Besides commenter Tom, a possible paid troll (why else would he land here?) who wants to turn the U.N. into condos and eschew all diplomacy between nations as a matter of American policy, Bolton will not be missed.
His last mission was particularly vile
TPMmuckraker December 4, 2006 10:27 AM
...attempting a thoroughly embarrassing and wholly unsympathetic maneuver.
Less than two weeks before the White House announced his resignation, Ambassador John Bolton's U.N. mission blocked an effort to celebrate the end of slavery in our hemisphere.Next year marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As far as anniversaries go, it seems like a good one to recognize, doesn't it? It should not be a real bone of contention to say that one is against slavery; and, upon hearing of the anniversary of its abolition in one region, to acknowledge that as a good thing; to recognize the cost of the practice in the millions of lives uprooted and forced into extreme suffering; and to celebrate the efforts which ended the horrific practice.
To do so, a number of Caribbean countries got together to propose a commemorative resolution before the United Nations.
Guess who refused to sign? That's right: Ambassador John Bolton's United States.
There used to be honor in being a diplomat. For both Republican and Democratic men of a certain age and class, serving one's country using the power of words, wit and persuasion was a noble calling. Apparently, Bush's crew of thugs prefers punching people in the face instead. Diplomats are men like Bush the Smarter (aka 41), and thus should be ignored or downplayed as often as possible.
There still are a few civil servants who don't agree with Bolton and Bush's fiat declaring the U.N. a worthless organization.
The Bush administration is not popular at the United Nations, where it is often perceived as disdainful of diplomacy, and its policies as heedless of the effects on others and single-minded in the willful assertion of American interests. By extension, then, many diplomats say they see Mr. Bolton as a stand-in for the arrogance of the administration itself.But diplomats focus particularly on an area with less evidence of instructions from Washington and more of Mr. Bolton’s personal touch, the mission that he has described as his priority: overhauling the institution’s discredited management. Envoys say he has in fact endangered that effort by alienating traditional allies. They say he combatively asserts American leadership, contests procedures at the mannerly, rules-bound United Nations and then shrugs off the organization when it does not follow his lead.
Six ambassadors separately offered similar accounts of an incident in June that they said captured the situation. All were from nations in Europe, the Pacific and Latin America that consider themselves close allies of the United States, and they asked to speak anonymously in commenting on a fellow envoy.
Mr. Bolton that day burst into a packed committee hall, produced a cordless microphone and began to lecture envoys from developing nations about their weakening of a proposal to tighten management of the United Nations, his chief goal.
Gaveled to silence, he threw up his hands and said, “Well, so much for trying something different.”
It was not merely rude, the ambassadors said. One recalled that moments later, his BlackBerry flashed a message from another envoy working on management change. “He just busted us apart,” it read.
Three weeks later, on June 30, the 191-member General Assembly upended Mr. Bolton’s strategy to force change, lifting a six-month budget cap that he engineered without agreeing to significant management improvements. Dumisani Kumalo, the South African ambassador and the leader of the Group of 77, which represents 132 developing nations, said Mr. Bolton’s “putting on budget caps and being very contentious” had increased his group’s resistance.
...
A European envoy said that Mr. Bolton was a difficult ally for his traditionally pro-American group because he often staked out unilateral hard-line positions in the news media or Congress and then proved unwilling to compromise in the give and take of negotiations.In the aftermath of a 170-to-4 vote last spring on creating a Human Rights Council, which the United States opposed, Peter Maurer, the ambassador of Switzerland, characterized the American approach as “intransigent and maximalist.”
“All too often,” he said, “high ambitions are cover-ups for less noble aims, and oriented not at improving the United Nations, but at belittling and weakening it.”
Mr. Bolton’s habit of avoiding any favorable mention of the United Nations while seizing many opportunities to disparage it is so well established that Senator Paul S. Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat, observed to him in a May hearing of the Foreign Relations Committee, “The role of constant scold I’m not sure is the best way to induce change.”
Ian Williams of The Nation has compiled a little list titled, “John Bolton's Greatest Hits.”
some excerpts:
One of his proudest achievements in his previous job at the State Department was to “unsign” the treaty that committed the United States to the International Criminal Court, and then to bully and browbeat small countries across the world into signing agreements not to extradite US citizens to its seat in the Hague. And then this year he had to allow a Security Council resolution setting the Court's prosecutors on the perpetrators in Darfur.As pious commentators talk about how effective he was, it is worth remembering that while he was in charge of arms control, North Korea joined the nuclear club and that, according to him and Bolton and his allies, Iran is about to. It is an achievement--but of a dubious sort for an alleged arms control maestro. To be fair, within the Administration, he reportedly opposed the US-Indian nuclear deal, although he remained silent on Israeli nuclear capabilities.
Otherwise, Bolton's most memorable “achievement” occurred while he was in charge of arms control at the State Department before moving to the UN. He was a major saboteur of Congressional efforts to improve and tighten the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. If these measures had been passed, countries would not have been able, as North Korea did, to drop out of the treaty after reaping its dual-use benefits, and the voluntary protocols on inspection that Iran stopped observing would have been compulsory.
However, his greatest legacy may be his semi-successful attempt to wreck the UN reform proposals last year. By introducing hundreds of unilateral amendments after long months of painstaking negotiations between the members, he certainly managed to destroy the efforts of Kofi Annan to persuade the Third World members that managerial reforms were not some form of American and Western plot. In fact, almost every public statement he made pretty much confirmed their suspicions.
Technorati Tags: Devolution, idiot, incompetence
