The Corruptions of Power: Will former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power ever learn?

• Author: Welch, Matt

LESS THAN 100 hours before 2008's critical Super Tuesday vote, Samantha Power, the Pulitzer-winning author of A Problem From Hell': America and the Age of Genocide, stared plaintively into the eyes of Armenian-American YouTube viewers and delivered a heartfelt testimonial to a "true friend of the Armenian people," Barack Obama.

Past presidents have shied away, she said, from the "sometimes hard truth telling" of calling the Armenian genocide a "genocide." But not the junior senator from Illinois, as evidenced by his "very forthright statement on the Armenian genocide, his support for the Senate resolution acknowledging the genocide all these years later, his willingness as president to commemorate it."

Fourteen months after Power's promise, Obama finally got his big chance to deliver. And he whiffed. "I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed," the new president said on April 24, the National Day of Remembrance of Man's Inhumanity to Man. He did not elaborate further.

A promise broken that brazenly could be a teaching moment for the "humanitarian interventionists," of whom Power--Obama's first-term human rights honcho on the National Security Council and his second-term ambassador to the United Nations--is arguably the leading light. Did the woman who is as likely as anyone alive to be the next Democrat-appointed secretary of state ever consider that mobilizing U.S. force to halt genocide inevitably requires such grubby logistical concerns as making sure not to piss off the owners of the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey? Might there be a corrupting paradox in protecting human rights at the point of a gun?

Power's new memoir, The Education of an Idealist, includes a whole chapter titled "April 24," complete with an O. Henry twist at the end. But whether it's the war of words she lost on that Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day or the far more consequential war in Libya that she successfully helped argue America into, the muddled track record of applied Powerism occasions little introspection from its intellectual architect.

"He was the President of the United States," Power exhaustedly concludes, after detailing her failed attempts to get Obama to utter the word genocide in 2009. "No matter how hard I tried, I would never be able to put myself in his shoes, or appreciate the variables he was weighing." So much for the self-styled "genocide chick."

As with most champions of the "just...