Samantha Power Quotes
My basic feeling about military intervention is that it should be a last resort, undertaken only to stave off large-scale bloodshed.
Power, Samantha. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Basic Books, 2002.
English law and United States law are different. The George W, Bush administration has argued that regime change—removing Sadaam Hussein from power and control of Iraq—would be legal under U. S. law. This belief was never tested in the American Courts during the Iraq War.
In every major war in the United States there have been government activities contrary to law, most of which were embarrassments when discovered years later and in retrospect most of which did not help the war effort in any way but undermined the sense of law and order either by not enforcing certain laws (profiteering in WWI or violence against war protesters in the Vietnam War), passing new laws that in retrospect were unjust or unconstitutional (incarceration of Japanese Americans in WWII) or by engaging in illegal activities (illegal spying and detention in the Iraq War.)
The United States should be One major problem at the time was that the Soviet Union was supporting and instigating revolutions in many parts of the world. When most nations of the UN wanted to provide peace keeping troops to quell the conflict, the Russians would veto and block the effort, Vandenberg wanted the UN to change the rules regarding the veto. The original right of veto for the major nations was originally included at the insistence of the United States and many Americans did not want to give it up or have any exceptions lest there be more. The Russians at that time also did not want to give up any of their veto powers. Another method that Vandenberg wanted to solve the Russian peacekeeping blockage problem was for America to engage in more collective security pacts so that action could be taken without UN Security Council unanimity by going around the UN.
After the World War I armistice there were 7,000 American troops remaining in Russian Siberia to the chagrin of the Secretary of War who wanted them removed. One reason given for their presence was to "protect our relief efforts there:"
Samantha Jane Power is an American academic and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. She is a member of the Democratic Party.
