By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, September 10 -- In a news cycle hungry for anything on Syria, the scheduling of a 4 pm consultation of the UN Security Council was given big play.
On the UK's Sky News, for example, it was called an emergency meeting that might somehow in one fell swoop nail down one of the various proposals on chemical weapons in Syria.
But then the consultations were canceled. It was by an e-mail from the Russian mission, which had requested the meeting in the first place. Security Council sources tell Inner City Press that the idea was to propose a statement, to pre-empt France's loud plan for a Security Council resolution.
It would have made the Council look like a kindergarten, one Council member said. Now that race has been put on hold -- another Council member said, in deference to Obama's speech tonight.
But it's the UN Secretariat that seems most obsequious to the US. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is eager to serve the US. Only last night, in the middle of all this, he gave a speech in honor of US Ambassador Samantha Power. (Some wonder, since Ban golfs with the Permanent Representatives of the UK, San Marino and South Korea, if Power might hit the links.)
There is also the question of how UN Peacekeeping could secure anything, much less chemical weapons, in a war zone.
Inner City Press asked about UN Peacekeeping planning for this at the day's noon briefing. But as of 4 pm, no answer had been provided.
And in the Security Council, rather than a meeting about Syria, there was a meeting about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on which we will have more. Watch this site.
Footnote: the US' list of 33 countries supporting its joint statement on Syria includes Kosovo, which is not a UN member state. But the UN is just "hocus pocus," as Obama put it after the G-20.
Two of the countries on the list of 33 are set to sing at the UN on Tuesday night: Canada and Romania. The US does not have Nauru or Cape Verde (or any African Union member) on the list yet, and fellow singer Costa Rica is all about peace (and now releasing all animals from zoos). Watch this site.
