Samantha Power, Gaza, and the False Mea Culpas That Got Us Here

The education of a clamoring resume-polisher.

photo by Dominique A. Pineiro)

Samantha Power, who has built her career on the concept that the United States has a “responsibility to protect” civilians, is leveraging her role as administrator of USAID to support Israel’s military assault on Gaza, which has killed 20,000 Palestinians, 10,000 of them children. She is doing this in two key ways: by declining to dissent from Biden’s support for Israel, which comes in the form of arms shipments, military support, intelligence, and political backing. And by using her reputation as a human rights champion to depict the US Department of Defense as a deliverer of humanitarian aid to civilians, as it directly supports a military campaign that is killing Palestinian civilians at a rate greater than anything we have seen in modern conflicts. Power’s role in the latter is no small thing: Her pronouncements garner headlines like Reuters’, “US aid chief arrives in Egypt with aid for Gaza, announces more aid for Palestinians,” cutting against negative press after nearly three months of seeing Palestinian children pulled from rubble.

For those who followed the US role in the Yemen war that left more than 377,000 dead (a figure that is likely outdated and too conservative at this point, especially in light of deaths by starvation and disease), her role today is familiar. While serving as UN ambassador in the Obama administration, it was Power’s public silence that allowed her to back Obama’s support for the Saudi-led coalition, which included weapons shipments, intelligence, training, and mid-air refueling for the Saudi-led military coalition as it bombed schools, hospitals, factories, and neighborhoods. If she had publicly broken with her boss and opposed the US role in the war, it could have had a big impact. But instead, she stayed mum, which had the effect of shielding Saudi Arabia at the UN. Reporter Samuel Oakford captured this dynamic in a Politico article published in July 31, 2016:

As Saudi behavior grew more careless publicly, both on the ground in Yemen in the halls of the U.N., the silence from Washington, and at the U.S. mission to the U.N. in New York, continued. Ambassador Power even found herself defending an intervention in Yemen that has killed thousands of civilians, coincided with the spread of Al Qaeda, and undercut her own passionate work to draw attention to the crimes of the Assad regime in Syria.

When Trump was in office, and Power was no longer in a position of institutional power, she issued a partial, vague, and smarmy mea culpa, whereby she raised some public questions about whether she, in her role in the Obama administration, may have made some missteps. It seemed, for a few brief moments in 2018 and 2019, that she—alongside a small handful of other former high-level Obama aides—may be coming clean about her role in the war. But in light of her current role in the Gaza massacre, this looks a whole lot more like a rebranding exercise aimed at rehabilitating her image, an exercise that allowed her to ascend to another position of power, where she is now enabling a new, more brutally efficient US-backed mass killing.

In a September 26, 2018 tweet, Power addressed an effort at the time to pass a War Powers resolution, in order to compel an end to US military involvement in the Saudi-led war. At the time, that role was overseen and escalated by Trump, but it started under Obama, and remains a core legacy of his administration. “A similar effort in the Senate earlier this year came close to passing,” Power wrote of the War Powers effort. “There has only been more horrific, pointless bloodshed since. We in the Obama admin should have cut off aid. Trump shows no concern for loss of life, but Congress can act to end US involvement.”

And just over a year later, Power went on to sign a public letter urging Democratic leaders to retain an amendment in the NDAA to “terminate unauthorized U.S. participation in the Saudi-led military campaign against Yemen’s Houthis.” The letter goes on to state, “Eighty percent of Yemen’s population, or 24 million, are in need of humanitarian assistance, and roughly 10 million Yemenis are on the brink of famine.” Power’s signature appears alongside those of other top aides in the Obama-Biden administration: among them Ben Rhodes, Robert Malley, and Jake Sullivan—Biden’s current National Security Advisor who traveled to Israel last week to reaffirm the US’s lockstep support for Israel and the US’s “shared objective of defeating Hamas.”

It was an interesting moment for anti-war activists, who had spent years in the Obama administration embattled and alone, and were exasperated at Power’s decision to stay silent while providing diplomatic cover for Saudi Arabia at the UN. In 2002, Power had catapulted into prominence with her book “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, in which she argues that the United States has a responsibility to protect civilian populations against mass atrocities and genocide. In retrospect, her concept of the “responsibility to protect” has been interpreted to justify the “humanitarian” interventionism that came to define the Obama and now Biden administration approaches. But Power had, leading up to her role in the Obama administration, aggressively positioned herself as a supporter of human rights, as the person who would step in and defend the defenseless, who believed that people in positions of power should not be afraid to speak up against atrocities. As Jon Schwartz noted in a December 15 article for The Intercept, Power demanded in that book, “How many of us do not believe that the presidents, senators, bureaucrats, journalists, and ordinary citizens who did nothing, choosing to look away rather than to face hard choices and wrenching moral dilemmas, were wrong?” (Schwartz rightfully argued that, by her own standards, Power should be willing to resign over US-backed atrocities in Gaza.)

