The collateral damage of the war in Iraq stretches far beyond its direct effects on civilians in the region. In the final convocation address of the academic year on Tuesday, April 11, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Samantha Power spoke of another victim of the Iraq conflict: U.S. foreign policy.

Power has had an active and successful career as a journalist, human rights lawyer, author and professor. She was the founding executive director for the Carr Center for Human Rights policy from 1998 until 2002. She currently works as a professor of Practice in Public Policy at Harvard University and is a foreign policy fellow for the office of the Democratic senator of Illinois, Barack Obama.

After a brief introduction by President Nancy Dye, Power began her speech by praising the Oberlin College community for its long history of political activism. She believes that students and domestic advocacy groups have served and continue to serve a crucial role in raising public awareness of international crises. Increasing constituency awareness pressures politicians to take action.

Power distinguished between foreseeable collateral damage and unexpected damage in a war at the outset of her lecture. While it is impossible to avoid completely harming those in the crossfire, there are many unnecessary and unexpected complications that may arise in the arena of war.

“There is no inevitability about torture,” she said, emphasizing the notion that no element of war is ever set in stone.

But what about the damage that is often unseen and unspoken of? Power’s reply was that the war is wreaking havoc on U.S. foreign policy objectives, deteriorating the nation’s image in the eyes of the world and undermining the more fundamental goal of spreading democracy and human rights.

Flashing back to the days following the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, Power said that she had believed that the U.S. was beginning to permanently move away from its preferred isolationist approach. She explained, however, that the 9/11 attacks taught the Bush administration that we could no longer ignore what happened outside of our borders. Furthermore, the attacks shattered the common belief that the country’s well-being was independent of what was happening in other parts of the world.

“The world was big, it was bad ... but we had to be in it, or it would come to us,” Power said.

Yet the communal spirit which lingered after 9/11 quickly faded, Power explained, and though the Bush administration acknowledged terrorism as a transnational problem, it ignored the need to transnationalize its approach to a solution. The war with Iraq proved to be a more or less unilateral action.

The collateral damage to U.S. foreign policy quickly followed. The attempted democratization of Iraq is one such example of what Power cited as ironic damage to the United States’ larger goals of democratization. The war began with multi-pronged reasoning for regime change, only one of which was democracy. After the others fell through, though it appeared to many that democratizing Iraq was a disingenuous goal, only becoming the primary concern after the failure of other objectives. Furthermore, global reporting of U.S. torture, so-called “black sites” and domestic spying programs led many more to believe that the U.S. was unqualified and even incapable of aiding in the construction of a new democracy.

Another form of collateral damage, Power said, is the way in which the Iraq war undermines all forms of humanitarian intervention. As she put it, nations are “using the quagmire of Iraq as an alibi” to ignore humanitarian issues all over the globe. The mishandling of the Iraq war has merely reinforced the pre-existing desire of many nations to remain uninvolved in international crises, she emphasized.

With the diminishing influence of the U.S. in the national arena, and a growing disdain for humanitarian intervention by American liberals and nations abroad, Power fears that we are taking dangerous strides toward an illegitimacy and an apathy that will have long-term negative effects for the nation. She believes that only by internationalizing our efforts and focusing on human security rather than the symbolic act of voting can we ultimately win the battle for human rights.

As it stands, Power said, the United States has lost its former status as a shining example for the world to follow.

“We’re no longer the country that put the man on the moon,” she said. “We’re no longer the country that came up with the Marshall plan...We’re the country of Iraq and Katrina now.”