[VISION] | PEOPLE: There are no people visible in the image. | TEXT: To lend some perspective on how rapidly this military and diplomatic response came together, when people were being brutalized in Bosnia in the 1990s, it took the international community more than a year to intervene with air power to protect civilians. In fact, a few hours before Obama’s speech, Power herself told an audience at Columbia University, in words that anticipated Obama’s, that “in the Balkans it took three years for the international community to use air power to prevent heavy weapons from firing on civilians. In Libya it took a little more than a month.” The invocation of Bosnia was not adventitious. It has become the siren song of liberal interventionists. Part of the legend of Power is her first mission to Bosnia, where she filed reports for the Boston Globe and other publications about Serbian belligerence and Western inaction. Power became the anti-Rebecca West—where West lionized the Serbs standing up to fascism in the 1930s in her book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Power became a heroine chastising America and Europe for their lassitude in confronting contemporary fascist impulses from West’s former freedom fighters. This was, at bottom, a new Spanish Civil War for Power and her cohort—a chance to choose sides, to experience good and evil, not vicariously but up close, and to denounce it. It is important to remember that when Power traveled to Bosnia, she frequently met with and chastised government officials, including Ambassador Peter Galbraith, for not doing more against Serbian iniquities (a favor he returned as Obama hesitated about intervention in Libya). Not for her the Weberian Wertfreiheit, or objectivity, that American newspapers inculcate. Power epitomizes an older model—the crusading journalist. BUT POWER’S journalistic triumphs were a dress rehearsal for her next career as a professor and author of “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, which won a Pu