NikkiSerapio.com

Posted earlier on OurPledge.org:

On September 23, 2009, National Security Council Director Samantha Power briefed the press on a meeting that same day between President Obama and representatives of a number of UN peacekeeping-contributing countries.

Power is arguably best known as the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. The book, incidentally, was and still is a vital guide for the Sudan movement. By meticulously cataloging and analyzing a long history of U.S. political and moral failure, A Problem from Hell reveals what needs to be changed in our country’s strategic and tactical game plans for combating genocide and other mass atrocities.

When President Obama took office, Power put on a new hat. Formally speaking, she is now the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the National Security Council. A perhaps excessively long title, yes, but the practical importance of having this particular person in this particular position should be clear to anyone. Power knows very well the different shades of political expediency, negligence, and wishful thinking that have undermined U.S. approaches to stopping genocide in the past. Accordingly, she can apply (and hopefully already has applied) this encyclopedic knowledge to help create anti-genocide policy instruments, institutions, and norms that actually save and protect lives.

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Power’s September 23rd Q&A press briefing included this important back-and-forth:

QUESTION: Thank you. My name is Laolu Akande. I work for the Guardian of Nigeria. I just have two really quick questions, specifically on the UNAMID situation in Darfur. For a long while, the generals of the troops there, I believe it was General Agwai, stressed the need that they needed about 18 helicopters. And all through [inaudible] there for about two years, I don’t think they got up to four. Did the President make any commitment to ensure that this kind of situation does not repeat itself?…

MS. POWER: …On the helicopters, you raise an excellent point. And it’s not just the last few years where we’ve had the helicopter Darfur issue. Of course, one only has to go back to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 to remember all of the painstaking effort that was made just to try to get armored personnel carriers to the peacekeepers in Rwanda while the genocide was underway. There are issues of red tape that I think this Administration is committing — it has committed itself and is engaged in trying to cut through. That is in other countries, and of course, as well in our collective effort in every country, we’ve got to cut through the red tape.

And then there is — really the message again that the President delivered today in the General Assembly is how can we get countries — each of us to ask ourselves where can we add value here. Maybe we’re not a country that’s going to send troops to South Sudan or to Haiti or to Liberia — this is any country — but maybe we have helicopters or maybe we have helicopter pilots. And that’s why I closed with the quote that the President gave at the end of his press conference saying respect, support, and thanks, and him saying that we’re going to work bilaterally and multilaterally.

Here, we think Power is absolutely right to connect Darfur and 1994 Rwanda. The international community’s failure (so far) to secure eighteen helicopters for the UN’s struggling Darfur force should draw comparisons to the U.S.’s monumental failures to act materially against the Rwandan genocide. With millions of Darfuris in need of adequate protection right now, there’s simply no excuse for delay, just as there was no excuse to not provide the firepower, interventionist mandate, and troop numbers necessary to stop the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis.

Power states that “we’ve got to cut through the red tape” in regards to Darfur protection issues. As watchful advocates, we should mark this down as a kind of promise on the part of the Obama administration. Securing, deploying, and maintaining eighteen helicopters is no small feat, but in the universe of U.S. military capacity and U.S.-ally military capacity, such a task is infinitely manageable and involves no huge cost. So why not now?

The Sudan movement should continue to press the Obama administration on this and other protection priorities. If A Problem from Hell taught us anything, it’s this: assumptions often breed tragedy. Samantha Power has provided a signal that the U.S. intends to cut through bureaucracy, but we can’t take anything for granted. The building of political will through relentless citizen pressure is what changes words like Power’s into action.