Samantha Power in 2008 at Stacy's book store in San Francisco reading her book. Photo by Steve Rhodes.
Amb. Samantha Power, the new US ambassador to the UN, isn't the first ambassador of the Wired State -- Amb. Susan Rice was very active and substantive on Twitter, and of course there are many other talkative envoys on Twitter, including our own (in the Russian field) @mcfaul out of Moscow.
Apparently Amb. Power is new to the whole Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/hashtag thing. So advice from someone who was an early adapter since 2007: if you are in public office, don't tweet more than one or two really pithy highly retweetable *substantive* thoughts of your own a day, and let an intern spend the rest of the day, once or twice an hour tweeting links to speeches, resolutions, or interesting news articles. Know your own value and the dignity of office. Be mindful of the fact that the main intellectual life of America's intelligentsia, such as it is, is taking place now on Twitter on a few thousand accounts, mainly of old media news editors and journalists, and don't let them bully you, get to you, trap you, or literalize you to death. Just keep moving and live to tweet another day. Don't do hashtags yourself like #WhatMatters like some lame and desperate beverage company because you won't get the traction or the volume or the trending topic when you do that. You also run the risk on the free-for-all that is Twitter that "the masses" (which usually consists of pretty skilled cadres, some from malevolent governments) will tell you to do things that you can't or shouldn't do, like withdraw aid from Israel or invade Syria.
Make your own substantive and pithy tweet be the thing that brings you the eyeballs and let the retweeting be organic rather than trying to force a dumb hashtag.
Do not hire Twitter or social media gurus -- they are a waste of time and money and also just various political groupings jockeying for power under the guise of consulting.
Twitter is best when it is about thought-casting, not broad-casting or life-casting. It's not a radio show because anyone can talk back without being selected for the phone-in show. It's not interesting if you tell us who you had lunch with and don't tell us what you talked about. So draw yourself up to your full height and try to say something for the historical annals that is meaningful as best you can.
I'm a big believer in making these government Twitter accounts really service-oriented public property and not putting personal names on them -- when @alecjross left the State Department, he took some 300,000 followers with him, many of whom he could DM because he followed them back, which mean the State Department essentially no longer had a mailing list. That's wrong. (It's like Obama For American converting to Organizing for Action and taking all the campaign lists away from the Democratic Party). By contrast, Susan Rice had a generic ambassador account.
But @ambassadorpower has decided to make what is unquestionably the coolest Twitter handle this year, and it should win prizes for its hipster double entendre -- but you don't win prizes if you have 50,000 followers instead of 20,000 if most of them are SEO gurus, bots, and porn stars. Follow more people back -- a ratio of a tiny number of followees to followers lets us know you are broadcasting, not thoughtcasting.
Basically, you have to go into the whole social media with a really robust sense that everything that Alec Ross and Jared Cohen tried to convince everybody about at the State Department when they horsed them into Twitter was all wrong. Both of them are no longer there for good reason. Ross, Cohen and his co-author Eric Schmidt of Google all have a radical ideology of connectivity as magnificent "better world" instrument. It's essentially preposterous and just about every thing that Ross ever talked about as "empowered" or "bettered" by social media flopped, particularly in the Arab World. Basically, Twitter is merely a (limited) communications tool, and if it is a tool for *service* in public office, it should be about *service* and not building up followers for the next gig.
FIRST SPEECH AT THE FOURTH ESTATE
@ambassadorpower has already given her first speech -- outside the UN, at the Fourth Estate Leadership Summit, which you can read here.
And interestingly, besides the cool "OMG" she opens with in talking to these young people, she rehabilitates and blesses the hugely controversial Kony video:
And that rings even more true today. Today ordinary citizens don’t just advocate for change and action, they force change and they take action themselves. Invisible Children doesn’t just lobby policymakers to go after the LRA—they do that and they do it well—but they also design fliers that tell LRA fighters how they might defect, and they distributes them—more than 400,000 fliers so far—into LRA-affected areas in DRC and the Central African Republic. Invisible Children has also built six locally-run FM radio stations in areas of high LRA activity. These stations now reach an audience covering more than 29,000 square miles.
