Samantha Power’s name has been thrown around a lot in the discussion of U.S. military intervention in Libya. Over on the home page, I have an intellectual profile of the director of multilateral affairs for the National Security Council:
She describes herself in public appearances as “an old-fashioned human-rights person,” or “a genocide chick.” The ironic inflection conveys that she is (1) conscious that her ideas might seem basic, simple, even clichéd, and (2) no less committed to their fundamental goodness and truth. And she’s no provincial liberal: She has extensively praised American evangelicals’ international charity and takes shots at the lit-department Left’s apologists for human-rights abusers in Third World countries…
But there are some patterns of her thought which may be inapplicable to current policy regarding Libya. For example, in A Problem from Hell Power argues that there is a set of ideas that get repeated in, and hence enable, each genocide. The first is the belief that there is an ambiguous and morally complex conflict between rival groups where there is in fact a simple relationship of victimizer and victimized (policymakers, she complains, “render the bloodshed two-sided and inevitable, not genocidal”). In some cases — like the Holocaust — her view is obviously correct. But it is less obvious in Libya. Observers from security expert George Friedman toNew YorkTimes man Thomas Friedman have pointed out that Libya’s sectarian conflict has been painted over by media-savvy Libyans and intoxicated Western journalists to portray a unified democratic uprising against Qaddafi, where there are in fact strong elements of tribal power rivalries.
Comments
Check it out, and chip in to the comments.
