[Marxism] "U.S.: Olmert's U.N. vote story '100% untrue" (or "contains inaccuracies")

[Fred Feldman]

U.S.: OLMERT'S U.N. VOTE STORY '100% UNTRUE'
By Herb Keinon and Allison Hoffman

Jerusalem Post
January 14, 2009 -- 9:25 [07:25 GMT; 23:25 PST, Jan. 13]

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1231866576464


Israel and the U.S. engaged in a rare and uncharacteristic public spat
Tuesday over events leading to the U.S. abstention in last Thursday's U.N.
Security Council resolution vote on the Gaza crisis.

Both the State Department and White House spokesmen said that Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert's claim that he had essentially gotten US President
George W. Bush to twist Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's arm and
abstain on the measure was simply untrue.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Olmert's story of what
happened in his conversation with Bush was "just 100 percent, totally,
completely not true," while White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto
said "there are inaccuracies."

During a speech to local authority heads in Ashkelon on Monday, Olmert
said that Rice had been embarrassed when she was ordered to back down from
supporting the resolution she had prepared, after Olmert intervened with
Bush.

Olmert said he had called Bush and interrupted a lecture he was giving in
Philadelphia to ensure that the U.S. not vote for the resolution.

"I said: 'Get me President Bush on the phone,'" Olmert said. "They said
he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't
care: 'I need to talk to him now.' He got off the podium and spoke to
me."

According to Olmert, he told Bush that the U.S. should not vote for the
resolution, and Bush then directed Rice to abstain.

"She was left pretty embarrassed," Olmert said.

McCormack said that Rice had decided as early as Wednesday that she would
not veto a resolution, after Arab ministers rejected an initial effort by
the U.S. to push for a weaker presidential statement from the Security
Council. That left her with the option of either voting for the final
text or abstaining.

"So you have two possibilities left: voting for it, or abstaining, and
she decided, given where the state of the negotiations were in terms of
the Mubarak initiative, that abstaining would give the best possibility
for those negotiations to move forward and actually resolve the situation
on the ground," McCormack said.

He said Rice had spoken with Bush both before and after his conversation
with Olmert, but insisted "with 100% assurance that her intention, again,
going into the conversation with the president was that she was going to
abstain."

An official in the Prime Minister's Office tersely responded to the
comments from Washington, saying "the Prime Minister's comments on Monday
were a correct account of what took place."

The official downplayed the incident, saying it was "over" and would have
no lasting impact.

The official said he was not aware of any conversation Olmert had had with
Rice on Tuesday to clarify the matter, or that any messages had been
relayed from Jerusalem to Washington.

Washington's account of the events, however, seemed to have been
indirectly confirmed by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who was quoted as
saying earlier in the week that she had held seven "difficult" phone
conversations with Rice on the day of the vote, and Rice had told her that
while the U.S. would not veto the resolution, it would abstain.

Rice spent three days in New York shuttling between conference rooms at
United Nations headquarters, meeting with Arab ministers and her British
and French counterparts. She said after Thursday's vote that she had
abstained because she felt a resolution "might have been a little
premature."

Israeli officials said it was unlikely that the spat would have any
lasting impact, primarily because Rice would be leaving office in less
than a week.

Olmert's comment, said in an off-the-cuff manner and not read from a text,
is widely believed to reflect the degree of Israeli disappointment at
Rice's handling of the Security Council resolution.

Middle East expert Steven Spiegel described the episode as "the worst faux
pas by an Israeli prime minister in history."

"You really do wonder what the prime minister was thinking - if it's true,
you'd really want to keep it as quiet as possible, and if it's not true,
why would you want to make up a story that would embarrass both the Bush
administration and the Israeli government and draw criticism from those
who are antagonistic to Israel?" asked Spiegel, director of the Center for
Middle East Development at UCLA.

"No matter how you play it, exaggeration, falsehood, whole truth, the
whole thing makes them all look bad," Spiegel told the *Jerusalem Post*.