The Three Women Who Prodded Obama

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama is currently involved in four major military operations around the world.

In addition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that were inherited from the previous administration, Obama is now involved in Japan and Libya as well. Since March 11, the U.S. has committed as many as 20,000 troops to Operation Tomodachi, the relief efforts for areas hit by the great East Japan earthquake. On March 19, the U.S., along with the U.K. and France, began bombing Libya with the backing of a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution.

The American people are deeply concerned about the great East Japan earthquake, and they highly approve of relief efforts. The bombing of Libya, on the other hand, has divided opinion fiercely within the U.S. regarding the purpose of the bombing (is this a humanitarian intervention, or another Iraq war?) and the exit strategy. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is careful not to turn the Arab world into an enemy, and thus he has shown a great deal of reservation about bombing Libya. So why did President Obama take the bold step of playing “a supporting role” to the U.K. and France?

The one person within the Obama administration who strongly asserted that not intervening in Libya “could result in the mass slaughter of opposition citizens”* was a foreign policy advisor named Samantha Power, head of the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights as senior director of multilateral affairs on the staff of the National Security Council (NSC). As reported in Time Magazine and elsewhere, President Obama held an NSC meeting in the White House on March 15 to discuss the proposed UNSC resolution to establish a no-fly zone over Libya. At this meeting, the resolution was supported not only by Ms. Power, but also by Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and an expert in African issues, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. All three of them are women. After the president listened closely to their case, he then heard an argument for caution from Pentagon officials and national security advisors who said “a no-fly zone would not prevent violence against civilians.” The meeting then came to a close. But after the president had dinner that evening with military commanders, he reconvened the meeting and decided to act in support of the UNSC resolution. Two days later, on March 17, the resolution was passed.

Ms. Power is currently forty years old. After covering stories such as the Bosnian conflict as a journalist, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” in which she describes and criticizes the U.S.’ indifference toward genocides throughout history. She then became a professor at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, but she took a leave of absence in 2005 when she met Mr. Obama, then a newly-elected senator, and joined his staff as a foreign policy fellow. During the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, her description of Hillary Clinton as a “monster” drew criticism and led Ms. Power to resign, but in 2009, she entered the White House as a foreign policy advisor to the president. She later apologized to Hillary Clinton and mended their relationship.

The U.S. had a unilateral foreign policy under George W. Bush, but the Obama administration has shifted to a multilateral approach that puts more emphasis on international cooperation. Ms. Power and others who are deeply concerned about human rights are called “liberal hawks,” interventionists who do not hesitate to use force for humanitarian purposes. It seems safe to say that they are the driving force behind the Obama administration’s role in the bombing of Libya. They have some ideological similarities with the Bush administration’s neoconservatives, who called for the democratization of the Arab world and promoted the war in Iraq. They are regarded with wariness by realists who view international politics more coolly. When Ms. Power was once asked about her similarity to neocons, she jokingly answered, “I am not Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush).”

President Obama publicly stated on March 21 at a press conference in Chile, “This is not about going after Gadhafi.”* But will this humanitarian intervention be the first step of the Obama Doctrine?

*Editor’s Note: These quotations, accurately translated, could not be verified.