Samantha
Power made a career arguing for America’s “responsibility to protect.”
During her years in the White House, it became clear that benevolent
motives can have calamitous results.
An activist turned adviser, Power saw how good intentions could go wrong.
Illustration by Malika Favre
For
eight years, Samantha Power served President Obama as an aide and then
as U.N. Ambassador but also as an in-house conscience on matters of
foreign policy. When she entered the White House, at the age of
thirty-eight, she had already established a reputation as a kind of Joan
of Arc for humanitarian intervention. Ben Rhodes, an Obama
foreign-policy adviser and speechwriter, imagined that she bore a
permanent tagline that seemed to announce her position at every meeting:
Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “ ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide.”
When innocent lives were threatened abroad, Power frequently pushed for
forceful action. Obama said that he welcomed her advocacy, but he
sometimes bristled when she voiced it. More than once, Obama told Power,
“You get on my nerves.” In 2013, during a meeting in the Situation Room
to discuss Syria, Obama, put off by her arguments, snapped, “We’ve all
read your book, Samantha.”
In “ ‘A Problem from Hell,’ ” published
in early 2002, Power detailed a century’s worth of American inaction in
the face of grotesque massacres: of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
during the First World War, in Europe during the Holocaust, in Rwanda in
1994, and in the Balkans for much of the nineties. Power had gone to
the Balkans as a freelance reporter fresh out of Yale, and witnessed the
violence that raged as the former Yugoslavia came apart. Like most
people who saw the war up close, she understood that the violence was
not primarily a spontaneous outburst of old hatreds but the result of
ethnopolitical machinations. Ethnic and sectarian enmity, fomented and
backed by the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milošević, was unleashed in
terrible waves of killing, rape, and starvation. In “ ‘A Problem from
Hell,’ ” Power wrote of Sidbela Zimic, a nine-year-old Bosnian girl who
had been jumping rope in front of her apartment building in Sarajevo
with her friends when she was killed by a Serbian shell. When Power
arrived, a few hours later, she found only a pool of blood, a jump rope,
and girls’ slippers.
Power was enraged by claims in the West that nothing could be done. President Clinton was famously persuaded by “Balkan Ghosts,”
a travelogue written by Robert D. Kaplan, who argued that Balkan
antagonisms were too deep-rooted and mysterious for outsiders to fathom.
“Their enmities go back five hundred years, some would say almost a
thousand years,” Clinton told Larry King. As Clinton dithered, a hundred
thousand people died.
What finally moved Clinton to act was not
ethics but politics: in 1995, as he prepared to run for reëlection,
images of Serbian barbarities began to affect his prospects. That
summer, he ordered devastating air strikes on Serbian military positions
and dispatched an envoy, Richard Holbrooke, to pressure the parties to
make peace. In Dayton, Holbrooke forged a deal that stopped the killing.
A few years later, when Milošević launched a violent campaign against
separatists in Serbia’s ethnic-Albanian province of Kosovo, NATO intervened fast and hard with an air campaign, pushing out the Serbian Army and clearing the way for the Kosovars to secede.
“ ‘A
Problem from Hell’ ” built upon the lessons of the Balkans: not just
that the American intervention had stopped the bloodshed but that, in
Bosnia, it had begun three years too late. Power advocated greater
interference in countries’ internal affairs in defense of an unwavering
principle of humanitarianism. “Given the affront genocide represents to
America’s most cherished values and to its interests, the United States
must also be prepared to risk the lives of its soldiers in the service
of stopping this monstrous crime,” she wrote.
The
book inspired a generation of activists, helping to establish the
doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” which held that the United
States and other wealthy countries had an obligation to defend
threatened populations around the world. It also made a star of its
author, a charismatic, cracklingly smart presence who urged others to
take up the cause. “Know that history is not in a hurry but that you can
help speed it up,” she told Yale’s graduating class of 2016. “It is the
struggle itself that will define you. Do that, and you will not only
find yourself fulfilled but you, too, will live to see many of your lost
causes found.”
