Samantha Power and Foreign Intervention

Jeffrey Goldberg looks at U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, published a decade ago, for clues on her views about the problems in Syria.

“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.”