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A hawk nests in the State
Department
By Jim Lobe
 WASHINGTON - To the
North Koreans, he is "rude human scum" and a
"bloodthirsty vampire". To former ultra-right US Senator
Jesse Helms, he is "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 name
is John Bolton; his title, undersecretary of state for
arms control and international security. And he is
widely seen as the reliable fifth columnist within the
State Department for the right-wing and neo-conservative
hawks who led the drive to war in Iraq from their
perches at the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's
office.
North Korea, which last week agreed to
multilateral talks on its controversial nuclear program
with its Northeast Asian neighbors and the United
States, has announced that it will have nothing to do
with Bolton and will not even recognize his status as a
US diplomat. The highly unusual statement was provoked
by a speech given by Bolton in Seoul, excerpts of which
were reprinted on the editorial pages of the Asian Wall
Street Journal.
Bolton, who ranks fourth in the
State Department hierarchy, described life in North
Korea as a "hellish nightmare", and accused Pyongyang's
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
last week that Bolton, who has made little secret of his
belief that Washington should pursue "regime change" in
Pyongyang rather than a new agreement on its
denuclearization, might have intended to use the speech
to provoke Kim into rejecting the forthcoming meeting.
Cheney and the Pentagon have long been skeptical of any
negotiation with North Korea.
Even if his words
were not as strong as Pyongyang's retort, Bolton's blast
at Kim was a typical performance by the Yale law school
graduate, whose red-meat anti-communism, staunch
pro-Likud outlook and ultra-unilateralist politics have
delighted his admirers among the hawks, even as they
have caused embarrassment and even some turmoil among
his State Department colleagues.
Despite a
bespectacled round face, red cheeks and a thick,
drooping blonde moustache that gives him an avuncular
appearance, Bolton is known to be confrontational,
combative and publicly humorless.
He began
excoriating evil in the 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 then attorney-general Edwin Meese's top aides.
In that capacity, he resisted all efforts by
Congress to investigate the Justice Department 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
George H W Bush to the position of assistant secretary
of state for international organizations, a position 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.
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 was
receiving 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
of all shapes and sizes, and the threats posed to US
sovereignty by the United Nations and its
secretary-general, Kofi Annan. So strongly was he
opposed to the UN that, at one point, Bolton suggested
simply halting US payments to the world body.
Given his history of far-right positions,
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. And within just a few months, it became clear
that Bolton was far more in tune with Pentagon hawks
than with Powell's relatively moderate positions and
demeanor.
In the summer of 2001, he shocked
foreign delegations and non-governmental organizations
at the 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 "abrogate the constitutional right to bear arms".
He played a similar role several months later
when, amid the public shock that followed September 11,
2001 and the 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. His efforts, which included
naming six countries that he said were violating the
treaty, provoked expressions of shock and outrage from
some of Washington's closest allies.
Bolton also
led the drive to renounce the US signature on the Rome
Statute that created the new International Criminal
Court, the first permanent tribunal with jurisdiction
over war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
At his request, Powell permitted his zealous lieutenant
to sign the letter to Annan formally announcing
Washington's withdrawal from the treaty, 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 a replay last month, Bolton was poised to
testify to Congress that Syria's alleged programs to
develop weapons of mass destruction had advanced 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.
Senior
Pentagon hawks, including most notably Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, have made little secret of
their wish to practice "regime change" in Syria, as in
Iraq, but, given the growing public suspicion that
evidence again Iraq was exaggerated and politicized, the
White House decided to delay Bolton's appearance until
next month at least.
(Inter Press
Service)
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