The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  I heard myself begin, “Well, hopefully, we can . . .” But then, catching Saleh’s gaze, I stopped.

  He had pulled the bodies of dead children from the rubble of Assad’s air strikes. He had seen the damage that chemical weapons, shattered glass, and falling cement did to the human body. He deserved more than hollow words. I just looked at him as we sat across from each other.

  Instead of filling the silence, Saleh just stared back. For an entire minute, perhaps even two, neither of us said anything.

  For all of the words that had been expended in the White House Situation Room and the UN Security Council, I knew that neither the United States government nor the governments of other capable countries were planning to confront a scale of evil rarely seen in this world. Syrian civilians were going to remain besieged until they surrendered to the Assad regime. And when they capitulated, even worse could follow.

  While our discussion eventually resumed, it was tense. After I said goodbye to Saleh, my speechwriter Nik Steinberg reflected, “Every official in the US government should be required to sit through a meeting like that and have to justify our response.”

  FROM MY EARLIEST DAYS in the job, I had heard calls for my resignation over our administration’s Syria policy.

  “UN Ambassador Samantha Power made her reputation by denouncing Western indifference to the types of atrocities the Assad regime is committing by the day,” wrote the Wall Street Journal editorial board. “She of all people could set a fine example here of choosing principle over power.” In a Washington Post piece titled, “You Got Some Nerve, Madame Ambassador,” opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote, “In a better world, you’d resign, give back the Pulitzer and do something more constructive. Write a sequel, perhaps, about the age of genocide. You’ve been there, every step of the way.”

  Rubin did not relent, calling for me to step down in three more articles, including one in which she asserted that I was remaining in the administration out of an “unwillingness to sacrifice career or monetary benefits (or fancy New York lodging) for the sake of principle.”

  Opinion pieces like this were extremely upsetting to Mum and Eddie, although they had very different reactions to them. Eddie’s approach was to go after the messenger. “Bastards,” he would rage at some of the more caustic takedowns. “What have these columnists ever done for anybody?”

  Inevitably, he would then say, “Obama should call a press conference to go out and defend you.” He must have suggested this a half dozen times, despite my reminders that the President had a country to run and was himself being subjected to far more severe and damaging attacks.

  My mother, an insomniac in the best of circumstances, stayed up all night every time a friend of hers carelessly forwarded an article condemning my terribleness. “Just keep doing your best, Sam,” she would say.

  Friends of mine seemed surprised that I wasn’t more rattled by these denunciations. But if events in Syria did nothing else, they gave me perspective. Syrians are suffering unimaginable losses, I thought; I am getting some bad press.

  But despite this logical response to criticisms of me personally, I was often flattened with horror by what was happening in Syria itself. When I would read the details of some new massacre, I often closed my office door and prayed for those begging for rescue, appealing also for wisdom as to how I could help. In February of 1994, when Bosnian Serbs had shelled the market in Sarajevo, killing sixty-eight shoppers and vendors, the attack had outraged people everywhere and led the world news for days. In Syria, almost as many civilians were dying every single day—attacked in their homes and schools, deliberately starved to death, shot by snipers, and executed in Syria’s prisons in a depraved and methodically documented murder scheme.56

  One of the most vocal public advocates for greater US involvement in Syria was Senator McCain. I had worked with McCain during my years at the White House, and he had supported me during my confirmation process. So when he placed a hold on Deputy National Security Advisor Antony Blinken’s nomination to become Obama’s Deputy Secretary of State, I volunteered to call the senator to smooth out the situation.

  “McCain and I have a great relationship,” I assured Blinken. “I’ve got this.”

  Our call began calmly. I told McCain that if he allowed the nomination to go forward, Blinken would become an important voice within the administration for doing more to protect Syrian civilians. As I finished my pitch, the senator erupted.

  “What planet are you living on?” he shouted.

  Sitting at my desk in New York, I held the receiver away from my ear. For the next several minutes, McCain did not seem to take a breath as he denounced Obama and what he deemed our administration’s “complete indifference to human life.”

  Initially, I took notes, scribbling down McCain’s points so I could respond to them. Many of his arguments about the gap between our objectives and what we were doing to realize them were ones I had made in the Situation Room, so I was achingly familiar with the rebuttals.

  I started by citing Congress’s opposition to the use of force in response to Assad’s 2013 chemical weapons attack—a reflection of how unenthusiastic the American people were for a military engagement in Syria. McCain interrupted me.

  “That is a complete cop-out!” he shouted. “Barack Obama has spent the last several years telling the American people that getting involved in Syria would be a disaster, and now he claims that he’s not getting involved because the American people had the decency to listen to him!”

  I tried bringing the conversation back to the importance of having Blinken in the Situation Room, where he could influence the direction of our debates. But McCain had had enough.

  “You know what—not only should Blinken never be confirmed by the US Senate, but you should resign. NOW!”

  The line went dead. He had hung up.

