UNITED NATIONS, March 19, updated -- As the US administration basks in its narrative of multilateral success in the Security Council on Libya, dutifully transcribed in today's New York Times, there are several discordant notes.
This narrative puts Susan Rice diplomacy at the UN at the center, even describing her as physically pulling the South African Permanent Representative into the chamber Thursday night to vote.
But at the UN in the run up to the vote, the US was nowhere near as central as this narrative portrays it. Lebanon speaking for the Arab League, the arrival of renegade Libyan diplomats Ibrahim Dabbashi and Shalgam, the dynamics between South Africa and Nigeria about the possible intervention in Cote d'Ivoire: all of this is left out.
It is ludicrous to suggest that South Africa would try to abstain by remaining outside of the Security Council chamber or not showing up to vote, or that South Africa's vote was determined by a single phone call.
The incident of Susan Rice searching for and finding South Africa's Ambassador and bringing him in to vote, further reporting reveals, may never have happened, at least not as implied by the New York Times and its source, presumably Susan Rice.
The self-styled paper of record, does not really have a reporter at the UN these days. Therefore they take their story from a telephone interview with Susan Rice, and throw praise on Samantha Power without mentioning a single thing she did.
While the US Mission to the UN is, perhaps tactically, largely inaccessible and unresponsive to much of the UN press corps, the strategy seems to be to give exclusive interviews to exclusive far away media and try to have it both ways. With Obama under fire from the right for being “too multilateral,” this narrative argues that the US is really as dominant as ever, they just hide it. Until you read it in the New York Times.
Elsewhere, amid coverage of Obama's trip to Brazil -- accompanied ironically by senior officials from Citigroup, which engaged in predatory lending including to Brazil -- it's said that he will discuss with President Roussef Brazil's abstention on Resolution 1973.
But what about the US-demanded carve out from the International Criminal Court referral of the case of Libya in resolution 1970 for citizens of non-ICC member states? Brazil nearly abstained from Resolution 1970 on that one: but you won't read it in the New York Times.
