Samantha Power
Samantha Power was in 2008 a foreign policy adviser to the then Senator (as of 2009, president) Barack Obama. She is a Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard University and the former head of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. In 2003, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Her latest book is a biography of UN diplomat Sergio de Mello called Chasing the Flame.[1] On 25 February 2008, when interviewed by Amy Goodman on DemocracyNow and asked if she was in contention for the post of Secretary of State, Power, in a round about way said yes.
Tom Hayden writes:
- The Carr Center does not officially favor the war in Iraq, though one of its former directors, Michael Ignatieff, is famed for endorsing the US as a "21st century imperium", an "empire lite”, and publicly calling for “acceptable degrees of coercive interrogation." On the other hand, there is the formidable Samantha Power, an Irish-born humanitarian who strongly supported the US-NATO Balkans war and campaigned for Gen. Wesley Clark in 2004. Power is a close adviser to Sen. Barack Obama, who supports a withdrawal of US combat troops by next year with exceptions for "advisers" and special units to battle al-Qaeda. Power, who worked last year in Obama's Washington, DC office, writes that even the proposed combat troop withdrawal can be reversed if Iraq's condition continues to worsen. Intentionally or not, the cautious, complicated Obama proposal as described by Power leaves open the likelihood of thousands of American troops remaining in counter-insurgency roles for years ahead.
If that is the limit of legitimate debate at Harvard, the Pentagon occupation of the academic mind may last much longer than its occupation of Iraq, and may require an intellectual insurgency in response.[2]
Contents
Memorable quotes
- Expectation calibration and expectation management is essential at home and internationally.
-Barack Obama's Foreign Policy Advisor Samantha Power, 21 February 2008[3]
Fashionable causes
Samantha Power is the instigator of a campaign for intervention in Darfur which seeks the public to wear a green armband.[4]
Affiliations
- Carr Center for Human Rights Policy – former Chair
Contact, References and Resources
Contact
Resources
- Edward Herman, Richard Holbrooke, Samantha Power, and the "Worthy-Genocide" Establishment, Znet, 24 March 2007.
- Edward Herman and David Peterson, There Is No "War on Terror", ZNet, 18 January 2008.
References
- ↑ DN Profile: Samantha Power, 25 February 2008.
- ↑ Tom Hayden, Harvard's Humanitarian Hawks, Znet, 16 July 2007.
- ↑ Paul Street, "Calibrating" HOPE in the Effort to "Patrol the Commons": Samantha Power and the Hidden Imperial Reality of Barack Obama, ZNet, 26 February 2008.
- ↑ Ref needed
