This week, the Barack Obama administration’s most eloquent and ardent advocate for humanitarian intervention overseas, Samantha Power, the ambassador to the United Nations,tweeted the following about the alleged Syrian chemical weapons attack: “Reports devastating: 100s dead in streets, including kids killed by chem weapons. UN must get there fast & if true, perps must face justice.”
Since then, she’s been publicly silent. Apparently, she’s on a previously scheduled, and unfortunately timed, vacation (which a handful of Republicans are casting as a scandal of some sort, Democrats not being allowed to take vacations in August).
Even if she were in town, Power most likely wouldn’t be tweeting, or speaking publicly. The administration is bollixed-up by this latest horrendous news from Syria, and the Pentagon has been pushing hard against the diplomats -- John Kerry chief among them -- who would like to see more direct American intervention. (For more on Kerry’s argument with the Pentagon, please see this column.)
But it’s not impossible to guess what Power might be thinking. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “‘A Problem From Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide,” published a decade ago, will be our useful guide.
I pulled the book off the shelf last night, and was reminded that it is brilliant, a carefully written, deeply researched indictment of American indifference in the face of atrocity. And I realized that the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria must be driving Power mad with frustration -- frustration, of course, with Bashar al-Assad's killer regime and frustration with the international community (so-called), in particular the Russians, who will do almost anything to protect the regime from censure, but also frustration with those in the administration who have spent the past two years looking for ways to distance the U.S. from the horror.
One caveat: The 100,000 dead in Syria do not count -- at least not yet -- as victims of genocide, as the word is traditionally understood, although I think a careful analysis of the civil war shows that Assad’s minority Alawite regime has directed its criminal violence almost exclusively against members of Syria’s Sunni Muslim population.
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