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36 Such tentative statements, as Massing observes, are acutely at odds with the fire-breathing Power of “A Problem From Hell.” There she denounced statesmen for doing what Vieira de Mello did. This raises the question of whether Power is willing to make any accommodation necessary to cater to her own new boss. Nor did the role that Vieira de Mello played in Bosnia turn out any better. It’s hardly a secret that the UN disgraced itself in the Balkans, where it served as a de facto accomplice to the Serbs. Power recounts that Vieira de Mello was touring the former Soviet Union while Serbian General Ratko Mladic presided over the systematic slaughter of every Bosnian man and boy in his custody, some eight thousand in all. When the Serb mass graves were discovered six weeks later, Vieira de Mello was stunned. “T never thought Mladic was this stupid,” he said, projecting his own reverence for reason onto one who clearly observed different norms. “The massacre was totally unnecessary.” (What massacre, incidentally, is necessary?) In this telling, Vieira de Mello, who sought to curry favor with leading Serbs, sounds less like an international statesman than a gullible technocrat. Power’s implicit criticisms of Vieira de Mello suggest, as Michael Massing notes, that she is wrestling with the contradictions of espousing an idealistic credo and implementing a policy. (Such would seem to be the case, for example, when she defends Obama administration policy on Guantanamo Bay, wildly at variance as it is with the president’s promises circa 2008 to shutter the detention facility promptly.) Power recounts other less-than-inspiriting episodes. She notes that in 1999, after the Washington Post reported that several UN weapons inspectors in Iraq were sending information to the Clinton administration, Vieira de Mello almost resigned. Fabrizio Hochschild, his special assistant, thought that some kind of démarche to Richard Butler, the head of the UN inspections team, was required. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_030566