[The following are excerpts from Susan E. Rice's opening statement to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Washington, D.C., July 29, 2009.]
I am particularly pleased to make my first appearance on the Hill as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations (U.N.) to discuss an issue that has enjoyed such strong bipartisan support for more than sixty years. From the Truman Administration's backing of the first dispatch of the U.N. military observers in the Middle East in 1948 to the Bush Administration's support for unprecedented growth in U.N. peacekeeping between 2003 and 2008, the United States has repeatedly turned to the U.N., and its peacekeeping capacity, as an …