(July 25, 2008 - Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images Europe)
With domestic issues consuming much of the President’s time in front of television cameras, it might be easy to assume that his focus is directly solely toward healthcare and other pressing issues. However, if we have learned anything about this new president from his first eight months in office it should be that he is never far from revealing his next big endeavor.
So what it Obama working on away from the public eye? While I am sure that there are a myriad of progressive programs in the formulation stages, I would guess that his next big splash will be on the international front. As he pushes for Congress to hammer out an agreement on the healthcare front, it is likely that he will be preparing his next major appearance on the world stage.
The fifteen member UN Security Council is scheduled to meet at the end of the month in New York and Obama will serve as the chairman. It is our turn in the rotating Presidency of the Council and President Obama will be the first American president to debate before the Council. Topics du jour you ask? Nuclear proliferation and disarmament. It will be the first time in the history of the Council that a session was devoted to disarmament. And just in time for the Chosen One to serve as Chairman. Who better to save the world from nuclear war?
The General Assembly session will also open that week and topics are expected to include Iranian nuclear proliferation and global climate change. I’ll let you guess which one our progressive leader is more concerned about. Mahmoud Ahmadi-nejad will be in attendance, so a good time should be had by all if he doesn’t soften his posture on forging ahead with his country’s nuclear program.
To make the meeting even more intriguing, Libya will also be represented on the Council as they are currently serving as one of the rotating representatives as well. This should make for good headlines as Muammar Gaddafi arrives in New York. He’s already made a lot of friends in New Jersey where he has set up his Ringling Brothers Traveling Circus Tents.
I would anticipate the presence of Gaddafi and Ahmadi-nejad will make it hard for the press to stay away from such an event and I am sure that President Obama will proudly look into those cameras and apologize once more for our nation’s actions and our relationship with the United Nations. I have no doubt it will be a week of apologies and “forging new relationships.” Just what we need at a time when Iran is giving us an old fashioned cold shoulder and Venezuela is calling our bluff on trade embargoes with the rogue nation pledging to break any that are attempted.
A preliminary agenda has been release for the meetings and the semantics of the topics leave much to be desired.
, speaking on September 2 at her first press briefing since the United States assumed the council presidency, is this: “The session will be focused on nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear disarmament broadly, and not on any specific countries.”
This seemingly innocuous language has two profoundly disturbing features. First, UN documents indicate that the Security Council is currently dealing with over 100 issues. While “non-proliferation” is mentioned, “disarmament” is not. Similarly, a UN Secretariat compilation “forecasting the Council’s program of work” for the month of September — based on prior activities and requests — lists non-proliferation specifically in relation to Iran and North Korea and does not list disarmament. But in light of Obama’s wishes, a tailor-made subheading will likely be adopted under the existing entry “maintenance of international peace and security.” The new item will insist on simultaneous consideration of nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament and make no mention of particular states.
This is no trivial technicality. The linguistic formula, which Obama’s confrere Qaddafi will undoubtedly exploit, shamelessly panders to Arab and Muslim states. It is a familiar recipe for stonewalling efforts to prevent Iran or other Muslim and Arab states from acquiring nuclear weapons until Israel is disarmed or Israel’s (unofficial) nuclear capacity is exposed and neutralized. It is also a frequent tool of those whose real goal is to stymie America’s defenses.
Second, Obama’s agenda preference indicates that he is dead-set against chairing a session on the non-proliferation issues already on the council’s plate — those that name Iran and North Korea. This stretches his “beer summit” technique to the global scale. Naming names, or identifying the actual threats to world peace, would evidently interfere with the spectacle of proclaiming affection for world peace in the abstract. The problem is that this feel-good experience will feel best of all to Iran, which has interpreted Obama’s penchant for form over substance to be a critical weakness. As a Tehran newspaper close to the regime snickered in July: “Their strategy consists of begging us to talk with them.”
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.”
A brutalized Iranian population, yearning for democracy, has repeatedly been met by nothing but sad faces from this administration. An Iranian president installed by treachery has been legitimized by American recognition of his government, a decision that has sidelined other eminently justifiable alternatives. The leaders of this state sponsor of terrorism aim to annihilate the Jewish state and are on the verge of acquiring the means to do so. But instead of making the isolation and delegitimation of Iran the top priority for America’s turn at the council presidency, the Obama administration has taken Iran off the table at precisely the time when top decision-makers will be present.
The administration’s zeal for the front-page photo-op on September 25’s New York Times has now become a scramble to manufacture an “outcome” for the session. The president’s idea for a glorious finish was described by Ambassador Rice as some kind of joint statement declaring in part “that we are united in support for effective steps to ensure nuclear nonproliferation.”
Such a result would be breathtaking — for the audacity of claiming exactly the opposite of what it really represents. Even allied council members France and the United Kingdom are reported to be very unhappy with Obama’s no-names strategy for his September rollout.
Far from bolstering his flagging image, the president’s group-hug theory of diplomacy deserves the disdain of anyone who can separate rhetoric from reality.
— Anne Bayefsky is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and executive director of Human Rights Voices.
Obama’s UN Gambit: King of the Universe and the Polls
