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Bush makes a foxy pick
By
Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - In a
breathtaking victory for right-wing hawks, US
President George W Bush has nominated Under
Secretary of 
State for
Arms Control and International Security John
Bolton to become his next ambassador to the United
Nations.
Bolton, widely considered the
most unilateralist and least diplomatic of senior
US officials during Bush's first term, will have
to be confirmed by the US Senate, where some
Democrats, a few of whom were said to be stunned
by the nomination, are expected to put up a fight.
One aide called the nomination
"incredible", particularly in light of recent
indications, including Bush's talks with European
leaders at the end of last month, that he and his
new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, intended
to pursue a more multilateralist policy in his
second term and was determined to smooth the
rougher diplomatic edges of his foreign-policy
team.
That notion had been bolstered by
Rice's choice of trade representative Robert
Zoellick, a long-time pragmatist and "realist", as
her deputy, despite Bolton's efforts, backed by
Vice President Dick Cheney, to take the job.
The fact that Bolton failed in his quest
was taken as a clear sign that Rice was indeed
moving toward a more multilateralist policy, in
defiance even of Cheney, the undisputed leader of
the coalition of aggressive nationalists,
neo-conservatives and Christian Right activists
that dominated foreign policy from the September
11, 2001 attacks until after the Iraq invasion.
Rice's acquiescence, if not agreement, for
Bolton to serve as her representative at the UN,
however, will require foreign-policy analysts in
Washington to reassess that judgment.
"This is like putting the fox in charge of
the henhouse," said Heather Hamilton, vice
president of programs for Citizens for Global
Solutions, formerly the World Federalist
Association (WFA), who called Bolton the
"Armageddon nominee".
The Armageddon
allusion was to Bolton's long-time loyalty to
former ultra-right Senator Jesse Helms who, on
retiring from public life, described Bolton as
"the kind of man with whom I would want to stand
at Armageddon, if it should be my lot to be on
hand for what is forecast to be the final battle
between good and evil in
this world".
"His nomination sends exactly the wrong
message to the world about the Bush
administration's willingness to work with other
countries and in multilateral institutions.
There's no one who has a greater track record of
offending other countries, including our closest
allies," Hamilton said.
Despite a round,
bespectacled face, ruddy cheeks and a thick,
drooping blonde moustache that give him an
avuncular appearance, Bolton is known to be
confrontational, combative and humorless.
He began excoriating evil in the Ronald
Reagan administration when, despite a lack of
experience in developing countries, he held a
series of posts in the US Agency for International
Development (USAID) before winding up as one of
attorney general Edwin Meese's top aides.
In that capacity, he resisted all efforts
by Congress to investigate the Justice
Department's role in the Iran-Contra affair, as
well as efforts by Senator John Kerry to
investigate drug and gun-running by the Nicaraguan
Contras in the mid-1980s.
His
effectiveness gained him a promotion under
president H W Bush to the position of assistant
secretary of state for international
organizations, a post he held until 1993 when he
joined first the right-wing Manhattan Institute
and then the neo-conservative-dominated American
Enterprise Institute (AEI), home to such prominent
hawks as former UN ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick,
former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard
Perle, and Cheney's spouse, Lynne Cheney.
At a 1994 WFA panel discussion, Bolton
asserted that "if the UN [secretariat] building in
New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit
of difference".
By the time former
secretary of state James Baker tapped him to serve
as a senior member of the George W Bush legal team
in Florida after the 2000 election, Bolton had
become senior vice president at AEI, a position he
used during the latter half of the 1990s to speak
out strongly in favor of fully normalizing ties
with Taiwan, from which he had received money at
the time, according to the Washington Post.
He also advocated withdrawing from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and railed against
"nation-building", international arms-control
agreements and threats supposedly posed to US
sovereignty by the UN and its Secretary General
Kofi Annan. At one point, Bolton suggested the US
simply halt payments to the world body.
Bolton is also a long-time activist in the
Federalist Society, an association of right-wing,
nationalistic lawyers who have been particularly
opposed to the application of international or
foreign law in their decisions, a practice that
they say threatens US sovereignty.
The
society is also strongly opposed to
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that seek
the adoption of international law and standards in
the US. Along with the AEI, the society sponsors
"NGOWatch", which seeks to expose such efforts, as
well as the funding sources of NGOs that take such
positions.
Given his history of far right
positions, former secretary of state Colin Powell
was reported to have been deeply skeptical of
Bolton when Cheney suggested him for the under
secretary position. Cheney, however, insisted.
But within just a few months, it became
clear that Bolton was far more in tune with the
neo-conservative hawks around Cheney and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Pentagon hawks than
with Powell's relatively moderate positions and
demeanor.
In the summer of 2001, he
shocked foreign delegations and NGOs at the a UN
conference on the illicit trade in small arms and
light weapons when he announced that Washington
would oppose any attempt to regulate the trade in
firearms or non-military rifles, or any other
effort that would "abrogat[e] the constitutional
right to bear arms".
He played a similar
role several months later when, amid the public
shock that followed September 11, and an anthrax
scare, Bolton single-handedly sabotaged a UN
meeting to forge an international verification
protocol designed to put teeth into a treaty on
bio-weapons.
When he had finished, he
reportedly told his colleagues, "It's dead, dead,
dead, and I don't want it coming back from the
dead."
Within the State Department, Bolton led
the drive to renounce the US signature on the 1998
Rome Statute that created the new International
Criminal Court, the first permanent tribunal with
jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against
humanity and genocide.
When Bush decided
to withdraw the US signature to the treaty, Bolton
prevailed on Powell to permit him to sign the
formal notification to Annan, an act he later
described to the Wall Street Journal as "the
happiest moment of my government service".
At the same time, Bolton was also engaged
in a lengthy row with US intelligence agencies
over his public charge that Cuba had an offensive
biological warfare program. His assertion became
an embarrassment after anonymous intelligence
officials and retired senior military officers,
including the former head of the US Southern
Command, told the media that no such evidence
existed and charged that Bolton was politicizing
intelligence.
In July 2003, Bolton was
poised to testify to Congress that Syria's alleged
programs to develop weapons of mass destruction
had developed to such an extent that they
threatened regional stability, an assertion which
reportedly provoked a "revolt" by US intelligence
analysts, who insisted that the evidence did not
warrant such a conclusion.
Powell
frequently complained to his closest aides that
Bolton was undercutting him and appeared to be
taking orders from Cheney and the Pentagon, rather
than from his State Department superiors.
In a speech in Seoul that same month, for
example, just as Pyongyang agreed to enter
multilateral talks on its nuclear program as the
administration had demanded, Bolton described life
in North Korea as a "hellish nightmare", and
accused its leader, Kim Jong-il, of being a
"dictator" or "tyrant" running a "dictatorship" or
"tyranny" no less than a dozen times.
Some
US and Asian analysts said the speech appeared
designed to provoke Kim to boycott the meeting.
Indeed, the North Korean media described Bolton as
"rude human scum" and a "bloodthirsty vampire" and
demanded that he be withdrawn from the delegation
that was to take part in the talks. Bolton did not
show up.
But, if Bush now gets his way, he
will soon find himself at the heart of all US
multilateral diplomacy.
(Inter Press
Service) |
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