Journal on Samantha Power's Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World, Chapters 1-11

Through her book, Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World, Samantha Power tells the story of Sergio Vieria de Mello, a diplomat and humanitarian whose contradictions and failures were rooted in the institution he so loyally served, the United Nations. Vieria de Mello, who climbed the UN food chain from assistant editor at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1969 to Special Representative of the Secretary General in Iraq in 2003, embraced international law and the UN as elements of global justice. He insisted that the only way to bring about lasting global stability is to press countries to play by international UN rules (pg. 9). But while Vieria de Mello worked diligently to spread the UN's reach to those in need, the organization's internal contradictions consistently prevented flawless peacekeeping. Ironically, Vieria de Mello was killed in a suicide bombing attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003, marking the end of a personal evolution that tracked the UN's achievements and failures (pg. xviii).

Power focuses particularly on the UN's mistakes which were rudely exposed in the genocidal crisis of the mid-1990s. Time and time again, she cites instances where the UN's authority prevented, rather than maintained or created, peacekeeping. A general ethic of strict political neutrality ended up favoring aggressors like the Hutu extremists in Rwanda and the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo. In 1994, the UN mandated that soldiers in the area were not allowed to use their weapons, even in self-defense. This lead to Hutu militias massacring some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutu (pg. xvi). In 1995, the UN discouraged the use of NATO air power to end the conflict in Bosnia, therefore prolonging the devastation on the ground. Eventually, the Croatian Army and NATO forces attacked the Serbs, and the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian men and boys was halted by the UN bombing of Serbia, proving that some conflicts cannot be solved without resort to power (pg. xvi).

Power claims that Americans today have two principles: 1) Retreat from global engagement altogether. Or 2) Go abroad to stamp out threats in the hopes of achieving full security. By the end of the 1990s, Vieria de Mello had determined that the best route to world peace is a mixture of the two. He had also concluded, by this point, that the UN needed to shift from peacekeeping to peace enforcement as a part of a new global “responsibility to protect.” The 1990s provided foreign policy with some difficult lessons. Of most importance, hard power is sometimes needed to resolve political conflicts. Because, aside from the UN, we do not have international institutions to resolve such conflicts, the UN must be willing to take a hard line with international criminals.

While it is easy to lay blame on the UN for it's peacekeeping failures, we must realize that the powers behind the organization fail to supply it with adequate resources, attention and manpower. Today, as the world is watching the Iraq debacle unfold, the idea that strong countries like the US should use their power to defend human rights or promote democracy around the world has become widely debated. Now focused on an overmilitarized foreign policy, we tend to forget the lessons of the 1990s, that sometimes, hard power is necessary to resolve political conflicts. However, until we have a set of international institutions and legislation intact, this type of diplomacy cannot be effectively deployed.


Work Cited
Power, Samantha. Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.