Politico reports:

President Barack Obama will need some fancy footwork next week as he tries to dodge the dictators during his first-ever visit to the United Nations.

Stung by GOP criticism of his Hugo Chavez grip-and-grin in April, Obama doesn’t need the political fallout from any more cozy encounters or smiling snapshots with anti-American rivals.

At this year’s U.N. meeting, Libyan President Muammar Qadhafi and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are two leaders Obama would likely prefer not be on his dance card. Chavez, the fiery Venezuelan president, and Zimbabwe’s leader Robert Mugabe also will be there.

But avoiding an insistent suitor at the bustling U.N. headquarters can be difficult – despite the painstaking efforts aides sometimes take to send a U.S. president down a different hallway, or into a different corner of a meeting hall to avoid unwelcome diplomatic advances.

The bad news for Obama is that it’ll be hard to avoid Qadhafi next week. The United States is heading up the U.N. Security Council, while Libya currently holds the presidency of the U.N. General Assembly. That means Qadhafi is scheduled to speak immediately after Obama on Wednesday morning, and the two men could meet in a green room of sorts just off the floor.

Later Wednesday, there is a lunch sponsored by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and that’s where U.S. presidents and their aides have had to be most vigilant for unwanted diplomatic advances.

Obama shook hands with Qadhafi in June at the G-8 economic summit in Italy. However, since then U.S.-Libyan relations were strained by Qadhafi’s decision to celebrate Scotland’s release of Pan Am 103 bomber Abdel Megrahi. Despite U.S. demands that there be no festivities surrounding Megrahi’s return to Libya, Qadhafi went to the airport to hug the ex-prisoner and join in the hero’s welcome.

And then there’s Ahmadinejad. Obama famously said during the presidential campaign that he’d negotiate with the Iranian leader “without preconditions” – but the White House rejected talk of an Obama-Ahmadinejad tete-a-tete in New York, though a U.S. representative will take part in broader negotiations with the Iranians Oct. 1.

Asked how Obama might respond to a greeting from Ahmadinejad or Qadhafi, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice punted.

“I don’t want to presage or guess what they might say or what would be the appropriate response. That’s in the realm of the hypothetical,” she told reporters Friday at a White House briefing.

Rice said she doubted Obama and the Iranian president would come face-to-face, but she acknowledged that avoiding face time with Qadhafi may be impossible, at least this year.

“With respect to the Iranian leader, I don’t think there’s much likelihood that there will be an interaction. There’s no obvious venue in which that would occur, and certainly we have no meetings or anything of the sort planned,” Rice said. “With respect to Qadhafi, Libya holds a seat at present on the United Nations Security Council, and Libya will be present at the Security Council summit.”

Though he’s been in office for only eight months, Obama has already caught political flak three times for his close-quarters interactions with foreign leaders.

At a G-20 economic summit in London in April, TV cameras captured Obama appearing to bow as he took the hand of Saudi King Abdullah. The video went viral on the Internet, prompting the White House to deny that Obama kowtowed to the Saudi monarch.

The Chavez moment came at a summit in the Caribbean later that month, when Obama shook hands with the Venezuelan president and pictures captured wide smiles on both men’s faces. Later, Chavez sought out Obama at the same summit and handed him an anti-American book. Obama called the gift a “nice gesture,” but critics pilloried him for being chummy with a leader who once referred to President George W. Bush as “the devil.”

And in July, photographers snapped shots of Obama’s handshake with Qadhafi.

(Source: Politico.com)