Power’s book didn’t offer much discussion of
failure, of the limitations of intervention, even in places where it was
unclear that American efforts could have succeeded. In Rwanda, which is
often cited as an example of U.S. inaction, most of the killing was
done so swiftly—eight hundred thousand people in three months—that it’s
hard to imagine the American bureaucracy and military orchestrating a
response quickly enough to make a difference, and then staying around
long enough to insure that violence didn’t recur. But in 2002 the notion
that America could police the world didn’t seem so far-fetched. NATO
had recently taken on three new members. China’s economy was a tenth of
its present size. The World Trade Center had been destroyed, but the
U.S. had toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan. The invasion of
Iraq was still a year away.
The
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not pitched as humanitarian
interventions. (That came later, as proponents looked for retroactive
justification.) But for many in the American foreign-policy
establishment the coming decade served
as a rebuke to the idea that the U.S. could remake the world. In Iraq,
the U.S. occupation—in its incompetence and brutality—became emblematic
of American decline. In 2014, less than three years after the Americans
departed, the Iraqi Army collapsed, and the state nearly followed. In
Afghanistan, U.S. officers, soldiers, and diplomats were almost entirely
ignorant of the country and its languages, and relied on gangsters and
strongmen to further their aims. The result was a state that functioned
mostly as a sprawling extortion racket—the Americans called it VICE,
for “vertically integrated criminal enterprise”—and that, by its lack
of legitimacy, helped Taliban recruitment. Nearly two decades after the
occupation began, U.S. diplomats are now negotiating a final exit from
the country; the Afghan state seems unlikely to fare any better than the
one the Americans built in Iraq.
Power’s new book, “The Education of an Idealist,”
takes in much of this tumultuous time. In the opening pages, she warns
that the title might suggest that she had “lofty dreams about how one
person could make a difference, only to be ‘educated’ by the brutish
forces” she encountered. She adds, “This is not the story that follows.”
But the book does hint at the death of a dream. Power, who provided
Obama with foreign-policy advice when he was a senator and a
Presidential candidate, joined the White House in 2009 as a champion of
humanitarian intervention in an Administration dedicated to ending the
conflicts it had inherited and refraining from entering into others. One
of the questions facing the new Presidency was whether someone like
Power, an insistent voice for the primacy of morality over politics,
could be effective—or whether the idea of humanitarian intervention, on
which she had built a career, had essentially exhausted itself.
The first test came in early 2011, with an uprising against Muammar Qaddafi,
who had dominated Libya for forty-two years. Rebels had seized
Benghazi, the country’s second-largest city. Qaddafi dispatched several
thousand troops to crush the revolt.
With a bloody showdown
seeming inevitable, the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the
British Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced that they would set up a
no-fly zone to protect civilians. Obama expressed reluctance, but some
aides argued that if he did not act a massacre would take place. As
Qaddafi’s troops massed outside Benghazi, Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton flew to Paris and met with Mahmoud Jibril, one of the heads of
the rebels’ leadership council. Jibril—American-educated, fond of
Western suits—helped convince her that the opposition was coherent,
secular-minded, and capable of governing.
In Washington, Obama
concluded that a no-fly zone would do little to stop a massacre, and
decided instead to strike Libyan government positions on the ground. The
intervention was on. Obama, wary of unilateral action, was careful to
secure a supporting resolution from the United Nations Security Council.
And he proclaimed the operation primarily European, with the U.S.
providing assistance—“leading from behind,” as one aide described it.
But the French and British air forces began to run out of bombs, and
that pretense fell away.
At the time, Power was working in the
White House as a member of the National Security Council. In her book,
she doesn’t agonize much over the part she played in the response to the
Libyan crisis. But senior Administration officials say that Power, a
forceful personality, pushed hard for a military intervention. “She was
clear in her views,’’ Derek Chollet, another member of the National
Security Council, told me. A Times story described her
role, along with that of Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, as
decisive. Power, in her memoir, calls the story “bizarre.” Yet she
concedes that she did recommend the course of action that Obama chose,
while saying little about the catastrophic consequences that followed,
apart from noting a “severe downturn in security.”
