A State Department official resigned on October 14, writing in a letter that the U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza “will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and Palestinian people.” The director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights resigned on October 31, stating that “once again we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes and the organization we serve appears powerless to stop it.”
With over 20,000 now dead in Gaza, there’s one government official who you’d assume — at least if you take her own words seriously — would join them. That is Samantha Power, current head of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Before that, she was the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. during the Obama administration.
But Power first rose to prominence with her 2002 book “‘A Problem From Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide.” It won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, with the citation reading, “Samantha Power poses a question that haunts our nation’s past: Why do American leaders who vow ‘never again’ repeatedly fail to marshal the will and the might to stop genocide?”
In the book’s introduction, Power makes this observation: “This country’s consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide offers sad testimony not to a broken American political system but to one that is ruthlessly effective. The system, as it stands now, is working.”
There is no sign of Power taking a principled stand on Gaza, however. Rather, she is spending her time proudly tweeting about all the good the U.S. is doing in the world, such as the arrival in Egypt of 147,000 pounds of humanitarian aid. This is approximately one ounce per person in Gaza.
In her book, Power depicts a grim history of U.S. realpolitik — during the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and more — that is totally indifferent to human suffering. In her telling, the ranks of the government are filled with cowardly, faceless apparatchiks who consistently choose their careers over humanity. Power describes them as “those who sat before their computers or bumped into one another in the [State] department’s drab cafeteria … [bureaucrats] who were protective of turf and career and not at all in the habit of rocking the boat.”
The book would be unbearably bleak if it weren’t for various heroes that Power locates in the labyrinthian halls of government, individuals who are so sick at heart at U.S. policy that they can no longer carry it out and publicly resign.
First, Power celebrates George Kenney, the State Department’s acting Yugoslav desk officer, who stepped down in 1992. Kenney decried George H.W. Bush’s disinterest in various massacres during the dissolution of Yugoslavia, with his cri de coeur making the front page of the Washington Post. When Power later covered the Balkans as a journalist, she wore a camouflage vest and helmet given to her by Kenney.
Then, in August 1993, Marshall Freeman Harris, the State Department’s Bosnia desk officer, resigned. Power interviewed him and quotes him as saying, “When you are in a bureaucracy, you can either put your head down and become cynical, tired and inured, or you can stick your head up and try to do something.”
Then, two more State officials left. Power cites a letter from one of them, Steven Walker, in which Walker wrote, “I can no longer countenance U.S. support for a diplomatic process that legitimizes aggression and genocide.”
So you might believe that Power herself would obviously step down now in the face of Israel’s actions in Gaza. After all, what’s happening now is arguably a greater indictment of the U.S. than what she writes about in “‘A Problem From Hell,’” which covers examples in which the U.S. government took little or no action to intervene to halt mass death. Here the U.S. is directly and unyieldingly supporting mass death.
At the end of the book, Power considers the past century and asks some cogent questions: “How many of us do not believe that the presidents, senators, bureaucrats, journalists, and ordinary citizens who did nothing, choosing to look away rather than to face hard choices and wrenching moral dilemmas, were wrong? And how can something so clear in retrospect become so muddled at the time by rationalizations, institutional constraints, and a lack of imagination? How can it be that those who fight on behalf of these principles are the ones deemed unreasonable?”
How indeed. For now, however, Power shows no signs of asking herself any such questions about the present and her role in it. If she did, she might see herself in these lines from a poem by Joseph Brodsky that she tweeted out four years ago:
Time, whose sharp blood-thirsty quill
Parts the killed from those who kill,
Will pronounce the latter tribe
As your type.
