alignment with Arab autocrats against Iran, and waterboarding in secret prisons. Says Power: “Now we’re neither the shining example, nor even competent meddlers. It’s going to take a generation or so to reclaim American exceptionalism.”

As she watched the 2004 presidential election returns come in, Power found herself sunk in “despondency” over the prospect of another four years of the same. Almost as disheartening as Bush’s win was the fact that the Kerry campaign had shied away from forthrightly challenging him on the fundamentals of his “war on terror.” For Power, as for so many, the one spark of hope was Barack Obama, whose ringing keynote speech had electrified the Democratic convention. Power was so impressed that she downloaded the speech onto her iPod. “I said, ‘God, what does one do now?’ ” Power recalls. “I guess it’s one of three things. One can just accept that all this will continue, one can run for office, or one can become Barack Obama’s foreign policy adviser.” A friend knew Obama’s college roommate. “So I got a short e-mail in early ’05: ‘Barack likes your book and would like to meet with you.’”

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0704.hirsh.html