And if you’ve ever doubted your activism matters, just think that the Kony video you made go viral, was sent by high school kids in Massachusetts to their Senator who joined with his colleagues to write a law that President Obama signed to create a rewards program to apprehend Kony and his thugs. And a few months ago that Senator from Massachusetts, now Secretary of State John Kerry, announced that thanks to that law—thanks to you—the State Department was offering the first cash rewards to bring the LRA killers to justice. That’s you. You.
I don't know if Amb. Power knows that the creator of the Kony video went crazy -- he was found raving and stark-naked after pounding car hoods on the street -- and had to be put in a mental hospital for some time.
I really didn't like the anti-Kony sentiment as I blogged at the time -- I pointed out that all of us who raised the Lord's Resistance Army carefully in mannered and self-limiting UN meetings for years in fact didn't accomplish as much as those kids posting and re-posting the viral video and getting Obama to put in advisers.
Except...those advisers didn't accomplish anything yet and Kony is still on the run, I believe mainly in the Central African Republic -- that hell-mouth of Africa which is so poor that apparently it has had to sell ambassadorships to fugitive Kazakh government officials so they could try to claim immunity from prosecution.
But no matter -- I don't think ultimately the Kony video -- despite all the sneering of the Twitterati about it -- was the worst thing and it helped "raise awareness".
More troubling in this speech is this kind of feel-good paragraph that is meant to inspire, but misleads:
This new kind of activism is visible so many places, on so many of today’s most critical issues. An army of citizen activists police the conduct of the recent Kenyan elections, using the tools of the web to monitor hate speech and document fraud in an effort to prevent a repeat of significant violence. In a region—the Arab world—that barely knew democracy as recently as three years ago, we see tens of millions of people moving governments, and, at times, removing them, driven by that universal desire to have their voices heard. At a time of economic uncertainty, we see tens of thousands taking to the streets in Russia and beyond, because they are no longer willing to turn a blind eye to corruption or to accept the growing inequalities in their own societies.
Shouldn't these kids get a more realistic picture of the real challenges on the day after the activism? Facing the backlash from authoritarian governments, for instance.
Kenya averted the kind of election it had in the past with these most recent elections as ICG points out but wait -- that new president and deputy president were indicted by the ICC for their role in the 2007 violence. What next?!
In Egypt, they removed governments twice now, and now more than 100 people were shot dead in the square protesting the abusive military that took over from the abusive Islamists. Yes, voices are being heard, especially on Twitter. Now what?
Russians aren't taking to the streets in such large numbers because some key leaders have been arrested and falsely charged. There've been a number of show trials, such as that of Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner sentenced to five years of prison, but let out while he appeals in order to run in a very stage-managed Moscow mayor election. Lesser known people continue to be beaten and jailed and of course there's the Snowden defection -- which is why Obama cancelled the summit, even as regretably, he's going to legitimize Putin by attending the G20 in St. Petersburg.
Unfortunately, Russia's domestic behaviour is off-limits at the UN Security Council -- which nowadays includes rounding up and beating migrants and deporting refugees and beating and persecuting gays and minorities along with corruption at the Sochi Olymipcs and long-term cases like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Pussy riot.
But there's Syria -- a mass crime against humanity in which 100,000 have been massacred and tens of thousands have fled to neighbouring countries. Russia must be made to take exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, fully paid-up, worldwide ownership for backing and arming the Assad regime. This is the main account over which Ambassador Power has to use her ambassador power to affect in the next few years before she leaves to write her next book. And it will be nearly impossible not only because of the veto, but because of the rampant anti-Americanism at the UN.
Amb. Power should try to deal with this -- Amb. Rice was very successful in disregarding the antagonistic anti-American atmospherics and repeatedly calling out Russian perfidy again and again. But it really is important to try to win over India, Pakistan, Rwanda and the other elected 10 on the SC because they are all disgruntled about Libya, completely turned off to humanitarian intervention, completely sour on the US over the NSA spy stuff -- and just needed to whip up domestic sentiment to distract from their own crimes by endlessly inciting hatred of America.
SPITE
I remember being so inspired by Amb. Power's first essay in The New Republic years ago during the Balkan Wars because she captured something that everybody who has been in Soviet and East European studies understands perfectly -- the role of spite in the political and social lives of these countries. Spite. That really, really sums up what is going on most of the time at the UN, too, and it has to be called out again and again as the sullen teen-age behaviour that it is (and in that sense, Obama's quip that Putin was like the kid in the back of the class room was spot on).
