Author says Iraq war hurts U.S. credibility

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Samantha Power believes the Iraq war has delivered collateral damage to America’s standing in the world. But as a result, the Bush administration has also learned the necessity of multilateralism, she says.

“Elections are the part we’ve handed off in Iraq, and it is the one sector that has actually gone well,” Power said about the United Nations’ involvement.

Power delivered the second of the Humanities Lecture Series on Thursday evening to more than 500 people in the Ballroom of the Kansas Union. The KU Hall Center for the Humanities sponsors the series.

Power won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for her book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” She is now advising U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., on foreign policy issues.

As a journalist, she covered the war in Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s.

While she depicted Kansas and former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole favorably in her book for his work to stop genocide in Europe during the 1990s, Power said that typically voters tend not to focus on human rights and acts of genocide, especially internationally.

“Human rights and national security are very much related to one another. There’s not this false dichotomy,” Power said.

As citizen groups tend to mobilize, rally and cry for more intervention, more activism will urge combating of crimes against human rights, especially when trying to fight terrorism, she said.

Power cited the student and religious groups that kept the Darfur region of Sudan in the forefront.

Overall, Power said she would like to see the U.S. work with and count on other nations because events such as the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina have damaged America’s credibility and the perception of its competence.