While criticism of United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice now centers on her mistakes in the Benghazi affair, her flaws go well beyond that, says former Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
“Senators might also explore Ms. Rice's broader record at the U.N.,” he and Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, write in
The Wall Street Journal. “Why, for example, did she think it was appropriate to absent herself from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's September speech to the General Assembly” about Iran’s nuclear threat.
When it comes to addressing that threat in the United Nations, “Ms. Rice has been able to achieve only one sanctions resolution, in June 2010, and with less support than any of the multiple Security Council resolutions passed during the George W. Bush administration,” the duo states.
They’re also critical of U.S. participation in the U.N. Human Rights Council, which includes autocratic nations such as China, Cuba, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.
“Ms. Rice has continually defended America's presence on the council while boasting to Congress that the U.S. ‘succeeded in getting Iran to withdraw its candidacy last year,’" Mukasey and Bayefsky say. “She omitted that, in return, the Obama administration stood aside while Iran was elected to the U.N.'s top women's rights body, the Commission on the Status of Women.”
Rice also hasn’t strongly defended U.S. policy on drone missions, they write. When asked to comment on this month's plans by Human Rights Council "experts" to create a special investigation unit and report on America's use of drones as violations of international law and possible war crimes, Rice responded only that the U.S. has "questions about the appropriateness of this approach but we will look at it on its merits."
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