President Barack Obama's choice as UN ambassador acknowledged today that the United Nations was unlikely to take decisive action soon to halt Syria's civil war, and she pledged to work to eliminate what she termed the organisation's anti-Israel "bias."
Samantha Power also said that if confirmed by the Senate, she would try to make the UN more efficient and stand up for freedom.
Her confirmation appeared likely. Several Republicans said Power would be a force in New York even as they pressed the former journalist, human rights campaigner and author to clarify several decade-old comments that the lawmakers suggested were critical of Israel or the United States.
Power, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her examination of the US response to genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s, long has advocated military and other forms of intervention to prevent mass atrocities. She helped make the case for Obama's decision to deploy American air assets to oust Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi from power in 2011.
Today she expressed little confidence in the UN authorising any similar intervention in Syria but said Washington could act on its own, if necessary.
"The failure of the UN Security Council to respond to the slaughter in Syria is a disgrace that history will judge harshly," Power told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
But pressed by Sen John McCain, she acknowledged that any forceful action was unlikely from an organisation that, because of the veto power of Russia and China, hasn't penalised Syrian President Bashar Assad or even condemned his government's role in a two-and-a-half-year civil war that has killed almost 100,000 people.
Moscow and Beijing have blocked US-backed resolutions against the Assad government three times and remain opposed to any effort by Western and Arab countries to force Assad into stepping down.
Russia, however, says it is working with the US to try to get Syria's government and rebels into peace talks.
Overall, the hearing amounted to a surprising show of bilateral backing for Power, a 42-year-old mother of two. She was a senior foreign policy adviser during Obama's first term and served as the first head of the Atrocities Prevention Board he established last year.
