Samantha Power has the President’s ear. To what end?
Gérard Araud, the French Ambassador to Washington, who previously served at the U.N., told me, “I was expecting this sort of N.G.O. girl, considering her past, considering the book she wrote. Actually, she’s a nice mixture of liberal interventionism and Realpolitik.” A senior Administration official said, “It’s easy in some ways to dismiss someone like Samantha Power. Oh, she cares about the marginal, vulnerable, and oppressed! But what she’s managed to do is link the marginal, vulnerable, and oppressed to core national-security interests of the United States.”
.. In the culture of the Administration, where overwork is a status symbol, Power projects harried busyness but not despair. Sunstein told me that, “for someone who wrote a book about genocide, she may have the most mental health of anyone I’ve ever known. She’s deeply non-neurotic.”
.. Ken Roth, the executive director, told me that Power cannily leveraged her office to that end. “It was an area with no real strategic value, no national interests, subject to utter neglect and indifference in Washington. She was able to step in and alert people to the potential of genocide and then overcome a stingy reluctance to pony up for a peacekeeping force.” He went on, “While the Central African Republic remains extremely precarious, it could have been a whole lot worse.”
.. She wanted to report from Bosnia, but she had no experience and news organizations wouldn’t back her application for a U.N. credential to cross the border. Carnegie shared a building with Foreign Policy, and when the editor left one night she sneaked into his office and stole some stationery. “I wrote this letter saying, ‘Please provide Samantha Power with all the credentials she needs.’ ” It worked.
.. In America, anxiety and misinformation were spreading. A Reuters poll found that nearly three-quarters of Americans favored a ban on flights from the worst-affected countries. In Maple Shade Township, New Jersey, parents of two students from Rwanda agreed to keep their children home from school, even though Rwanda had no cases of the disease and is nearly three thousand miles from the cent
.. Obama has said that he “underestimated” the task of helping Libya fashion a new state after the Qaddafi era. He told Thomas Friedman, of the Times, “That’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question ‘Should we intervene militarily? Do we have an answer the day after?’ ”