Articles
Human Terrain System
The Pentagon is bringing social scientists to the battlefield. Plus Big Thinker Samantha Power.
01.07.08

Samantha Power
Freedom from fear. Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the concept in 1941. Sixty years later, we lost sight of his wisdom, stoking fear at home to justify an all-expansive, counterproductive lunge at real and imagined threats abroad. Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. envoy murdered in a 2003 terrorist attack in Baghdad, had it right when he said, "Fear is a bad adviser." Neutralizing terrorism would entail freeing ourselves from fear at home, while also launching a grand international initiative to make citizens abroad safe in their persons and property. Insecurity causes all of us to make bad decisions, to back extreme policies, or to support extreme leaders-and each of these only compounds our insecurity. It's time to break the cycle, returning to respecting law ourselves, and for the first time channeling major development assistance into helping bring law to lawless places.Samantha Power is a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the author of Chasing The Flame: Sergio Viera de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, and a foreign-policy advisor to the Barack Obama presidential campaign.