Israel Matzav

Another strike for America's dimwitted UN ambassador

Claudia Rosett reports on a dinner party last week for UN Security Council ambassadors hosted by Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki at the plush Manhattan residence of Iran’s ambassador to the UN. Guess how many ambassadors (or their representatives) showed up: 13.

None of them should have come. Iran is in flagrant violation of a series of binding UN sanctions meant to stop its race toward the nuclear bomb. Iran has deceived the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, scoffed at UN Security Council requests, demands and deadlines. And, P.S., according to the U.S. State Department, Iran is the world’s “most active state sponsor of terrorism.” (Terrorism is something the UN has not yet managed to officially define, but it is also something one might hope the Security Council would be against).

But, hey, why should the UN Security Council let Iran’s global terrorist networks and sanctions-violating nuclear program get in the way of a free meal in New York? Apparently forgetting President Barack Obama’s claim that Iran is finding itself increasingly “isolated,” the Obama State Department sent an envoy to Iran’s Manhattan dinner party. So did at least a dozen other members of the Security Council (Inner-City Press reports that Uganda came late, Mexico left early, and Gabon and Nigeria didn’t show up). President Barack Obama’s administration, which sent the number two envoy from the U.S. Mission, saw this Iranian banquet as “an opportunity for Iran to speak to its international obligations” — as one unnamed official told the Washington Post.

Who scripts this U.S. diplo-babble? Iran has been speaking loud and clear to its “international obligations,” and the gist of what Iran’s despots have been saying, and doing, is too rude to print in this space.

But the real question was the whereabouts of the United States' lazy ambassador, Susan Rice.

Speaking of Ambassador Susan Rice, where is she in all this? It’s public knowledge that the U.S. government, courtesy of U.S. tax dollars, provides its ambassador to the UN with a plush and spacious apartment in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. When Iran sent out invitations to Mottaki’s Security Council soiree, surely Rice could have availed herself of her fancy New York digs to host a dinner party of her own, that same night, and invite the 15 members of the Security Council – without Iran in tow. They could have had a cozy chat about the burgeoning problem of an Iranian government that has learned to exploit the UN in ways deeply at odds with the interests of the free world and the charter of the UN. (Of course there’s always the awkward possibility that an Iranian dinner could prove a bigger draw than a concurrent shindig thrown by Ambassador Rice. The upside, however, is that such a showdown could greatly clarify for the American voting public the true character of the UN Security Council).

I guess Rice was busy that night, or she didn't want to compete with the Iranians. Maybe it's time to find a new ambassador. What could go wrong?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:27 PM