She
also refrains from addressing several questions that linger over the
intervention, the kind that preoccupied her in her first book. The most
basic among them is whether, given the way the intervention turned out,
war was necessary. As the uprising gathered momentum, Qaddafi sent a
menacing message to Benghazi. “We are coming tonight,” he said, and for
rebels who do not lay down their arms “there will be no mercy.” Qaddafi
had a well-established record of murder and torture when it came to
domestic opponents. But, in the decades during which he had presided
over Libya, he had typically suppressed uprisings by killing their
leaders, rather than by mounting wholesale massacres. No large-scale
massacres had occurred in the cities that his forces had recently
recaptured. Was it going to be more than bluster this time? It’s
difficult to say. If Qaddafi had put down the uprising in Benghazi, the
rebellion might have ended altogether. A tyrant would have remained in
power, and many people would have died—but perhaps fewer than died in
the intervention.
Another question is why the Obama Administration
decided to destroy Qaddafi’s regime, rather than merely stopping a
massacre. The U.N. Security Council resolution authorized taking “all
necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians; there is no evidence
that this was meant to authorize the destruction of the Libyan state.
Yet, within days of the intervention, NATO
airplanes began attacking central elements of Qaddafi’s regime. Qaddafi
himself hung on for seven months, before rebels captured him hiding in a
drainage pipe, sodomized him with a
blade, and executed him. During that time, the Libyan state was mostly
demolished. Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, claimed that
his government had been deceived by the United States and subsequently
vetoed many U.N. resolutions related to the Syrian civil war. Hillary
Clinton, in “Hard Choices,”
her account of her tenure, claims that Lavrov was being “disingenuous,”
and that he “knew as well as anyone what ‘all necessary measures’
meant.” But she doesn’t explain how he might have known. The Kremlin
took Qaddafi’s fate as a cautionary tale. Libya had, in 2003,
effectively become an American ally: it relinquished what it had by way
of weapons of mass destruction, agreed to make payments of $2.7 billion
to families of the Lockerbie plane bombing, and began to provide the
C.I.A. with information about Islamist militants. From the perspective
of Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, Qaddafi had received better
treatment from America as an enemy than he had as an ally.
Secretary
of Defense Bob Gates, who opposed the intervention, said that Obama had
explicitly stated that removing Qaddafi would be a mistake. In his
memoir, “Duty,” Gates is vague about when the decision to remove Qaddafi
was made, or whether such a decision was ever actually made. Power is
silent on the question. Derek Chollet told me that the decision to
destroy Qaddafi’s regime ultimately became indistinguishable from the
goal of protecting civilians. “The whole experience shows the
fundamental pull of mission creep,” Chollet said. “The mission was
civilian protection, but we never defined when that would be satisfied.
When we had grounded the air force? When we had decimated the army? Our
judgment was ultimately that civilians would not be safe as long as
Qaddafi was in power.”
In “ ‘A Problem from Hell,’ ” Power
chastised American policymakers for denying that genocide was taking
place, and then, when it became undeniable, for convincing themselves
that nothing could be done. “The real reason the United States did not
do what it could and should have done to stop genocide was not a lack of
knowledge or influence but a lack of will,” she wrote. But, in Libya,
Obama acted decisively, and while his Administration may have prevented a
massacre, it also became responsible for a more durable disaster. For
all the hand-wringing that preceded the Libyan intervention, no one in
the Obama White House seems to have given serious consideration to what
would happen if a civil war broke out. Obama, knowing that Americans had
little interest in another foreign entanglement, assured citizens that
the U.S. would put no troops on the ground, and would play no major role
in reconstruction. This was a gamble with very long odds.