CRITIQUE OF POWER
On the other hand, I've been disturbed by a number of features of Amb. Power's career in the White House.
First, there's all the things David Rieff wrote about. Perhaps I don't feel as much spleen as he did about flip-flopping or being forced to take more nuanced positions because that's what people in public office have to do. For example, I don't feel that James Clapper lied in some cunning and nefarious way about what the NSA does; I think he was truthful enough and then was backed into a corner on technicalities and felt that he had to concede this was misleading
But I don't doubt that Amb. Power and her husband Cass Sunstein do think he lied, and with the rest of the progs, are on the side of Snowden, or at least think that he "started an important national conversation" as the socialists have long put it.
Cass Sunstein, friend of Lawrence Lessig-- with his support of open-source software, collectivism on the Internet, FDR's "Second Bill of Rights" (stealth Marxism), "nudging" i.e. state and elite social engineering/control -- is the sort of thinker I've endlessly blogged against in my years critiquing the Internet jet-set. So I'm really, really concerned about having those Silicon Valley cult views so close to a prominent ambassador with cabinet-level access now to the president and I will be watching fearfully to see if the UN becomes a setting in which these views are given further traction, i.e. at the ITU, etc. -- just as they were with Amb. Eileen Donahoe, wife of e-bay CEO and millionaire John Donahoe. The "cognitive infiltration" that is most needed, in my view, is with this network.
And it's the sort of radical democratic socialism mainly lurking under the surface and never dare saying its name that is the foundation of the activism that bothers me here. Samantha once infamously called Hillary "a monster", was forced to resign from the campaign but didn't lose her place in the Obama Administration over the scandal; that she didn't is testimony to the sheer rabid power of the more extreme leftist tendency in the Democratic Party that so viciously fought Hillary -- and was the ideological wellspring of Samantha's remark.
MARY ROBINSON'S MEDAL OF FREEDOM
And then I recall when UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson was given the presidential medal of freedom, I felt fairly sure that it was Samantha Power, then at the White House, that engineered this. Why? Because I think the Obama Administration -- Obama personally -- and Power and Sunstein in particular, felt that Mary Robinson got a raw deal from the Jewish groups and others critical of the Durban World Conference Against Racism, and that they had to make it up to her.
And it isn't the fact of her getting the medal of freedom that troubles me -- she deserved it for the many ways in which she stood up to all the great powers while in her job -- but the palpable sense that she was given it precisely as a "make-up" for Durban and to stand up to Jewish groups. And that in the course of doing that, the Jewish groups were triggered to articulate the truth of the situation -- that they they felt Mary Robinson had not done enough to keep Israel from being singled out in the final document at WCAR, along among all nations.
As I wrote at the time, they were right, although regretably, this got ensnarled in the sort of word-search-strings that cocky geeks do, saying that technically the phrase "Zionism equals racism" was not in the final Durban document. But in essence it was -- it was in the issue of the placement of the section on Israel, making it appear Israel had a state policy of racism against Palestinians, which it does not, and also trying to book as "racism" the Israel-Palestine conflict -- which was hardly to be solved at that conference, and particularly not with that outrageous singling-out. That at the time, the Israeli ambassador didn't seem to protest because far worse language had been expected means nothing and is a mere Fisking on this debate; the reality is, the insidious, ideological canard first planted by Cuba then promoted by Egypt and finally the South African government found its way not only into Durban, but all of its follow-up meetings -- which is why it was right for the US to walk out.
I suspect that Amb. Power does not share this belief, or can ever be persuaded about this, and it troubles me -- because I know it is part of a larger basically objectionable viewpoint about Israel that in fact has been carefully managed away by lots of private meetings and an upbeat blog from Colum Lynch about how "Michael Jackson's Rabbi Made Samantha Power Kosher".
Ultimately, it doesn't matter, because Israel-Palestine is not decided at the UNSC, and the US position is tightly-scripted from Washington and any inventiveness is going to be in the provenance of Secretary Kerry, not the UN ambassador.
Like so many things in politics, groups that were critical or apprehensive about Amb. Power have now been heard and seen and feel they have an entree and that's all that matters for now.
"SEE EVERYBODY"
And that's the first rule of the UN, as articulated by a very wise veteran UN official I know -- "see everybody". Be willing to talk to anyone on the hard issues. Don't block people from accessing you because of the scripted positions from capitals.That's what the UN is for -- diplomacy. (BTW, it's not what the presidency is for, and the unconditional talks that Obama has held with Russia, Iran, China, etc. have all ended in tears.)
