America's dangerous game at the UN

*John V. Whitbeck is an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel.

The number of UN member states extending diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine has now risen to 131, leaving only 62 UN member states on the wrong side of history and humanity.

If one ignores small island states in the Caribbean and the Pacific, almost all of the non-recognisers are Western states, including all five of the settler-colonial states founded on the ethnic cleansing or genocide of indigenous populations and all eight of the former European colonial powers.

It appears that the current American strategy to defeat the State of Palestine's UN membership application is to try to deprive Palestine of the required nine affirmative votes in the Security Council by convincing all five European members (including Bosnia & Herzegovina, which has recognised the State of Palestine) and Colombia (the only South American state which has not recognised the State of Palestine) to abstain, leaving only eight affirmative votes and thus making America's lone negative vote not technically a "veto".

Even though everyone knows that the Security Council would approve Palestinian membership unanimously if the United States announced its support, the explanation and expectation behind this strategy is, apparently, that, in the absence of a "veto", no one would notice America's fingerprints all over this result, no one (notably in the Arab and Muslim worlds) would be outraged by America's blocking of Palestine's membership application and Mahmoud Abbas and his colleagues would crawl back into the hamster cage from which they have so recently and dramatically escaped, duly chastened and docile, and resume running mindlessly on the Israeli-American exercise wheel.

remainder: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/2011928153635754605.html

apparently no one the US has been loudly announcing its intent to veto for months unless but from what I have read Bosnia is finding itself the center of attention right now