To Tell The Truth.(Book review)

Byline: MEGAN O'GRADY editor: Valerie Steiker

Samantha Power chronicles the life and times of one of the U.N.'s most iconic figures.

War-zone journalist, Harvard professor, and now foreign-policy adviser to Barack Obama, Samantha Power has never rested on her laurels. Her 2003 Pulitzer Prize--winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was a fierce indictment of this country's reluctance to intervene in the face of atrocity. Now comes her incisive follow-up, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (Penguin Press), which examines U.N. intervention in recent global conflicts through the career of the high commissioner for human rights and nation-building expert who, in 2003, became a victim of the first major suicide bombing of a civilian target in the Iraq War.

"A cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy" is how Sergio Vieira de Mello was once described to Power, who first met the dapper yet down-to-earth diplomat in Zagreb in 1994. A singular blend of idealism and suave pragmatism, the Sorbonne-educated Brazilian was the very embodiment of the quixotic U.N. mission to bring peace and civility to an ethnically divisive post--Cold War world. Moving from Cambodia to Kosovo, Vieira de Mello spent three decades repatriating refugees, sponsoring elections, and charming everyone from Marxist jungle radicals to Balkan warlords (he joked that his biography would be titled My Friends, the War Criminals ). Learning from successes (East Timor) and failures (Rwanda) alike, this humanitarian-philosopher and bon vivant never lost sight of the human scale of his vocation.

Like the U.N. (and like Power), Vieira de Mello didn't support the war in Iraq. He accepted his post as U.N. envoy under pressure from Kofi Annan with the intention to make the most of the nebulous role granted the organization by the American-led "coalition of the willing." In fact, this consummate negotiator was given little chance to put his expertise to use. Dismayed by what he saw as the coalition's missteps--an aggressively militarized presence within Baghdad, a lack of security and a clear timetable, the harsh treatment of detainees--Vieira de Mello understood the growing insurgency to be the consequence of an increasingly ...