Saturday, February 28, 2009

Playing 'Nice' Doesn't Work

From James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal:
Susan Rice, America's ambassador to the U.N., is one of President Obama's kindly new foreign-policy faces. Yesterday, the Associated Press reports, she asked Iran really nicely to be nice:

Rice brought up Iran at an open meeting of the UN Security Council on Iraq,
saying the long-term US commitment to Iraq and the reduction of the US military
presence in the country had to be understood "in a larger, regional context"
that included Afghanistan, the Middle East and Iran.
The United States "will
seek an end to Iran's ambition to acquire an illicit nuclear capacity and its
support for terrorism," Rice said. "It will aim to encourage both Iran and Syria
to become constructive regional actors . . ."
She didn't call them evil or anything! But how did they respond? The AP reports Rice's gentle admonition "drew an immediate rebuke from Iran's UN envoy":
Ambassador Mohammad Khazee said Iran has never and will never try to
acquire nuclear weapons and dismissed US Ambassador Susan Rice's allegation that
Iran engages in terrorism as "baseless and absurd." . . .
"It is unfortunate that, yet again, we are hearing the same tired, unwarranted and
groundless allegations that used to be unjustifiably and futilely repeated by
the previous US administration," Khazee said.

No comments: