Samantha Power is the Pulitzer Prize winning professor of global leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and former senior foreign policy advisor to the Obama campaign. CAHIR O'DOHERTY talks to the Irish-born author about her career, her recent controversy and her new book.

REPORTER, professor, founder of the Carr Center for Human Rights, former senior foreign policy advisor to Senator Barack Obama and Pulitzer Prize winner, Irish-born Samantha Power, 37 has made a powerful impact since coming to America as a nine-year-old.

Recently she was in the headlines when she resigned after calling Senator Hillary Clinton a "monster" in an interview with a Scottish newspaper, a comment she says happened when "my Irish temper got the better of me." In typical fashion she has rebounded from that setback and is once more at center stage.

Her remarkable new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira De Mello and the Fight to Save the World (Penguin Press), is an engrossing examination of the life and legacy of De Mello, the relatively unsung UN troubleshooter who was regarded by many as the secretary-general-in-waiting.

Soon you can perhaps add Hollywood writer to Power's many list of achievements. Her new book has also been greeted with widespread enthusiasm there too.

Terry George, the Irish film director who consulted with Power during the writing of his Oscar nominated film Hotel Rwanda, has optioned the rights and plans to make a film about it. It probably helps that alongside a lighthouse intellect, Power is in possession of an athlete's stamina.

Described by his fellow diplomats as cross between Bobby Kennedy and James Bond, De Mello, the Sorbonne-trained humanitarian, was killed in Baghdad on August 19, 2003, in a suicide attack by al- Qaeda that was considered a reprisal for the UN's collusion in the invasion.

Power's book focuses on the many lessons of De Mello's life and work, in the process focusing on the besetting claims and contradictions of our troubled new century. But it's also a profoundly inspirational tale, reminding us how exceptionally skilled De Mello was in brokering peace in distant, war-ravaged nations - and how much we can learn from his experiences.

Chief among the questions De Mello's life poses are when should killers or militants be engaged and when should they be shunned? How can outsiders play a role in healing broken people and broken places? And when is military force justified?

"In my travels over the last few years I've found people looking for insights on how their governments should respond to global challenges like terrorism, civil war, genocide and extreme poverty," Power said during an interview with the Irish Voice.

"They're often overwhelmed and paralyzed by the messiness of what confronts them in the newspaper every morning. I turned to Sergio - whom I knew in Bosnia - because he seemed the one global figure who had the experience, the charm, and the hard-won wisdom to manage broken people and broken places."

Traveling to hot spots at a young age with no experience, Vieira's travels took him to every major hellhole on the face of the earth - Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, Afghanistan, Kosovo and East Timor.

Iraq was the last mission of his life, the place where he probably had the most insight to offer, and ironically it was also where he was killed.

But before his death De Mello was completely ignored by the American occupiers, and patronized by the then U.S. consul Paul Bremer III, so he had come to believe his presence in Iraq was a terrible mistake.

In 2003 the Americans were not ready to listen to him. Had he lived he might have persuaded them to contribute more resources in the aid of reconstruction and even policing. De Mello knew that the decisions the administration had made - demobilizing the Iraqi army, gutting its ministries, and failing to plan for a post Saddam transition - would lead to the country's implosion.

Says Power, "In the realm of national security and American foreign policy there are commentators who commandeer the realm of the 'real,' in that they call themselves realists. They're the one who fashion U.S. national security, while people who care about human rights and human welfare or genocide prevention are very easily marginalized in that discourse.

"I have consistently pushed back against this false dichotomy between realism on the one hand and idealism on the other. For me, torturing detainees has actually enhanced terrorist recruitment. A violation of human rights has undermined U.S. national security, not enhanced it."

Power was nine when her mother and her stepfather left Ireland together. They had met at Meath General Hospital, and since divorce was not an option in Ireland in 1979 - at the time they were married to other people - they decided to leave the country together.

Both were specialists working in dialysis, and they also felt that the best medical education would be found in the U.S. Power grew up in Pittsburgh and then Atlanta, Georgia.

"Everything was bigger, the grass was less green, people seemed less talkative, but I just adjusted," she recalls.

The context in which her parents left, for economic and social reasons, was at the height of what Power calls the "brain drain." Celtic Tiger Ireland, which Power visits frequently, amazes her now.

"My cousins have become real estate moguls, the country has become so wealthy and expensive," she says.

Power admits that reactions to her book here and abroad have varied wildly.

"I think American reviewers want one size fits all solutions to things and so they're having a hard time with the book, and it's doing incredibly well in Europe. I think here reviewers don't want grey areas," she feels.

In Chasing the Flame, one of Power's most passionate arguments is that it is in America's self-interest to provide humanitarian relief to failing states. "The U.N. is a gathering of the world's governments. If they're at each others throats and not focused on human welfare that's going to manifest itself in the organization," she says.

"So the approach Sergio took was that we'd achieve a greater constituency for the United Nations if we build a constituency for the problems the United Nations is uniquely suited to tackle. Law, for example. If we could convince Congress that we've spent too little money on building judicial systems in broken places, we could make real progress.

"If we focus on the problems and then work backwards we almost have no choice but to invest resources in a global body like the UN that can cross borders. We've been coming at it procedurally - we should come at it substantively."

Power admits that the primary concern of governments should be looking after the security of its own citizens, but a long-term stake in the welfare of others will benefit ourselves. There's a lot of good that can be done at minimal cost to democracies, Power argues.

In regard to HIV AIDS, suffering alone ought to be enough for us to pool our resources to bring drug prices down. We are, she argues, profoundly connected to failing states like Afghanistan and Darfur.

Darfur, for example, where a simple but very troubling humanitarian issue of atrocity unfolded, is a vast desert wasteland that could easily become the kind of place where the world's worst killers could set up shop - and many of them already have, in fact. Enlightened self-interest should drive us to understand that we're connected, that harms cross borders now in a way they didn't 15 years ago.

"In the last few years we've gotten the lingo down in terms of the 21st century challenges facing us. We talk about global warming finally, thanks to Al Gore; we talk about terrorist threats across borders; public health calamities and so forth but all of our models are 20th century ones.

"It was almost unbearable to me that Sergio Vieira, a person who had stored up all of this insight about how to deal with violence, could be lost in the rubble of Baghdad. Those insights needed to be plucked from the rubble."

As Power finds her way through many of the same diplomatic channels that Vieira once navigated she has encountered challenges of her own. Her recent "monster" comment concerning Senator Hillary Clinton taught her that complex political questions could quickly be reduced to the status of a sound bite.

"I regret saying that because I love the campaign - it's my favorite thing I've ever done in my career," she says.

Power says she now has no role in the Obama campaign and refutes recent reports that hint at a comeback.

"When I met him first we were supposed to meet for an hour. Four hours later I heard myself say I'm going to quit my job at Harvard to intern here or do whatever," she says.

"I did that for 15 months before my Irish temper got the better of me in a heated moment. But being able to communicate, being able to write, being able to get a word in edgeways at the dinner table - I credit Ireland with everything that has made my career possible."