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Imagine If You Could Make the President Drop What He Was Doing, Listen To You, Oppose His Own Policies
Israel's Olmert: Rice embarrassed over UN vote
By JASON KEYSER, AP
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's prime minister said Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was embarrassed by orders to abstain from voting last week on a U.N. truce resolution for Gaza that she helped arrange.
Israel had argued that the Security Council measure calling for a halt to the Gaza fighting — which passed Thursday in a 14-0 vote with the U.S. abstaining — was unworkable because it did not guarantee Israel's security.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he called President George W. Bush to seek an abstention from the U.S., a key Israeli ally at the United Nations.
"I said: 'Get me President Bush on the phone,'" Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. "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."
Olmert said he argued that the United States should not vote in favor, and the president then called Rice and told her not to do so.
"She was left pretty embarrassed," Olmert said.
A senior U.S. official in Washington disputed the account.
"The plan had been all along, as agreed by the secretary and the president, that if all of the pieces fell into place, we would abstain," the official said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
"The government of Israel does not make policy for the United States," the official added.
The approved resolution called for "an immediate, durable and fully respected cease-fire, leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza."
Rice said later that the United States "fully supports" the resolution but abstained because it "thought it important to see the outcomes of the Egyptian mediation," referring to an Egyptian-French initiative aimed at achieving a cease-fire.
Still, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said he was surprised by the U.S. abstention.
"We were told that the Americans were going to vote in favor," he said Friday, a day after the vote.
But when Rice came in to the Security Council chamber, she informed the Saudi foreign minister with an apology that she would abstain and would clarify later that the U.S. supported the resolution nonetheless, according to Malki.
"What happened in the last 10 or 15 minutes, what kind of pressure she received, from whom, this is really something that maybe we will know about later," he said.
AP writer Matthew Lee in Washington and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
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"A senior U.S. official in Washington disputed the account."
"The plan had been all along, as agreed by the secretary and the president, that if all of the pieces fell into place, we would abstain," the official said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue."
"The government of Israel does not make policy for the United States," the official added."
As an educated American I am supposed to believe that Prime Minister Olmert can on the one hand make a phone to call to the "leader of the Free World", disrupt what the "leader of the Free World" is doing, and dictate what action the "leader of the Free World" is to take, not in the best interests of the nation rrepresented by the "leader of the Free World" but in the interests of that Prime Minister's nation, namely, Isreal.
The Bush administration official quoted above, apparently with a straight face then proclaimes that "The government of Israel does not make policy for the United States,".
Now those Americans who swallow the pablum supplied them by the mainstream media might buy this bullshit, but I'm not. This is a classic example of the ZPC again manipulating American interests. The curiosity of all Americans needs to be piqued to the highest levels to demand that this manipulation be exposed and explained. We will not see this exposure coming from the mainstream media as that entity is part of the manipulating apparatis in this country.
Such a claim by the Prime Minister of Isreal should be front page in the biggest boldface type available OLMERT DICTATES TO BUSH!! Yet, I did not hear anything about this until I came across this post on ADS.org. The power of the ZPC (Zionist Power Configuration) as presented in great detail in James Petras' latest book, ZIONISM, MILITARISM AND THE DECLINE OF US POWER, is so pervasive that this proclamation of the Isreali Prime Minister is not considered newsworthy but routine relations between two so-called sovereign nations.
Ask yourself how American knee-jerk support for Isreal has strengthened and/or promoted any American interests over the last 40+ years? Go ahead, I'll await an answer.