Of course, this might be easier to do at the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
And in that sense, I think this job will be very hard for Amb. Power. It's not the Human Rights Council, and most of the substantive gritty human rights issues get bucked to the HRC by the SC. Even so, there is a lot more language than there used to be in the SC resolutions on human rights, and that can be bolstered and one must never go below what was achieved in the last resolution.
It's also not Washington, where you can do what the NGOs want, or part of what they want, and look good.
You can't do what the NGOs want at the UN -- because of all those other countries!!! -- and when Washington officials soothe NGO reps in Washington with claims that they are going to prevail at the UNSC, their UN reps have to set them straight -- the US doesn't get its way a lot of the time in a multilateral setting.
So aside from "see everybody" -- which isn't going to be physically possible anyway, what other advice could one have for this new emissary of the Wired State -- where California and Silicon Valley and the media, old and new, are more important some days than governments?
ADVICE TO AMB. POWER
1. Try to raise the estimation of the UN in the American people's eyes. This is very hard because the reputation is so low -- and for all the good reasons we all know of corruption and tyranny and lies and double-dealing -- plus the crazy obsessive hate of Israel and the staggering inability to act on Syria.
But here's the thing about the UN -- it's like the reason Willie Sutton went to banks -- "because the money's there" -- you go to the UN because the countries are there, all in seats with their name-tags conveniently arranged for you right on their desks.
There are many good things that the UN does especially in its humanitarian agencies and treaty bodies and special rapporteur system -- OCHA is an unsung hero. All of this can be fronted as all of it is better than the countries and represents their best conscience.
That doesn't mean agreeing to go and speak to every little group. That's what NGOs and the other ambassadors at the mission are for. The speeches inside the UN should count and get noticed by the press.
2. Pick just a very few things to accomplish. The UN is a very sprawling and bureaucratic place with a zillion meetings. There's always things like the planning committee of the sub-commission of the Committee on the Law of the Sea for Land-locked Countries and obscure places with initials like ACABQ which in fact really decide everything. There are the non-paper non-papers and those informal informals in the basement. All the world's greatest problems, on the desks of those countries with the name-tags, were mainly caused by those countries' will or lack of will -- not the weather. So just focus on a few things, one hard thing to do for moral reasons, a few doable things to avoid despair.
3. Break up the blocs. All the old hands know what this means. Getting countries to vote outside of their habitual regional or political blocs. Getting certain countries to stay in the men's room during a vote, or abstain.
4. Chop up the Syrian horror into doable pieces. It would be great if the UN and this moment and this job was the place where the Syrian mess will find some wonderful solution. I don't think it will. Nor will bilateral or multilateral talks with Russia. So the question is -- while continuing to put pressue ALL on Russia which is the key to this -- to find pieces of the issue -- like pursuing the chemical weapons investigation and its access and chain-of-custody issues, getting everyone to accept that the sheer number of refugees means that this is a certified "threat to international peace and security" now, working on medical neutrality (follow up on the aborted effort of the new member, Australia), etc. Build a wall of shame around Russia when it doesn't do those smaller pieces. China is less of a problem than Russia.
Hopefully, Amb. Power, with her Balkans experience can explain to Anne Marie Slaughter why the "humanitarian corridors" and "safe zones" and such can really be awful (see Srebrenica; see Goma) when done by the UN. Maybe if all that Amb. Power can do is make a humanitarian corridor that this time doesn't turn into a blood-bath, she could go down in history.
5. Adopt a calm and cool and rock-solid confident position about the need for Internet freedom regardless of the Snowden noise -- and regardless of your own feelings about it tilting toward Snowden as national-conversation inducer -- which may prompt private winks and nods. No, the position of the United States of America is that Snowden is a defector, he is wanted for committing felonies, and he is not a human rights activist or a whistleblower. Human Rights Watch is wrong about this. Bring the conversation back to the jailing and killing of bloggers, the shutting down of the Internet in other countries, the implications for the "freedom to connect" for the Great Chinese Firewall and the Russian Sovereign Internet theories -- and don't be bullied. If you let coercive anarchist hackers start national conversations, you end up with their national revolutionary committees antithetical to human rights.
Recent Comments