The
collapse of Qaddafi’s regime loosed a wave of anarchy. The coalition
government that took power after Qaddafi’s fall failed to disarm the
many militias that had fought in the rebellion, and a military conflict
among armed factions swept the country. The conflict drew in neighboring
countries, with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia backing more
secular groups and Turkey and Qatar supporting the Islamists. The most
recent fighting features a weak government in Tripoli, nominally backed
by the U.S. and other Western countries, against forces led by Khalifa
Haftar, a former Libyan general and C.I.A. proxy, who has been supported
by Egypt, the U.A.E., and Saudi Arabia. It’s difficult to determine the
exact number of people killed since the uprising began, but credible
estimates suggest that it is at least twenty-five thousand.
The
absence of a central authority turned Libya into even more of a magnet
for the wretched of sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. Today, there are
as many as a million migrants in Libya, typically on their way to
Europe, across the Mediterranean. Only a deeply problematic initiative,
in which the European Union pays the Libyan coast guard to block
migrants, has stemmed the exodus. The apprehended are often sent to
detention camps—centers of rape, robbery, and human trafficking. This is
the “severe downturn in security” that Power refers to.
Power
essentially absolves herself and the Administration of what happened
after the bombs: “We could hardly expect to have a crystal ball when it
came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the culture was
not our own.” In a certain light, this sounds like an argument for not
intervening at all. Obama has referred to America’s involvement in Libya
as the worst decision of his Presidency.
Power
is ideally placed to write about the clash between moral imperatives
and political necessities. Instead, her memoir unfolds as an inspiring
story of a woman’s rise. We are witness to her childhood in Ireland; her
parents’ separation; her courtship, marriage, and motherhood; and her
career as an activist and a government official. For the most part, the
issues that she struggled with so intently in “ ‘A Problem from Hell’ ”
receive cursory treatment. Attention is paid to President Obama’s
anti-Ebola campaign in Africa, which Power helped lead, and which was a
refreshing success. But the focus is on lengthy reconstructions of
Power’s mundane duties, such as when, as U.N. Ambassador, she visited
the embassies of a hundred and ninety-two member states. “By visiting
the other ambassadors rather than having them travel to the US Mission
to meet me (as was traditional), I was able to see the art my colleagues
wanted to showcase, the family photos
on their desks, and the books they had brought with them all the way to
America,” she writes. Almost no one in this book comes in for a critical
word. Of the late Vitaly Churkin, the Russian U.N. representative who
vetoed a resolution commemorating the Srebrenica massacre as a genocide
and defended Russia’s annexation of Crimea, she writes, “Vitaly and I
both loved sports, and the only times he didn’t answer his phone were
when Russia was competing in the Olympics or the World Cup.” Much of the
book reads as though it were written by someone campaigning for her
next job—one that requires Senate confirmation.
So
it’s striking that Power opens her book by describing a day, in
September, 2013, when she and Obama conferred over how to respond to the
chemical-weapons attack, in defiance of the “red line” Obama had drawn
the previous year, that had killed more than a thousand Syrian
civilians. This was one of the most dramatic moments in Obama’s years in
office. Power quickly drops the issue, and does not revisit it for
three hundred and fifty pages. Yet the challenges she has chosen to
sidestep are ones that weigh heavily in the assessment of Obama’s
Presidency.
The Syrian uprising was set in motion in 2011, when
citizens began demonstrating against Bashar al-Assad and the autocratic
regime run by the Assad family for four decades. The protests were
largely peaceful at first, but the regime responded with brutal
repression, and the country spun into civil war, with rebels receiving
military support from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. By February, 2013, some
seventy thousand Syrians had been killed.
The noncombatants
targeted by Assad were almost all Sunni, members of the country’s
majority population, and so his actions plausibly fit the legal
definition of genocide, which Power described in her first book as an
irrefutable call to action. But, in office, she found that practical and
political considerations overwhelmed the moral concerns. The President
had campaigned on a promise to get the U.S. out of the Middle East. I
visited Obama in the White House in the winter of 2013, half a year
after he had drawn his red line. He clearly had no enthusiasm for any
kind of armed intervention. “We can’t even identify the groups on the
ground that we might support,” he told me.