  FROM THE EARLIEST STAGES of Syria’s war, I had weighed the risks of any new US action against the risks of maintaining the general direction of our policy. As I considered the potential dangers in either direction—first as a White House staffer, and then as UN ambassador—I had tried not only to factor in the harms of the present, and all that could go wrong if we deepened our involvement, but also to assess what the trends in the conflict portended for Syria, the Middle East region, and the United States.

  From 2012 onward, it was clear that if the United States and others did not alter the trajectory of the Syrian war, the consequences would extend well beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives that would be lost in Syria. Millions of refugees would pour into neighboring countries. Terrorists would continue to draw recruits, lured by the sectarian conflict. Foreign fighters, radicalized and battle-hardened, would eventually seek to return from Syria to the United States and Europe.*

  President Obama frequently convened us to discuss options for jump-starting the stalled diplomatic process and limiting the carnage. In these meetings, I and others argued that the United States should accept greater risk in the present to prevent more horrific and extensive harm down the road. We suggested measures including air-dropping food parcels to besieged civilians being starved to death by Assad’s forces, significantly increasing our support for the Syrian military opposition so they could better defend civilians from Assad’s attacks, and creating a no-fly zone over select areas of Syria that were under opposition control.

  Each of these proposals came with potential benefits and risks. The no-fly zone, for example, could both protect civilians and neutralize the Syrian government’s singular advantage: its ability to bomb populations into submission. Unlike Qaddafi in Libya, Assad used air power as a key tool of terror and death. If government forces were unable to inflict harm from the air, they would be more likely to seriously consider peace negotiations. Hampering Assad’s ability to destroy pockets of the opposition would also lead to fewer refugees fleeing the country. However, the Pentagon estimated that Syria had five times the air defense capability as Libya, meaning that the US military wo
uld first have had to destroy Syrian anti-aircraft systems before putting in place any no-fly zone.

  Obama demanded and reviewed proposals such as these, and those of us advocating for new measures earnestly prepared for every meeting by refining and adapting them based on evolving battlefield and geopolitical dynamics. But ever since the President had pulled back from air strikes in August of 2013, he had been looking for lower-risk options to impact the direction of the war—which didn’t exist.

  Our internal debates became circular and unproductive. In meeting after meeting, participants would emerge better informed about the conflict, yet even more polarized in our respective views on what the United States should—or shouldn’t—do differently.

  Once, when President Obama began a Situation Room discussion on Syria by remarking, “I don’t expect a solution out of today’s meeting,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey quipped, “We won’t disappoint you there, sir.”

  Cass had introduced me to the behavioral science concept of “confirmation bias”—the inclination to hunt for, interpret, and remember information in a manner that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs. None of us was immune to this tendency, which Simon and Garfunkel had so aptly summed up in “The Boxer”: “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” I would leave many meetings on Syria unable to get the song’s refrain out of my head: “Lye-la-lye, lye-la-la-la-lye-la-lye, lye-la-lye . . .”

  On several occasions, President Obama reprimanded me for comments he thought were dogmatic or sanctimonious.

  “We’ve all read your book, Samantha,” he snapped in one Situation Room meeting. I looked down, chastened. But fifteen minutes later, he said, “Let’s get back to the point Sam made earlier . . .” He seemed to be trying to rehabilitate me, knowing that his criticisms could make me less influential in meetings he wasn’t chairing.

  Likewise, following a different meeting, he telephoned to complain about something I had said.

  “You are trying to tutor us as to why this is such a shit show,” he said. “People are heartbroken and anguished. I rack my brain and my conscience constantly. But I can’t answer in practical terms what we can do.”

  As someone who talked often about the humanitarian dimensions of various crises, I knew the risk of coming across as self-righteous. I went out of my way to avoid impugning my colleagues or sounding strident. Even when I was an activist and outsider, I believed that making—and criticizing—US foreign policy should be done with humility. I did not think Obama’s interpretation of my comments was fair, so I pulled out my notebook during our call and read to him precisely what I had said in the meeting. I wanted to demonstrate that I had offered a concrete recommendation and grappled with the very real constraints that he faced. I never wanted to fall into the trap of “admiring the problem.”

  Obama conceded the point, but added, “You don’t always come across the way you think.” Given the horrors happening day after day in Syria, I was not entirely surprised.

  On no other issue did I see Obama so personally torn—convinced that even limited military action would mire the United States in another open-ended conflict, yet wracked by the human toll of the slaughter. I don’t believe he ever stopped interrogating his choices.

  While Syria brought only grim news, Obama refused to allow it to dictate his overall outlook on humanity’s capacity for progress over time. He professed a distinct optimism about what the future held for the world. “We’re pushing in the direction of more security, more international norms and rules, more human rights, more free speech, less religious intolerance,” Obama said in a typical interview in 2015. His hopeful disposition often became intertwined with a belief that the US government could do best by avoiding foreign policy mistakes of the kind it had so often made. His memorable mantra for how he evaluated options in this arena became “don’t do stupid shit.”

