Vote Postponed After Acrimonious Bolton Confirmation Hearing
May/June 2005, pp. 16-17
By Richard H. Curtiss
Here are some excerpts:
Bolton “has ruffled feathers around the world. Visiting South Korea in September 2003 as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, Bolton gave an inflammatory speech about North Korea in Seoul. In his vitriolic attack, the U.S. diplomat called North Korean leader Kim Jon Il “a tyrannical dictator,” and described life in Pyongyang as “a hellish nightmare.” Kim responded by describing Bolton as “human scum” and “a bloodsucker,” and vowed never to allow Bolton to enter his country. Bolton’s tirade dealt a serious blow to any attempt at reason….
… keeping Bolton under control in the U.N. may be a problem, because insults and invective come quite naturally to him. It’s difficult to imagine Bolton comfortable playing the role of a traditional diplomat.
In an article posted March 7, 2005, on the Web site of the Center for American Progress Brooke Lierman wrote of Bolton: “he is a walking history book of the right-wing movement.” She continued: “Bolton has been effective. In his first one and a half years in office the U.S. pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, scuttled a protocol to the biological-weapons ban, ousted the head of the organization that oversees the chemical-weapons treaty, watered down an accord on small-arms trafficking and refused to submit the nuclear test-ban treaty for Senate ratification.”
In 1993, Jim Lobe reminded readers, Bolton joined the right-wing Manhattan Institute, and subsequently the neoconservative-dominated American Enterprise Institute (AEI)—home to such hawks as former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, and Vice President Cheney’s spouse, Lynne.
Perle was the lead author of the 1996 position paper “A Clean Break” for then-incoming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, which proposed getting the U.S. to clean up the region—first Iraq, then Syria, then Iran—on behalf of Israel. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz of Feb. 18, 2003—a month before the U.S. launched its bombing of Iraq—Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials “he has no doubt America will attack Iraq, and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards.”
As Lobe wrote on Aug. 4, 2003, “Bolton is seen as the reliable fifth columnist within the State Department for the right-wing and neoconservative hawks who led the drive to war in Iraq from their perches at the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.”….
Now that he has been nominated to be U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Bolton’s disdain for the world body is yet another embarrassment. “If the U.N. building in New York lost its top 10 stories [where all high-ranking officials have their offices] it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” he has famously remarked. Bolton has argued that the United States has no legal obligation to pay its U.N. dues, and that it would be a good thing if they weren’t paid.
Other memorable Bolton quotes include: “There is no such thing as the United Nations”; “If I were redoing the Security Council, I’d have one permanent member: the United States”; and “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law.” According to the would-be ambassador, the United Nations is “a great, rusting hulk of a bureaucratic superstructure…dealing with issues from the ridiculous to the sublime.”
Gabriel Espinosa Gonzales, a research associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, summed up some of the reasons Congress should think twice before approving John Bolton’s nomination as Washington’s U.N. ambassador: “John Bolton has demonstrated a disturbingly constant tendency to disregard facts, as well as a self-righteous attitude toward achieving selfish and even dangerous foreign policy goals.” |
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