Regime change seemed
exceedingly difficult, because there was no organized group remotely
capable of taking over. Even substantial military strikes were
problematic, in part because the regime held a sprawling arsenal of
chemical weapons, much of it in hidden locations that were unknown to
American intelligence. A U.S. attack might provoke their use;
decapitating the regime posed the risk that these weapons could fall
into the hands of ISIS.
Chastened by Libya,
Obama took only the smallest steps in Syria. Early in his second term,
his advisers, including Power and Clinton, supported imposing a no-fly
zone. No-fly zones can be effective. The no-fly zone over northern Iraq,
put in place in 1991 to protect the Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s armies,
helped provide the Kurds with space to build a semi-autonomous state
and army. A no-fly zone established over Bosnia in 1993, though not
rigorously enforced, effectively grounded the Serbian air force. In
Syria, Assad’s strategy relied heavily on aerial attacks—using poison
gas, indiscriminate shelling, and barrel bombs to terrorize the
population, until everyone except the rebels fled. The Global Public
Policy Institute (GPPi) estimates that the majority of chemical-weapons
attacks have been delivered by helicopter. With a no-fly zone, such a
campaign would have been impossible.
But Obama declined. A no-fly
zone would have required destroying the country’s formidable
Russian-provided air-defense network, and killing many Syrian soldiers.
And Syria was far from a defeated state, as Iraq had been in 1991. Nor
would a no-fly zone have stopped all chemical-weapons attacks. The
attack that prompted the crisis meeting Power describes in the opening
of her book involved sarin-gas shells delivered to a Damascus suburb by
artillery. As the reports were confirmed, Obama initially indicated that
he intended to punish Assad. He deployed warships to the Mediterranean
and reviewed options for a strike—only to call the strike off at the
last minute to ask Congress for permission. Congress was having none of
it.
Abroad,
though, the idea of “leading from behind” may have resulted in a
qualified success. In September, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry
publicly mused that the crisis could be solved if Assad surrendered his
chemical weapons. The Russians volunteered to help, and they eventually
managed to remove most of Assad’s arsenal—thirteen hundred tons of
chemical weapons at twenty-three locations across the country. For
Obama, this was a humanitarian victory, even if it required a
humiliating sacrifice of international prestige. It may also have
forestalled a more pressing need to invade. The operation to remove
chemical arms from Syria concluded in the summer of 2014, just as ISIS
swept in from the desert. Had those weapons remained, the U.S. might
well have felt compelled to send a huge force to seize them. “Obama
would have invaded Syria,” Chollet said. “We could not have allowed even
the smallest chance that ISIS could have gotten
hold of them.” Instead, Obama dispatched some seven thousand American
troops to northeast Syria and to Iraq in order to fight ISIS. After they arrived, a de-facto no-fly zone
was established in Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria. The policy,
which remains in effect, has kept Assad and his allies from bombing
civilians in the area.
But elsewhere in Syria the story was very
different. Assad started making and deploying more chemical
weapons—usually chlorine gas, which is barbaric but not illegal, and
often in less than lethal concentrations, to avoid attracting attention.
According to the GPPi, the regime has used chemical weapons two hundred
and sixty-six times since the U.N. declared that they had been removed.
After two such attacks, in 2017 and 2018, Donald Trump ordered missile
strikes. They didn’t work: Assad has used chemical weapons sixty-one
times during Trump’s tenure.
Obama’s hesitation led to one other
unintended consequence: it brought in an indiscriminate Russian campaign
of bombing and artillery barrages that drove millions of Syrians out of
the country. Hundreds of thousands fled to Europe, helping to trigger a
continent-wide wave of reaction. In this way, a humanitarian crisis
morphed into a geopolitical one.
