Power has the leadership needed for post
Dear Sen. Risch:
It’s not often you will have an opportunity as a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to vote on a nominee for ambassador to the United Nations who has provided Idaho with human rights leadership and assistance, but you do now.
As your committee considers President Obama’s nomination of Samantha Power to be our next U.N. ambassador, you will be have the opportunity to vote on human rights champion who brought her wisdom, insights, skills and energy to the Gem State on a half-dozen occasions to promote human dignity and human rights in the face of neo-Nazi activities.
Born in Ireland, Samantha Power is an adopted daughter of Idaho who has been an ambassador for human rights in our state. At the invitation of the Association of Idaho Cities and Counties, Power brought her skills to Idaho to help organize, in partnership with 300 mayors, Idaho’s campaign to promote human rights from 2000 to 2005.
Power is a superb choice for the United Nations. Throughout her career as an academic and a member of the Obama Administration, she has shined an international spotlight on the moral and human consequences of governmental decision-making on mass killings.
Power is a rare example of a leader who brings a real-world appreciation for both the uses and limits of power. Her academic credentials, including a law degree from Harvard, are impressive. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her internationally acclaimed book, “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” and the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, Power has a brought a laser-like, pragmatic intelligence to protecting the innocent from violence.
Power’s long, studied approach to the soul-searing problem of genocide -- first as a journalist, and then as an academic, and finally as a practitioner and presidential adviser -- won high praise within diplomatic circles, at home and abroad. Her book argued convincingly for military intervention to prevent genocide in Rwanda and the Balkans.
She argues for the employment of various tools to prevent mass killings, including economic sanctions, travel bans, freezes on assets, public denunciations of human rights violations and referrals to the International Criminal Court. Power rightly declares that in the face of genocide, “There is always something you can do.”
For more than 15 years, Power has been one of the foremost experts in the world on the issue of genocide and human rights. If confirmed as ambassador to the United Nations, she will fight to stop human trafficking and she will push for humanitarian programs. She cannot fix the United Nations, but she will bring the sort of wisdom, experience and courage that America requires in its chief ambassador.
Adler is the director of the Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University, where he holds appointment as the Cecil D. Andrus Professor of Public Affairs. He has lectured nationally and internationally on the Constitution, the presidency and the Bill of Rights. He is also an adjunct professor of law at the University of Idaho, where he teaches courses on the Constitution and the Supreme Court.