At
last week’s grand gathering of the United Nations General Assembly in
New York, one of the Obama administration’s worst fumbles was largely
unreported by the U.S. media. It came during Israeli prime minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Thursday speech to the assembly. In the face of Iran’s advancing nuclear program and repeated threats
to annihilate Israel, Netanyahu was presenting an urgent case for
drawing a red line against Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons. “The
relevant question,” he said, “is not when Iran will get the bomb. The
relevant question is at what stage can we no longer stop Iran from
getting the bomb.”
The prime minister presented this essential declaration to a U.N.
chamber dominated by member states whose governments are for the most
part hostile to Israel. More than half of them belong to the Non-Aligned
Movement, now chaired by Iran. Meanwhile, the most important diplomat
to whom Netanyahu should be able to look for support the U.S.’s ambassador to the U.N., was not there.. Amid the theater of U.N. summit speeches, where symbolism matters,
Ambassador Susan Rice should have been right there in the chamber — not
only to listen to America’s embattled ally, but to be witnessed by the
world, and especially by other delegations to the U.N., heeding every
word and applauding at the end. If Rice absolutely could not be present,
Secretary of State Clinton, also in New York for meetings, should have
been there.
Instead, seated in Rice’s place at the head of the U.S. delegation
was an under-secretary of state, Wendy Sherman. Sherman is a veteran of
the Clinton administration’s unsuccessful nonproliferation dalliance
with North Korea, and more recently took part in the Obama
administration’s failed talks with Iran. Where was Rice? There’s been astoundingly little coverage of her
ill-timed vanishing act, apart from the Israeli press and Fox News, on
which U.N. commentator Anne Bayefsky raised the question and talk-show
anchor Greta Van Susteren gave it brief mention.
In response to my own queries about Rice’s absence, a spokesperson
for the U.S. Mission to the U.N. said that Rice had been at the General
Assembly earlier in the day, but left before Netanyahu spoke. This was
due to a cascading set of scheduling conflicts in which the top priority
was apparently Clinton’s commitment to speak elsewhere at an event for
an initiative called “Connecting the Americas 2022.” That meant Clinton
could not attend a ministerial-level lunch meeting of the five permanent
members (P5) of the Security Council, so Rice had to fill in at the P5
lunch. According to the U.S. mission, Rice might have been able to cram in
Netanyahu’s speech before the P5 lunch, had the GA speakers stuck to
their allotted time slots. But as the speeches preceding Netanyahu’s ran
late, Rice “notified” the Israelis that she had to leave, and they
apparently “understood.”
But this explanation just doesn’t wash. Whether the Israelis
“understood” or not, Rice should done whatever it took to be there for
Netanyahu’s speech, even if that meant a late solo lunch at a hot-dog
stand. Even if either Clinton or Rice had to attend the P5 lunch, surely
State could have convinced the Connecting Americas audience to
“understand” that however important it is to connect the Americas by
2022, there’s a life-and-death nuclear crisis looming in the Middle East
on a much more urgent schedule.
Further, anyone familiar with the U.N. surely knows that General
Assembly speeches almost always run long, and thus it’s simply not
believable that Rice planned to be there for Netanyahu’s speech and to
attend the P5 lunch. When Rice was scheduled to take Clinton’s place at
the luncheon, it was pretty much a done deal that they were placing a
higher priority on her lunch appetizer than on Netanyahu’s speech. (To
infer anything else would be to vastly underrate the scheduling talents
of Susan Rice. Just a fortnight earlier, she had managed to appear on no
fewer than five separate Sunday shows, spreading the absurd and now
discredited message that the Benghazi attack was “spontaneous.”) Worse, in trying to defend Rice’s absence, the U.S. mission stressed
that in leaving, she also missed the Palestinian president’s speech, as
if the discourtesies were somehow equivalent. Israel is a close U.S.
ally under direct, explicit, and increasingly urgent threat of
annihilation by a terror-based Iranian regime seeking nuclear weapons.
The Palestinian Authority is none of these.
Nor is it easy to discern why, at a time of worsening crisis over the
Iranian nuclear program, it was urgent for Rice to abandon the Israeli
prime minister in order to attend a lunch where two of the attendees,
Russia and China, have been running interference for Iran for years. If,
during last Thursday’s lunch, unusual progress was achieved on this
front, or indeed on any front, there’s been no visible sign of it.
Moreover, the absence of Clinton and Rice was not the worst part of
America’s appalling diplomatic dereliction during last week’s U.N.
meetings. Their priorities were of a piece with administration practice.
President Obama himself, who has placed the U.N. at the center of his
foreign policy, spent less than 24 hours in New York for this year’s
conclave, with part of that time devoted to appearing as, in his own
words, “eye candy” on The View.
Apart from hosting a reception for visiting heads of state, Obama
found time for only one official U.N. event, his own speech. When he
worked his way around to Iran, he did promise that the U.S. “will do
what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” But then
he proclaimed his preference for yet more “time and space” for
diplomacy, with only the vague reminder — unlikely to wow the ayatollahs
or anyone else — that “time is not unlimited.” In a departure from custom, including his own, Obama not only skipped
the U.N. secretary general’s annual summit lunch, but made no time for
bilateral meetings with any foreign leaders, including Netanyahu. When
Obama himself finally connected with Netanyahu, on Friday, it was for a
20-minute phone call.
One might ask why the U.S. bothers with hosting the General Assembly,
an annual festival of tyrants and traffic gridlock, in the first place.
But if U.S. support for Israel at this shindig consists of being out to
lunch at crucial moments and phoning in a day later, it’s time to cut
the losses. Do it all over video conference.
— Claudia Rosett is a
journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies,
and heads its Investigative Reporting Project. The National Review
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