US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was left shamefaced after President George W Bush ordered her to abstain in a key UN vote on the Gaza war, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday.
"She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favour," Mr Olmert said in a speech in the southern town of Ashkelon.
The UN Security Council passed a resolution last Thursday calling for an immediate ceasefire in the three-week-old conflict in the Gaza Strip and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza where hundreds have been killed.
Fourteen of the council's 15 members voted in favour of the resolution, which was later rejected by both Israel and Hamas.
The United States, Israel's main ally, had initially been expected to voted in line with the other 14 but Ms Rice later became the sole abstention.
"In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favour," Mr Olmert said
"I said 'get me President Bush on the phone'. 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.
"I told him the United States could not vote in favour. It cannot vote in favour of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favour."
Mr Bush has consistently placed the blame for the conflict on Hamas, telling reporters on Monday that while he wanted to see a "sustainable ceasefire" in Gaza, it was up to Hamas to choose to end its rocket fire on Israel.
http://www.agi.it/world/news/200901131123-pol-ren0025-art.html
(AGI) - Jerusalem, Jan. 13 - A call made by ad interim Premier of Israel Ehud Olmert to US President George W. Bush would have been the cause for the unexpected abstention of the USA in the vote for the UN resolution last Thursday on the cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and the pullout of Israeli forces from the Palestinian enclave. The resolution was adopted anyway, though not unanimously. ''When, for reasons we actually don't understand, we understood that American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wanted to vote in favour of the resolution, I immediately contacted President Bush. I was told that he was in Philadelphia for a conference'' said Olmert, ''but I replied 'I don't care, I must speak to him now'. They led him from the hustings to another room where I talked to him. I told him 'You cannot vote for this resolution' and he responded 'Look, I know nothing about it, I haven't seen the text, I don't know what's in it'''. According to the premier of Israel at that point there were only ten minutes left before the UN vote. His reply to Bush was: ''I do, and you cannot vote in favour of it''. The outgoing US president then gave in and ''communicated an order to his Secretary of State'', who ''didn't vote for the resolution'' despite the fact that, Olmert underlined, it ''was initiated, written, prepared and negotiated by her''. Rice ''felt really bad about it'' he concluded, and still ''she abstained from voting for a resolution she had worked out''.
Submitted by Cherifa Sirry on Tue, 2009-01-13 23:23
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could it be more obvious who runs this country now?
so Bush had no idea what was in the resolution, but he asked Rice not to go ahead with it....it's a hell of a way to resolve things when you have no idea what certain things stand for.