Reading the Ban

Ban Ki Moon needs to put some distance between himself and Washington: John Bolton could help - by attacking him.

By Ian Williams
The Guardian

"......when a German reporter from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was asking Ban Ki Moon how he proposed to resolve that perennial friction between the US and the UN the new secretary general seemed to be occupying a parallel universe. He replied, "The US plays the main role in the coalition forces in Iraq. America has suffered many casualties. Nobody can doubt that America has played a major role in stabilizing Iraq. We have to appreciate the contribution of the US and their sacrifices. How the US will develop their military presence and strategies in future, they will have to decide themselves, in close cooperation with the coalition forces. The UN will not directly be involved in this."

Even most Americans now seriously question just how much "stability" the US has contributed to Iraq, so this seems to be taking politeness to rather unrealistic extremes......

Certainly Ban has betrayed some lack of appreciation of the finer points of the Middle East until now, instinctively taking the American view: on a recent visit to East Jerusalem where he met a group of Palestinian notables he seemed to be under the impression he was in Israel - an impression shared only by the Knesset, since no other government recognizes the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem, and the official position of the UN and its members is that until there is a peace settlement, both East and West Jerusalem are supposed to be a UN-administered "corpus separatum", which precludes them being either Palestinian or Israeli capitals without a further resolution......"