Since the war in Iraq began, millions of Iraqis have fled their homes for safety and security. More than 1.5 million Iraqis are currently living in Syria, Jordan and other neighboring countries, and more than 2.5 million Iraqis are internally displaced. These people are some of the world's most vulnerable. For years, NGOs supporting Iraqi refugees and internally displaced people have called on the US government for a more comprehensive plan to assist these people and their host communities. Finally, the US government has responded, and the president has appointed Samantha Power to coordinate these efforts.
We will never know if Sergio Vieira de Mello fully appreciated the life lessons and experiences that Power captures so beautifully in Chasing the Flame. Nor do we know if he could have transformed them into policy. His final posting in Iraq represented that opportunity, but that opportunity was, as Power describes, constantly frustrated by the United States.
When Power climbed into Sergio's life and mined it for lessons as she walked with him through Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Iraq, she realized that Sergio's experiences could shed light on and clarify a new way of acting in the world. Indeed, the key lessons that she derives from Sergio's career are appropriate guidance for her as she assumes this new responsibility.
*Legitimacy matters, and it comes both from legal authority or consent and from competent performance.
*Spoilers, rogue states, and non-state militants must be engaged, if only so they can be sized up and neutralized.
*Fearful people must be made more secure.
*Dignity is the cornerstone of order.
*We outsiders must bring humility and patience to our dealings with foreign lands.
US failures in Iraq are well-documented. Chief among them has been the failure to coordinate the various agencies (and individuals) working in and on the country and the wider region. Power has the opportunity to correct this failure and her success is dependent upon it. This is where she will have the opportunity to draw upon her own life lessons and experiences. It's clear that Power has an ability to synthesize and then articulate complex ideas into policy (not ideology). She has the ability to engage and excite people, to bring them along with her--she's a natural bridge-builder, and she appreciates the deeply transnational dimensions of this work. She's courageous, pragmatic and passionately human. Power faces an enormous challenge, but she is also someone who unashamedly believes in making the world better, in our capacity to change it, in our responsibility to do that work.
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning first book, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, Power quotes George Bernard Shaw. That quote should act as inspiration for her - and for all of us - as she takes on one of the world's biggest challenges and as she begins to provide the much needed short and long term support that these vulnerable human beings in Iraq so sorely need.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress, depends on the unreasonable man.”
George Bernard Shaw
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