Who's Running The Show?

Everything you need to know about the relationship between Israeli Prime Ministers and American Presidents in the 21st Century is explained here.(h/t BooMan)

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was left shame-faced after President George W. Bush ordered her to abstain in a key UN vote on the Gaza war, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday.

"She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favour," Olmert said in a speech in the southern town of Ashkelon.

The UN Security Council passed a resolution last Thursday calling for an immediate ceasefire in the three-week-old conflict in the Gaza Strip and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza where hundreds have been killed.

Fourteen of the council's 15 members voted in favour of the resolution, which was later rejected by both Israel and Hamas.

The United States, Israel's main ally, had initially been expected to voted in line with the other 14 but Rice later became the sole abstention.

"In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favour," Olmert said.

"I said 'get me President Bush on the phone'. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't care. 'I need to talk to him now'. He got off the podium and spoke to me.

"I told him the United States could not vote in favour. It cannot vote in favour of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favour."

Nice to know Ehud Olmert is running America's foreign policy personally to the point where he can brag about it openly to the rest of the world.

Name another country's leader who would be allowed to make the entire US State Department make a 180-degree turn and then get to rub our faces in it publicly like this, and I'll leave Israel alone.

But it seems to me that Ehud Olmert almost feels sorry for Condi making that cease-fire resolution when he knew full well the US would never vote for it...because he controls that vote on anything having to do with Israel.

Just a thought, isn't having a foreign leader completely controlling our foreign policy towards that foreign leader's country, you know, illegal?