John Bolton, Dems New Whipping Boy

[Bonnie]

John Bolton, Multilateralist
Rich Lowry


April 12, 2005

Almost everyone agrees that the Democrats are viewed as too soft on national security. How is the party addressing this deficiency? By making its rallying cry, "Please, don't be mean to the United Nations."

This is the gravamen of its attack on President Bush's nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton. Bolton's chief offense is having been harshly critical of the U.N. through the years. The toughest Bolton quote is that the U.N. headquarters could lose ten stories and no one would notice. The notable thing about this statement is that it is indisputably true. A ten-story subtraction would still leave 29 stories to house the planet's most hellishly impenetrable and inefficient bureaucracy.

The outraged-at-Bolton caucus has a problem, which is that anything Bolton has said about the U.N. appears mild given recent U.N. malfeasance. He never said that U.N. peacekeepers would rape children in the Congo. He never said the U.N. would engage in insider dealing to rip off its own Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. He never said the U.N. would institute what appears to be a cover-up of its Oil-for-Food wrongdoing. But this all happened, which is why even Kofi Annan says the U.N. needs a thorough overhaul.

Democrats who oppose Bolton are in effect more deliriously pro-U.N. than even the secretary general. Bolton has always said that the U.N. needs strong U.S. leadership in order to work as an institution. This is Bolton's key disagreement with those Democrats who are content to have the U.S. led by the nose by the lowest common denominator of recalcitrant foreign actors. This attitude is the international version of the old definition of a liberal as someone who won't take his own side in a fight.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/richlowry/printrl20050412.shtml

 

[nosarcasm]

Questioning Mr. Bolton

Published: April 13, 2005

he longer John Bolton's Senate hearing for the post of United Nations representative went on, the more outrageous it seemed that President Bush could have nominated a man who had made withering disdain for that world body the signature of his career in international affairs. Some fear that the aim is to scuttle the United Nations. It's more likely, but just as disturbing, that this is another example of Mr. Bush's rewarding loyalty rather than holding officials accountable for mistakes, especially those who helped build the case for war with Iraq.

Whatever the explanation, the hearing held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee only added reasons for denying the job to Mr. Bolton. It turned up a third incident (we already knew of two) in which Mr. Bolton tried to have an intelligence analyst punished for stopping him from making false claims about a weapons program in another nation, notably Cuba. Trying to tailor intelligence is enough to disqualify Mr. Bolton from this job. But the hearings also provided a detailed indictment of his views on the U.N., multilateral diplomacy and treaties.

Mr. Bolton tried, but failed, to explain away his long public record of attacking the United Nations. Senator Barbara Boxer dealt rather neatly with Mr. Bolton's lamentation that he was being misquoted by playing a videotape of a 1994 speech in which he said: "There is no United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world - that's the United States - when it suits our interests and when we can get others to go along."

Mr. Bolton tried to convince the senators that he was just being provocative with those remarks and that as U.N. ambassador, he would confine his utterances to official policy vetted by appropriate agencies, like the State Department. But much of the hearing focused on Mr. Bolton's contempt for that process, especially on his attempts to have a State Department intelligence analyst punished for stopping him from misrepresenting intelligence on Cuba.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/13/opinion/13wed1.html?

 

[rtwngAvngr]

I watched part of this on cspan. The dems were grasping at straws trying to make this guy look bad. Maybe they don't realize that accentuating his pro u.s. stance actually looks good.

 

[dilloduck]

I watched part of this on cspan. The dems were grasping at straws trying to make this guy look bad. Maybe they don't realize that accentuating his pro u.s. stance actually looks good.

LOL and outing a CIA agent in the process !