Obama is such a micromanager, he is even usurping Susan Rice’s role later this month when it’s time for the US to chair the meeting of the UN Security Council. It says a lot about the confidence, or lack thereof, he has in Susan Rice.
Maybe President Obama just wants to be among friends:
Looking for a quick and easy boost in the polls, President Obama has decided to go to the one place where merit bears no relationship to adulation: the United Nations. On September 24, the president will take the unprecedented step of presiding over a meeting of the UN Security Council.
No American president has ever attempted to acquire the image of King of the Universe by officiating at a meeting of the UN’s highest body. But Obama apparently believes that being flanked by council-member heads of state like Col. Moammar Qaddafi — who is expected to be seated five seats to Obama’s right — will cast a sufficiently blinding spell on the American taxpayer that the perilous state of the nation’s economy, the health-care fiasco, and a summer of “post-racial” scapegoating will pale by comparison.
Anne Bayefsky continues her article and notes that the president is not just presiding over the security council but is setting the agenda as well, and it doesn’t sound very encouraging regarding the West’s ability to defend itself from rogue terrorist nations who are desperate to get their hands on a nuclear bomb.
It’s clear from Rice’s comments regarding the upcoming meetings this month when the US chairs the council the US will not discuss the shipload of weapons that the UAE intercepted enroute from North Korea to Iran:
At Ambassador Rice’s news briefing, she gave “an overview of the principal important meetings” to be held in September on her watch. After finishing the list of subjects without mentioning Iran or North Korea, she added: “So those are the highlights. We also have . . . three sanctions regimes that are up for regular review, chaired by the heads of the sanctions committees. We have Sudan, Iran and North Korea, and these are, I expect, likely to be uneventful and routine considerations of these various regimes.”
Even hard-boiled UN correspondents were surprised. Rice was asked to explain how the recent capture by the United Arab Emirates of containers of ammunition en route to Iran from North Korea could be construed as “uneventful and routine.” Her answer highlights the administration’s delinquency: “We are simply receiving . . . a regularly scheduled update. . . . This is not an opportunity to review or revisit the nature of either of those regimes.”
It is necessary to ask and expect an answer to the question: exactly whose side is the Obama administration on?