  In choosing me as UN ambassador, Obama knew he was appointing someone impatient about present-day harms. Even as I tried never to identify a problem without offering recommendations for what the United States could do about it, I was not shy about bombarding him with statistics highlighting the global decline in freedom and rise in inequality over the previous decade. When I did so, he would throw back data on the tremendous gains in maternal health, poverty, and literacy, or note that the number of democracies around the world had nearly doubled since the end of the Cold War.

  While Obama told me many times, “you get on my nerves,” he didn’t push me away. On the rare occasions when I didn’t speak during a national security debate, he would joke, “Are you sick, Power?” or draw me out by saying, “Samantha has that skeptical look again.” In our very first meeting over dinner in 2005, he had said he synthesized ideas well. He seemed to want my perspective and my sense of urgency in the mix.

  AFTER ASSAD’S CHEMICAL WEAPONS ATTACKS in 2013, I believe that the United States should have followed through on Obama’s threats and bombed the Syrian military targets designated by the Pentagon. Even having not taken this step, before Russia intervened militarily two years later, we should have at least attempted to mobilize a group of countries to enforce a no-fly zone. If implemented, this would have offered some civilians protection from Syrian air assaults. In light of the complexity of the conflict and the vast number of factions that became involved, these steps in and of themselves would certainly not have ended the war. But they could have mitigated some of its most egregious effects and potentially helped ignite the diplomacy necessary to establish a cease-fire.

  Starting in 2014, however, the Obama administration’s priority in Syria shifted from ending the civil war to confronting the terrifying rise of ISIS. President Obama directed a comprehensive effort to defeat what was quickly becoming both the world’s most lethal terrorist organization and an alarming threat to American national security.

  After overseeing the removal of American forces from Iraq in 2011, Obama sent thousands of troops back to the country, at the behest of the Iraqi government, to take part in the fight against ISIS. By 2015, the US-led military coalition had begun to make significant headway, helping liberate territory held by ISIS in both Iraq and neighboring Syria. At the UN, my team and I helped spearhead the passage of a number of anti-ISIS resolutions in support of the coalition’s efforts. We crafted new laws requiring UN member states to prevent foreign fighters from traveling to Syria to join ISIS. We made it far harder for ISIS to access funds to pay those in their ranks. And we targeted ISIS’s looting and sale of Syria’s highly coveted cultural artifacts, calling on Interpol to track illicit antiquity sales and requiring member states to pass laws cracking down on the international trade in these items. (Fifty countries went on to pass such laws.)

  While we did this, however, the Assad regime used the world’s focus on ISIS as cover to decimate Syrian civilians in opposition-held areas. The Syrian government, which had portrayed even peaceful protesters as “terrorists,” now attempted to justify its brazen attacks by lumping in the entire opposition with ISIS and al-Qaeda.

  Once Russia had intervened militarily in the fall of 2015, its aircraft helped the Syrian government attack population centers. With Russian soldiers now involved in the war, Obama saw that the risks of US military entanglement had further increased. Although the President initially argued that the Russians would pull back only if they paid a military price—what he called getting “a bloody nose”—he soon directed that US-backed opposition groups avoid clashes with Russian forces. The Pentagon worked assiduously to deconflict its flight patterns with those of Russian jets. In such a contested airspace, widening the American mission beyond ISIS would have created more opportunities for an accidental confrontation—and subsequent escalation—between the Russian and American militaries.

  Obama’s reluctance to take further action in Syria played into critiques that he was an unfeeling, “Spock”-like leader. The New Yorker’s David Remnick quoted a more novel, alternative assessment from a former US official
, who observed, “Obama is basically a realist—but he feels bad about it.”

  Despite our differences over Syria, such portrayals did not ring true to me.

  Obama took unprecedented steps to protect civilians in a range of circumstances. When I undertook an extensive atrocity prevention agenda at the White House, he offered unbridled support. He had such concern for Libyan civilians that he had ordered military action to protect them despite his goal of reducing US military deployments overseas. Although commentators frequently claimed that Obama came to view the Libya decision as the “worst mistake” of his presidency, he made publicly clear that what he regretted was “failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya” (italics mine).57

  And despite the fracturing of Libya and his resistance to deeper involvement in Syria, Obama had responded quickly to ISIS’s threat to wipe out the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking religious minority group in Iraq. In August of 2014, tens of thousands of defenseless Yazidis had fled ISIS’s approaching troops and retreated to Mount Sinjar, where they were trapped without food or water. They seemed almost certain to die of starvation and dehydration or else be killed en masse by ISIS.

  I joined Secretary Kerry, Ben Rhodes, and others in advocating the use of US air power to protect the Yazidis, but President Obama had already decided to order US military aircraft to begin airdropping supplies to the mountain and conducting air strikes on ISIS positions. These strikes provided cover to Kurdish ground forces, who opened up a corridor that allowed the trapped Yazidis to escape into Iraqi Kurdistan. As the President declared publicly at the time, “When we have the unique capabilities to help avert a massacre, then I believe the United States of America cannot turn a blind eye. We can act, carefully and responsibly, to prevent a potential act of genocide. That’s what we’re doing on that mountain.” Due to Obama’s actions, an estimated 30,000 people were saved.*