Power, who once urged Americans
to search the world for people whom they could help, writes of
reassuring herself by looking inward. In one chapter, she describes how
Obama weighed a response to a chemical attack that caused the deaths of
hundreds of Syrian children. After long deliberation, he declined to
act. Power steps back from the debate and concludes the chapter on a
personal note. “I reminded myself of my good fortune: I could put my
kids to bed knowing that, when I checked on them late at night, they
would be there, breathing soundly in their sleep,” she writes.
The
memoirs of former Obama aides follow a similar pattern in reckoning
with the catastrophe in Syria: the aides discuss their revulsion at the
slaughter and their desire to use American power to ameliorate it. But
they don’t say much about failure and its consequences, or about what
might have been done differently—perhaps because such arguments have no
end.
If the United States had intervened more forcefully, would
the Syrian war have turned out otherwise? Robert Ford, the last American
Ambassador to Syria, opposed a no-fly zone and sending American troops
to fight, but he thinks the outcome would have been different had Obama
heeded his recommendation to arm moderate rebels. By late 2014, Ford
believes, it was too late. He had served several years in Iraq, where he
watched how the insurgency against the Americans evolved; over time,
the secular and nationalist forces were pushed aside, and radical
Islamists came to dominate. Ford believed that he was witnessing a
similar dynamic in Syria. “If we don’t help the moderates, we are going
to end up having to fight the extremists,” he said.
Acting
on the recommendation, though, would have meant arming the rebels with
sophisticated weapons, like anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, and
American officials feared that those weapons could fall into the wrong
hands. The Pentagon did mount an effort, at a cost of as much as five
hundred million dollars, to engage Syrian fighters. But it was directed
solely at attacking ISIS, and most of these
combatants wanted to fight the Syrian government. The C.I.A. launched a
similar campaign, but it proved ineffectual. “There was never enough,
and it was always too little too late,” Ford told me. Perhaps so, but
the dismal results posted by the C.I.A. and the Pentagon suggest that
doubling down in the same endeavor would have failed. Anyone who has
spent time in Iraq or Afghanistan during the past fifteen years knows
that American soldiers and foreign-service officers are ill-equipped to
shape events in dangerous countries. An effective effort would have
required U.S. military officers to fight Assad’s forces alongside the
rebels, a troops-on-the-ground policy that had no domestic political
support and that Obama was unwilling to advocate.
Ford continued
to publicly support Obama’s policy in Syria, even though he thought it
was failing. In 2013, during an appearance before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, he was harshly criticized by both Democratic and
Republican senators, particularly by John McCain, who excoriated him for
his role in a “shameful chapter in American history.” Ultimately, Ford
quit. “I was defending a policy I didn’t even support,” he said. Power,
in her book, recounts a telephone conversation, in 2014, in which McCain
lit into her in a similar fashion. Obama’s policy, he told her, was a
disgrace, and she was defiling herself by defending it. Before slamming
the phone down, he shouted, “You should resign.” Power didn’t resign, of
course, and it’s unclear that she should have. If the events of her
tenure at the White House have taught us anything, though, it is that
the moral case for intervention is only as strong as the practicality of
the mission itself. There is no moral case for doing something you’re
not able to do.
The biggest reason that memoirs from the Obama
Administration tend to avoid lingering on humanitarian intervention is
simply that the record provides little to brag about: a disaster in
Libya and in Syria, and a quagmire in Afghanistan, where the prospects
of millions of women, empowered by the removal of the Taliban, hang in
the balance. In Iraq, Obama’s decision to withdraw American troops,
against the advice of his military, opened the door to ISIS,
whose fighters massacred thousands of Yazidis and Christians, and other
minorities. In other places where Obama turned down requests
for military assistance—as in Ukraine—the counterfactuals are just as
murky. Could Obama have done more? In retrospect, the answer is always
yes. Would the results look better? Knowing the answer would require, as
Power said of the decision to intervene in Libya, a crystal ball. ♦
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