Imagine the silence as you rise from your seat. A commotion is approaching, you can hear it.
Suddenly, the room bursts with activity as the President paces through the doorway, assertive in his mumbling, a fresh disaster on his mind. Last night, roughly 6,000 miles from where you’re standing right now, in the maelstrom of a war-fueled morning, women and children fled to hospitals after the latest round of bombings --- only this time, many of them were foaming at the mouth, clenching at their eyes, hunched over, gasping, twitching, sobbing, helpless.
Some of them were unconscious. Some of them were dead.
You hear the words: “They must’ve used stronger chlorine this time because it’s serious. They used something else, too. Something deadly.”
This is the world of US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. Faced with news of war crimes and murdered children, she does not recoil. The indignation roils up in a careful way. Call it poise, or grace, or something deeper and calmer.
She does it without losing the unmitigated fury of an American at the helm of a ship on dangerous waters.
Either way, she does it without losing the unmitigated fury of an American at the helm of a ship on dangerous waters. Her speech to the UN has largely --- and, to be fair, understandably --- gotten buried under news of FBI raids and Facebook on trial. But it deserves attention.
Every sentence rings with a barbed intensity, unimpeded. She faces forward with a calm yet unshakeable disdain: “History will recount this as either the moment the Security Council discharged its duty or demonstrated its utter and complete failure to protect the people of Syria.”
But, in everyone’s mind, one line in particular repeats: “The Russian regime, whose hands are all covered in the blood children, cannot be ashamed.”
It echoes through the silent auditorium of diplomats. It echoes with the weight of a ghost story.