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“How does the author of a book on atrocities defend the US government’s inaction in the face of mass murder in Syria?”
I had long taken for granted the importance of individual dignity, the richness of American diversity, and the practical necessity of global cooperation. Yet suddenly, these core values were under assault and far more vulnerable than I had recognized.
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Mum gave people she met a quality of attention that I would come to associate with the most gifted politicians. When making a new acquaintance, she would cock her head to the side and peer earnestly at the other person, digging for details and drawing connections across time and space.
I never knew my mother to have an ulterior motive as she listened; she was simply curious and intensely empathetic.
Years later, I would hear Irish novelist Colm Tóibín speak about how, growing up in Ireland, there was simply nothing worse than “being boring.” “You could be smelly, you could be ugly, you could be fierce dumb,” he said, happily, “but you could not be boring.” This had been the sensibility in our home in Ireland, and so it came to be in America as well.
little-known publication called The National Interest into my hands. Authored by Francis Fukuyama, and titled “The End of History?,” the article argued that with fascism and communism soon destined to land in the dustbin of history, economic and political liberalism had won the ideological battle of the twentieth century.
“These people speak so much,” Mort said about the proliferation of self-styled experts in Washington, “and yet they manage to say so little.”
“You do know I don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, don’t you?” His humility often manifested itself as self-criticism,
“Will it do any good?”
As Yugoslavia’s largest single nationality, Serbs had enjoyed plum jobs and privileges. But as the Croatian and Slovene governments moved toward declaring independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, Milošević used state media to whip up fear over what he portrayed as the coming existential struggle.* If Serbs were trapped as ethnic minorities in newly independent Croatia or Bosnia, he warned, they would become second-class citizens.
Four US diplomats—George Kenney, Marshall Harris, Jon Western, and Stephen Walker—had already resigned to protest what they saw as the weakness of the US response to the Bosnian war, the largest wave of resignations over US policy in State Department history.
But at Carnegie I saw that this was an abstraction. Now I had a focus—a specific group of people in a specific place who were being pulverized, and I wanted to do something to support them.
The test, as I put it then, was as follows: If I end up not making it as a journalist, will something else I learn in the process make it worth trying?
But many stayed because they expected that the war, which they had never believed would happen in the first place, would end quickly.
“If we leave, they win,” Sarajevans would say defiantly.
Russia’s forces in Chechnya know they are free to do anything they please. They know nobody will stop them. There are no lines they won’t cross. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“The only way to move people in Washington is to tell them things they don’t already know, and that requires seeing things for yourself.”
Russia was responsible for the death of one of the world’s great humanitarians.”
An identifiable American life would almost always be more galvanizing than thousands of faceless foreigners in a faraway country.
“The most effective way to avoid the recurrence of genocidal tragedy is to ensure that past acts of genocide are never forgotten.”
This disconnect seemed to illustrate the perplexing coexistence of Americans’ purported deep resolve to prevent genocide, and our recurring struggle to acknowledge when it is happening in our midst.
watched Claude Lanzmann’s devastating nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah for the first time.
For example, when is military force justified? How do the moral and religious traditions of nonviolence coexist with the moral imperative not to stand idly by in the face of suffering? How does one (particularly one who lacks sufficient information) measure the risks of action and inaction before deciding what to do? What would it mean if any country could take upon itself the decision to use force without any rules? Who should write these rules?
Philip Gourevitch, an American writer who had traveled to Rwanda in 1995 and then published a series of haunting articles on the genocide in The New Yorker.
The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust.
The books written by journalists and academics covered the atrocities, but generally did not investigate what US policymakers themselves were thinking when they responded to these genocides. American decisions and nondecisions seemed to have gone largely unanalyzed. The reference books I had sought for my research simply did not exist.
the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which became the driving force behind much of the Kennedy School’s human rights programming.*
I noted that very few of us were likely to find ourselves the victims or perpetrators of genocide. But every day, almost all of us find ourselves weighing whether we can or should do something to help others. We decide, on issues large and small, whether we will be bystanders or upstanders.
Many years later, when I was UN ambassador, I was stunned—and profoundly gratified—to be informed by a reporter that the Oxford English Dictionary had added the term upstander, which it wrote was “coined in 2002 by the Irish-American diplomat Samantha Power.”
began, “[The invasion] will ratify and fuel the bubbling resentment against the U.S., and this anti-Americanism is the sea in which terrorists thrive.”
MONTH AFTER THE US INVASION, my publisher called and informed me that “A Problem from Hell” had won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.
He predicted that we were entering a period in which Americans—especially young people on college campuses—would rise up to demand a different kind of foreign policy from Washington. “It’s all about pressure,” he said. “Governments will do the right thing, or less of the wrong thing, if people make clear that they care.”
People hunger for something they aren’t getting—authenticity, a willingness to speak one’s convictions, aspirations that transcend party affiliation. I guess I’m filling some kind of void.”
his strengths and weaknesses. “I’m not some big original thinker,” he said. “But I listen well, I synthesize ideas, and I can generally figure out how to communicate what we need to do.”
“X test” question in my mind. In this context, the question seemed to boil down to: “If the most I am able to do is learn more about how Congress works, will moving to Washington have been worth it?”
Many members appeared to be motivated less by John F. Kennedy’s call to service than by a self-serving parody of that famous exhortation: “Ask not what your representative can do for the issue, but what the issue can do for your representative.”
“Here we go again,” Obama told me as we entered one hearing in which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was testifying. “We will faithfully pretend to be asking questions, but we will instead give statements. She will faithfully pretend to answer our questions, but will instead answer questions we didn’t ask so as to deliver talking points we’ve all heard before. And the hearing will end, and we will walk out of here, calling it ‘democratic accountability.’
Regardless, I realized that sharing the same general political loyalties does not mean that people are kindred spirits.
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” I agreed with this, but I still couldn’t get the small things or people out of my head.
I was also struck by how unprepared our national security institutions were for responding to unconventional
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I felt the way I feel about all of this. People are hungering for something, and they see that something in me. I can’t take it too seriously.”
Every NSC official who was seen to have “equity” in a statement had to be “looped in” so that they could “chop on,” or edit, the words that went out into the world under President Obama’s name.
This sin of bypassing colleagues with equities was termed a “process foul,” and being guilty of it felt akin to committing a crime.
I saw early on how few voices in high-level government discussions highlighted the nexus between human rights and US national security.
the realist view—which downplayed the importance of “values”—was dominant. Many US officials considered prioritizing human rights to be in tension with, if not antithetical to, our traditional
Countless studies showed the importance of the rule of law to sustained economic development, and the strong causal links between government repression and civilian susceptibility to radicalization and extremism.
the truism that countries that treated their citizens with respect made far more reliable partners over time.
I did not yet know how to move the US government.
When I held back in policy debates out of humility, I saw others—who often knew less—sound off with strong opinions, helping tip the direction of our policy. Being forceful and having others on your side often mattered more than the objective
