On Syria, Obama Speech Cites YouTube, Leaves UN to the End, No Ban Ki-moon, Race for Relevance

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, September 10 -- President Barack Obama's prime time speech on Syria was short, and only near the end did he even mention the UN Security Council and the UN. 

  The gambit to have Syria identify chemical weapons, sign a treaty and invite the UN in through the march toward missile strikes into disarray. Obama said he'd asked for delay in Congress -- when things had been looking bleak for him there, especially in the House of Representatives.

  Obama's speech was mostly summary, hung on references to YouTube videos and a letter from an unnamed interlocutor, that whoever comes after Assad might violate human rights. 

 Might eat lungs, you say? This wasn't heard in Obama's speech.

  Obama mentioned Russia, then France and the UK. (China never showed up.) Then at Minute 13 Obama spoke of a resolution in the UN Security Council, and of UN involvement. The name of Ban Ki-moon, or even the words "Secretary General," did not come up. 

There was no mention at all of the UN report. But nor did Obama repeat the "UN is hocus pocus" line he used after the G-20.

  Just after Obama finished, two US networks were showing singing and dancing shows. On ABC they noted that Obama's speech had not been shown live in Syria. (Of course, it was 4 am there.)

  From a UN perspective, all of the manipulative effort to get Ban Ki-moon on television -- canceling noon briefings for Ban to take a mere two or five pre-selected questions, refusing as on Tuesday to take any but Syria questions, even amid questions about the UN's Intervention Brigade in the Eastern Congo and a seeming cover-up of attacks on the press in South Sudan. and Liberia (click here for short pitchof the Free UN Coalition for Access @FUNCA_info, on press freedom.)

  Ban's UN is all in, but not to Obama. The UN's Race for Relevance continues. Watch this site.

   

As Obama Mocks UN's Hocus Pocus, Evidence at US Mission Called UNconvincing, United for Peace?

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, September 6 -- When US President Barack Obama took press questions at the end of the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, he said that but-for his reaction to the August 21 incidents in Syria, it would just be a (draft) resolution at the UN, "the usual hocus pocus."

At the UN on September 5, US Ambassador Samantha Power announced that members states had been invited across the street to the US Mission to see the US' evidence. As Inner City Press reported yesterday, one attendee said he was not convinced by the evidence; another said it was the same shown "back in the capital."

  Since then other attendees have told Inner City Press the US invited was directed beyond the Security Council members to those countries which wrote to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon asking for an investigation into the August 21 incidents.

  That's the same group the UN's Angela Kane invited to a stealth meeting in the North Lawn building earlier this week -- but that, Syria's Permanent Representative Ja'afari also attended (and spoke afterward, see Inner City PressYouTube here.)

  While some make much of a Saudi draft General Assembly resolution, other interested countries tell Inner City Press "that's on hold" and speak of another, quite different resolution.

  There's also this question, for the US: would it support a Uniting for Peace resolution which could empower to act on the issues the US uses its veto for in the Security Council?

  Echoing Obama, French president Francois Hollande after the G20 said Obama told him the vote in the US Congress could not be until the middle of next week and that he, Hollande, told Ban Ki-moon to speed up the report.

(Hollande asked what if instead of just intervening in Mali he'd waited for the Security Council -- seemingly an admission that the line France used at the time, that its intervention was under an earlier resolution for an African force, "in the framework of international law," was just... the usual hocus pocus.)

  Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi after meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said the UN report will go to the Security Council and to the rest of the international community." Does that mean all 193 states, at same time as Security Council? Or another "hocus pocus" invite list, like the US and Angela Kane have used? Watch this site.