It was reasonable to expect that she would, at the very least, have something to say about the US-created, supplied and funded humanitarian crisis that was unfolding in Yemen on her watch.

When Power started speaking out under Trump, there were signs she may not be entirely sincere about examining her own responsibility. As I noted for In These Times in 2018, she never gave a full run-down of what happened behind closed doors, nor outlined a plan for repair, nor solicited feedback about what reparations could look like. And as Yemeni-American anti-war activist and scholar Shireen Al-Adeimi noted in September  2019 for In These Times, Power declined to mention her own role in the Yemen war in her much-vaunted memoir, The Education of an Idealist, about her time in the Obama administration. “Despite this glaring omission, her memoir has received mostly positive reviews that fail to criticize her for helping turn Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” Al-Adeimi wrote.

And then there’s the reality that she spoke out only under Trump, at a time when Democrats were more able to find their spine on the issue, as the war could be framed in partisan terms, as Trump’s wrongdoing. And Trump did, indeed, escalate the war, but US-backed atrocities began when Obama—and Power—were calling the shots.

The case of Power raises important questions about what a real apology looks like. It seems foolish to suggest that it wasn’t a good thing, at the time, for her to support a War Powers resolution, however minimal and tepid this support was. Anti-war activists had been isolated and ignored and needed all the help they could get. Even if it came far too late, any War Powers resolution would have gone a long way toward reducing the suffering of people in Yemen that was taking place on a tremendous scale, often hidden from view in the US. (Trump ultimately vetoed Congress’s push for a War Powers resolution in 2019.) As the saying goes, “The right looks for converts, the left looks for traitors. I cast no aspersions on anti-war activists, desperate to end a massacre, who welcomed the shifts of Power, Rhodes, and others. 

But the fact that she is in a position of power again, where she is providing cover for, legitimizing, and remaining silent while her government, her administration, and her bosses carry out what many experts  believe is a textbook case of genocide or, at the very least, ethnic cleansing, raises serious questions about what we can demand of the Powers of the world when they gesture towards an apology. US support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen wasn’t just a whoopsie: It was a catastrophic political choice that unleashed one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, that was supplied with US bombs, and the Obama administration was fully aware of its role in likely war crimes. Power never described her role in detail, nor the roles of others. She didn’t elucidate how power functioned, how a crime of this scale came to happen. These insights may have been useful if we had hoped to prevent another atrocity like what we are seeing in Gaza, let alone stop the ongoing, US-backed harms in Yemen, where present-day, Saudi-led restrictions are still cutting off vital supplies, including treatments for cancer patients. 

To discuss the question of what sufficient reparations could look like, I called up Shireen Al-Ademini, with whom I have collaborated on and off for years to document US support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen. “Everyone was so eager to let them wash off their sins, but with very little demands for sustained action,” she said. “Just saying you’re sorry doesn’t guarantee you are. They think they can say a mea culpa and then go on to have these same positions.”

Power’s complicity in today’s massacre in Gaza is especially striking because there are public figures who are taking risks, in real time, to oppose Biden’s support for Israel’s military actions. Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, Delia Ramirez, and Summer Lee particularly stand out for showing real moral courage in pushing for a ceasefire, and facing a firestorm as a result. People across the United States are risking—and losing—their jobs, their security, and their privacy, for speaking out on the issue. Power is not only silent, but actively helping market and sell the US role in Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign, and failing to come to the defense of colleagues who are not “choosing to look away,” as she put it in her book.

An insincere mea culpa, or one that is not tethered to meaningful action, can do more harm than good, because it can give the false impression a public figure has been rehabilitated, and that their wrongdoing is in the past. I’m not going to claim to know what sufficient reparations look like for someone like Power to undertake. In a just world, this would be something for Yemenis to decide through a democratic and transparent process. But it seems it should involve interrogating the worldview, material interests, and systemic influences that allowed one to enable an atrocity, rather than a cursory “my bad” for a one-off mistake. And, at bare minimum, it seems reparations would involve committing to never putting yourself in a position where you could do mass-scale harm again—agreeing to step away from public life, because you had previously used your role in public life to enable the killing of people in the hundreds of thousands. The fact that Power did not do that, and instead did the opposite, ascending to yet another position of power, is now enabling another nightmare.