Ehud Olmert, Prime Minister of Israel, said Monday that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was “shame-faced” by her president, George W. Bush, in the United Nations.

Rice, Olmert said, planned to vote for the resolution before the UN Security Council would called on both sides in the Middle Eastern conflict to accept an immediate ceasefire. She led the international community on writing and shaping the resolution, believing that the U.S. could take a lead role in bringing an end to the conflict.

Sadly for Rice, however, Olmert thought slightly differently. He called President Bush, telling him that the resolution was unacceptable to Jerusalem. Bush then called Rice and told her not to vote.

“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.

“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.”

If true, and it probably is, Olmert is right: Rice was indeed shame-faced by Bush. Rice led the UN on crafting this resolution. She spoke to all sides, believing that the resolution, as it was, would be in the interest of all involved. She wanted to vote in favor of it regardless of what Israel thought of it; in other words, she was prepared to act in breach with the wishes of one of America’s main allies.

But then Bush himself stepped in, telling Rice that if the resolution was unacceptable to Israel it was also unacceptable to the United States. A worse embarrassment is hard to imagine for a secretary of state.

One also wonders whether, and if so, this hurt America’s reputation among the countries that did eventually vote for the resolution crafted by Rice. If the U.S. crafts such a resolution, takes a leadrole in the process of creating it, but then ends up voting against it, how reliable of a partner is it? Something tells me that although Israel may have been delighted with Rice’s refusal to vote for the resolution, every other country involved has a slightly different opinion.

Lastly, even though it may have happened in the way Olmert described, it was unwise of him to say this publicly. He should have known better than to use this for domestic purposes (elections are coming up after all). Not only did he embarrass Rice, but the U.S. as a whole, and he gives fodder to those who say that Israel has too much influence over U.S. foreign policy.