Jonathan Guyer@mideastXmidwest
Samantha Power, at last, addresses Gaza's Problem from Hell
"I don't just get up and decide today what US foreign policy is," she told the University of Notre Dame this week. "That is the price of being in government."
The comments were perhaps the most in-depth to date on why the Pulitzer-winning author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide stayed on in the Biden administration throughout the Gaza catastrophe, which many have documented as a genocide.
Biden's former USAID administrator spoke at the 32nd Annual Hesburgh Lecture in Ethics and Public Policy, hosted by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Notably she did not discuss Gaza or Palestine during her prepared remarks, but a student posed a question to her in the Q&A.
Here is my quick transcription of this remarkable exchange.
Student: In your book, A Problem from Hell, you criticize US's passivity in watching genocide unfold. You also recognize the power of using the word genocide, the G-word, in recognizing genocide. Yet, as you yourself held a position of power in government, you failed to call out the genocide in Gaza, referring to it more as a humanitarian crisis. Given the importance of recognizing genocide and acting on genocide, I'm wondering why you did not name the genocide in Gaza and when you were in a position of power and if you continue to hold that.
SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, Gaza was the most difficult humanitarian crisis I worked in, certainly at USAID and probably my whole career.
My job was to get food and medicine to the people who were living in Gaza, who were not getting access to clean water, to electricity, to adequate medicine, and of course, were suffering in many cases from acute severe malnutrition.
While I know that there's an impulse on the outside for any official, especially a senior official who has the privilege that I had, to make my own foreign policy, that's not what happens when you go into the government. I don't just get up and decide today what US foreign policy is.
I certainly as somebody who wasn't then, and I'm not now, looking at evidence as a lawyer, and I'm trying to get food from Point A to Point B with my men, and above all I'm supporting my teams, who are doing God's work 24-7 to do that, and failing by the way a lot of the time, because of the obstruction by the Israeli government. But when you are in government, that is the price of being in government.
It was a very different, analogous circumstance, but on Syria, I had lots of debates and discussions with President Obama on the "red line" and what to do, and this and that. Once I have failed to convince someone within the Situation Room about a course of action that I might favor, then I'm out there representing the administration's position. And for some of you, that is just going to be too big a price to pay.
For me to have the opportunity every day to get food from Point A to Point B, it was worth all of the understandable criticism that comes from outside. Like I totally respect your position, your frustration… But for me to have resigned and not be doing that work, also not be doing energy repair—not that I was doing it personally—but supporting energy repair in Ukraine when Putin's taking out the energy, not supporting girls education online for the Afghan girls and women who'd been taken out of classrooms by the Taliban. We were doing so much every day that seemed really significant and impactful.
The price of being part of a team that can do that great work, an administration that can do that great work, is you are going to be part of what the president ultimately decides the policies and the positions are. So other people might have handled it differently, could have decided that it was better to be back in academia and criticizing from outside, or again mustering evidence as a lawyer even to judge intent and whether the intent rose to the level of genocide.
My view was I had the greatest job in the world to try to do as much good as I could in the fleeting time that I had in that position.
