Rice, Olmert, Bush & The UN - For The Record

On the tiff in an interview With Mike Schneider of Bloomberg TV:-

QUESTION: Back once again with the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in her last few days here at the State Department. We saw newspaper headlines which have surprised, shocked, and disturbed many people, remarks made purportedly by the prime minister of Israel, ostensibly made in the southern part of the country saying that he was unhappy about the direction the U.S. was going to take regarding a resolution in the Security Council, and that he called up the U.S. and said he didn’t want to speak with you, he wanted to speak with the President. He interrupted a President’s speech, he got him on the phone, and basically ordered that we not follow through on a course that you wanted to follow through on, according to him, in the Security Council regarding a resolution on what’s happening in Gaza. How much of that is true?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, first of all, I don’t know if the prime minister was – I hope – quoted out of context, because the story that I read in the newspaper is fiction.

QUESTION: You had – what did you want to do with that resolution? We abstained.

SECRETARY RICE: The President and I talked about the resolution, about the importance of allowing the Council to send a signal even though the United States believed that the resolution was premature. And I had made very clear that I thought the resolution was premature, and there were also concerns about a resolution that had Israel, a member-state of the United Nations, and Hamas, which is a terrorist organization, you don’t ever want there to be any equating those two.

And so we talked. We talked about abstention as a good option. And I was quite aware of the President’s call to Prime Minister Olmert. Of course, Prime Minister Olmert is not at all aware of what the President said to me. And I repeat, his rendering of this is fiction – if, in fact, that was his rendering of it. And I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps it’s not exactly what he said.

QUESTION: Well, you also find yourself being criticized by former Ambassador Bolton, who said that the U.S. should veto --

SECRETARY RICE: There’s not much new in that, Mike. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Why do you think that is – I mean, there are some people who think that the U.S. should not just abstain in the situation, but should continue to do what it’s done in the past, which is to say a member-state, Israel, is being rocketed by a terrorist organization and they deserve the right to self-defense.

SECRETARY RICE: I think we’ve said precisely that, that --

QUESTION: Why not veto then?

SECRETARY RICE: No, the resolution does not in any way say that there’s no right to self-defense. In fact, what the resolution says is there should be an immediate and durable ceasefire. And by the way, that had been American – the American position for days that we were seeking that kind of ceasefire. What will make a ceasefire durable? Hamas has got to stop rocketing Israeli cities. What will make a ceasefire durable? Something has to be done about the ability of Hamas to smuggle arms in with Iranian backing through tunnels that have been created there.

QUESTION: Are we going to get more cooperation out of the Egyptians on this matter?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, the Egyptians, I think, want to do the right thing here. We are providing some assistance through the Army Corps of Engineers, have been for some time. So a durable ceasefire is in everybody’s interest, because the one thing that you want to be very clear about is that the United States wants Israelis to be safe, it also wants Palestinians to be safe. And we have spoken also very forthrightly about the humanitarian needs there, which I think Israel is trying to address.

But we were very clear. Hamas started this. Hamas started this when they refused to extend Egypt’s – the calm that Egypt had negotiated.

QUESTION: You mean the truce that had --

SECRETARY RICE: But we abstained on this resolution because we wanted it to allow the Council to go ahead and speak even though we believed that it was premature.

And on diplomacy, peace and whatnot:

QUESTION: President Bush has said that one of the goals of his last year in office was to have some sort of Mideast peace agreement in place. President Clinton, in the last few days of his administration, finally, in frustration, realized that he could not achieve the same thing. Do you – as you leave this office, do you think that, realistically, there’s any chance of working this thing out in --

SECRETARY RICE: Yes, I do. I do. And I think that the foundation that was laid at Annapolis, which, by the way, is now enshrined in the Security Council Resolution 1850, which says that the two parties should negotiate as they have been doing. The representative – the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, President Abbas, has been negotiating with the prime minister, with Prime Minister Olmert, and also Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister. They’ve made quite a bit of progress. They don’t have an agreement yet, but they have made progress.

QUESTION: But does he – does Abu Mazen have the clout – I mean, there were those who say he’s been – that Hamas prior to this was actually being degraded, that it was weak, it was – its stand in the polls, it was low, and that, in fact, it’s been bolstered by what’s happened here, and Abu Mazen and Fatah have been weakened.

SECRETARY RICE: Well, you hear that, but if you look at the West Bank, the Palestinian people have got to be able to see that the West Bank economy has actually been growing for the first time in years. It’s far more peaceful. Nativity Square in Bethlehem, where in 2002, completely by accident, an Israeli tank shell hit the Church of the Nativity – just a few months ago, Salam Fayyad, the Prime Minister of the Palestinians held an outdoor dinner for an investment conference for more than 1,200 people. And so the Palestinian security forces, which are being trained in Jordan and taking over responsibilities in Hebron and in Nablus and in places like this – this is a different place.

If you contrast that with Gaza, where you have Hamas throwing people off of roofs and then getting down and praying, where you have them trying to make the schools as Islamist as possible, where you have them engaging in policies that have isolated Gaza, I think that’s a contrast that the Palestinian people can see.

But yes –

QUESTION: But what are they going to do about it?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, it’s a good reason –

QUESTION: What can they do about it?

SECRETARY RICE: It’s a good reason that hopefully the ceasefire, a durable ceasefire, can take place.

QUESTION: And that Hamas is what? Is eliminated from the scene, or –

SECRETARY RICE: No, I don’t think you’re going to eliminate Hamas by military means. But it’s a matter of showing that Hamas’s dark vision for the Palestinian people is not the only one, and it’s not the one that the Palestinian people want. And we have to remember, again, Mahmoud Abbas was the elected President of the Palestinian people. He still is. And he has a lot to show for his engagement on a basis of negotiation and peace with the rest of the world.

Olmert maintains his story:

Ehud Olmert's bureau maintained on Wednesday that the outgoing prime minister had correctly described moves that led to a United Nations resolution on a truce in Gaza, despite a United States rejection of his account, Israel Radio reported.

The U.S. State Department on Tuesday flatly rejected Olmert's assertion Monday that he had convinced the Bush administration to abstain from last week's resolution calling for an immediate truce between Israel and Hamas in the coastal strip.