Letters
To an Aspiring President

Sunday, February 17, 2008

James Mann's review of Samantha Power's Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (Book World, Feb. 10) suggests to me three reasons to recommend the book to, among others, the first post-Bush president of the United States. The first is that the United Nations can only be as effective as its members allow it to be. Thus, vociferous critics of the global organization would do well to reframe their "dissing" of the UN to, say, critiquing the five permanent members of the UN Security Council -- i.e., China, France, the Russian federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. These powers not only account for nearly 100 percent of the weapons that eventually find their way to hotspots around the world, but, in one of the cruel ironies of the times, they then have to consider whether to mandate "peacekeeping" missions to deal with the results of their deadly trade in arms.

Second, Power emphasizes the need to reform the UN by focusing not on the UN as such but on the inspiring work of the late Sergio Vieira de Mello, who "spent most of his life on the ground in the world's worst hellholes." It seems that Vieira de Mello, who, along with 21 others, was killed in the suicide bombing of the UN mission in Iraq on Aug. 19, 2003, had learned how to circumvent the deadening bureaucracy of the UN that "had a knack for 'killing the flame' -- the flame of idealism that motivated many to strive to combat injustice and that inspired the vulnerable to believe that help would soon come"-- hopes that were sadly dashed in Rwanda in April 1994 and Srebrenica in July 1995.

Third, Power's book reminds us that the United States can and should play an active role in ensuring that the UN can be everything it can be in determining "how the international community should cope with ethnic unrest, civil wars and genocide [and] how much power the world's governments should give to the United Nations." These and other issues, including how to deal with global climate change, must be part of the first post-Bush president's agenda for the United States to take the lead, within a revamped multilateral setting, on efforts to solve complex problems worldwide.

--Dennis J.D. Sandole

Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution

George Mason University

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