Bush names Pro-War, Hater of the U.N. to represent the U.S

• Bolton said "there is no such thing as the UN"
  

President Bush on Monday nominated Undersecretary of State John Bolton, a prominent conservative within the State Department and a longtime critic of the United Nations, to become the U.S. ambassador to the international organization. The selection of Bolton, 57, a tough-talking, experienced diplomat, surprised many in Washington and the diplomatic community. He's a hard-liner who's advocated a no-concessions approach toward Iran and North Korea on their nuclear ambitions. He's also helped to lead administration efforts to have Mohamed ElBaradei removed as head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency for allegedly being soft on Iran and its nuclear program. Several lawmakers, including a prominent Republican, and some diplomats considered Bolton's appointment odd in light of Bush's second-term efforts at mending fences with allies alienated by the unilateralist foreign policy that Bolton advocated. Bolton, the State Department's undersecretary for arms control and international security since 2001, was considered the odd man out at the State Department after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rebuffed efforts by Bolton supporters, mainly aides to Vice President Dick Cheney, to make him her top deputy, according to diplomatic sources who spoke on the condition that they not be identified. Rice named U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick to the position instead. It was Rice - not Bush - who announced Bolton's appointment Monday. [more]

Extreme Right Wing Freak:
Pro -War Republican & Hater  of Multilateral Agencies like the UN
Bolton, an attorney, served as assistant secretary of state for international organizations under former presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Friends and enemies alike regard him as a quintessential unilateralist. Long a favorite of the far right, which had lobbied unsuccessfully for Bolton to be named to the State Department's number two position, Bolton served most recently as Vice President of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think tank that is home to Reagan's former U.N. ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and several other senior Reagan administration officials. He has advocated to abandon the ABM (the anti-ballistic missile treaty); build a destabilizing national missile defence system; abandon the Kyoto treaty; suspend missile talks with North Korea; oppose the international criminal court; and the international land-mind convention." Indeed, Bolton has a long history of positions that identify him as belonging to the Republican party's extreme right wing, which sees the United Nations and virtually all multilateral agencies as a permanent threat to U.S. sovereignty and well-being.

• At a public forum in 1994, for example, Bolton went so far as to assert that "there is no such thing as the United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that is the United States when it suits our interest and we can get others to go along."

• "If the U.N. secretariat building in New York lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference," he said. "In today's world," complained Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone during the debate on Bolton's confirmation, "these remarks are inevitably seen by the rest of the world as arrogant, confrontational and condescending. They make it more difficult for the U.S. to provide world leadership," he said.

• As recently as 1998, when Washington was on the verge of losing its vote in the U.N. Generally Assembly for failure to pay some $ 1 billion in arrears, Bolton suggested that such a result might be in the U.S. interest. "Once the vote is lost, and the adverse consequences predicted by the U.N. supporters begin to occur, this will simply provide further evidence to many why nothing more should be paid to the U.N. system," he said.

• On arms control agreements, Bolton has been similarly disposed. He greeted the Senate's rejection in 1999 of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), a cornerstone of global nuclear disarmament efforts, as "an unmistakable signal that America rejects the illusionary protections of unenforceable treaties." He described treaty supporters as "misguided individuals following a timid and neo-pacifist line of thought." "I realize some hold that view," said Sen. Joe Biden, the ranking Democrat on Jesse Helms' committee. "They're not people that I think should be in charge of promoting arms control and disarmament and nonproliferation matters."

• Bolton has similarly opposed the international ban on anti- personnel landmines and the creation of an international criminal court (ICC), a permanent tribunal to prosecute crimes against humanity and terrorism, as a threat to U.S. sovereignty. He also has opposed U.S. participation in peacekeeping forces, especially those sponsored by the United Nations.

• He strongly opposed the 1994 Framework agreement between Washington and North Korea under which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its nuclear program. He also and argued against any new deal to freeze its missile development or halt its missile exports to third countries in exchange for U.S. aid and normalization of relations. Rather, he argued in 1999, "a sounder U.S. policy would start by making it clear to the North that we are indifferent to whether we ever have 'normal' diplomatic relations with it, and that achieving that goal is entirely in their interests, not ours." IPS-Inter Press Service May 8, 2001