Ban Bolton Now PDF Print E-mail
Andy Rowell, 2 August

After a five-month stand-off with the American Senate, President Bush yesterday appointed John Bolton to be UN Ambassador to the UN. Bush did so by using a little known rule that allows the President to make nominations whilst the Senate is not sitting.

In doing so Bush has overridden the objections of the Democrats who believe the neo-conservative Bolton is the wrong man for the job. Long-term Senator Edward Kennedy called it a 'devious manoeuvre' that 'only further darkens the cloud over Mr Bolton's credibility at the UN'.

By appointing Bolton to the UN, Bush is once again overriding democracy and showing his true extreme neo-con credentials. John Bolton is a dangerous man. His nomination for US Ambassador had sparked outrage, even leading to a dedicated website called http://www.stopbolton.org/.

It is not just those in the United Nations, Europe, the Middle East or on the American political left who see his nomination as outrageous. Some 60 US ex-diplomats had signed a letter urging the Senate to reject Bolton’s nomination, including former U.S. Senator, James Sasser who was President Bill Clinton's ambassador to China; Patricia M. Byrne, deputy U.S. ambassador to the UN under Reagan, and John Hirsch, ambassador to Sierra Leone under Clinton.

But Bolton has powerful friends too. In a counterattack to the anti-Bolton campaign, former US Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, ex-CIA Director R. James Woolsey and 64 other retired arms control specialists and diplomats signed a counter letter supporting him. The letter was organised by Frank Gaffney, a Pentagon official in the Reagan administration who said Bolton had “distinguished himself throughout a long and multifaceted career”.

So let’s look at that career. As a schoolboy at a military-orientated college, Bolton was a student organiser for Barry Goldwater, the founding figure of American conservative politics . At Yale University, he was active in the local Conservative Party. Bolton joined the then Reagan administration in the early eighties as a lawyer, gaining support from such right-wing stalwarts as Senator Jesse Helms and Richard Viguerie. The latter was a leading fund-raiser in the emerging “new Right” in America, who made a “career – and a fortune on the politics of resentment” .

Helms is a controversial figure too, coming from the extreme political right, and someone who was described by the Washington Post as the “last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country” .

In January 2001, Jesse Helms endorsed Bolton’s nomination for Under-secretary of State for Arms Control. “John Bolton 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”, said Helms.

Bolton continued to forge close alliances with those on the hard right of American politics. He became one of the most loyal advisors to Reagan’s Attorney General, Edwin Meese, who was himself one of the then President’s closet confidants. Meese was later implicated in “financial improprieties” to do with Bechtel and an oil pipeline in Iraq.
 
In the late eighties Bolton himself was implicated in the Iran Contra scandal. Bolton “tried to torpedo” Senator John Kerry’s inquiry into allegations that Reagan-backed Contra rebels in Central American were involved in drug smuggling and gunrunning . In the nineties with Clinton in power, Bolton worked as a lawyer as well as continuing to issue his hard-right dogma.

Some of his language would be a chilling precursor to his job over a decade later. In a 1994 speech, Bolton declared that “there is no such thing as the United Nations”. He added: “If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference”.

In 1997, he joined the American Enterprise Institute, a leading right-wing think tank. The following year, Bolton became a member, then director of the Project for the New American Century, a neo-con organisation that led the charge for war in Iraq.  On the 26 January 1998, Bolton along with Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz wrote to Clinton arguing for the “removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power” to “secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world”.
 
That same year Bolton called the International Criminal Court a “product of fuzzy-minded romanticism [that] is not just naïve, but dangerous” . The reality is it is “dangerous” only because it threatens the economic interests of the US.

Two years later Bolton again attacked the legitimacy of the United Nations and Kofi Annan over the war in Yugoslavia. Bolton wrote that the “United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has begun to assert that the U.N. Security Council is ‘the sole source of legitimacy on the use of force’. If the United States allows that claim to go unchallenged, its discretion in using force to advance its national interests is likely to be inhibited in the future” . Note the phrase “advance its national interest”. Annan was “dangerous” only because he threatened the military and economic interests of the United States.

Bolton’s philosophy is simple: There is only one global superpower, only one national interest. And that is the interest of the United States of America. He has also argued that “the U.N. is valuable only when it directly serves the United States”.  And it is not just the United Nations that is only valuable if it serves the US. It is you. It doesn’t matter if you are black or white; European, Asian or Middle Eastern: Christian or Muslim; if you live outside the United States you do not matter. What matters, to Bolton, is the raw economic interest of the United States.  That decides what is good and evil; that will decide who will live and who will die.

That is the way of Bolton and Bush. Once Bush was elected President, Bolton became Under-secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. He became Bush’s destroyer on international treaties. His entry on the “Right Web”, a website that tracks influential right-wing activists, notes how: “From the early days of the first Bush administration, Bolton mounted a campaign to halt all international constraints on U.S. power and prerogative, fiercely opposing existing and proposed international treaties restricting landmines, child soldiers, biological weapons, nuclear weapons testing, small arms trade, and missile defense” .

In a rational and humane world people would be willing to stop the use of landmines and child soldiers. They would want lives to stop being ripped apart by the lethal legacy of war. Anyone would want to prevent war too. But no so John Bolton. If it is in the American national interest to remove Saddam, you remove him, whether you have legitimacy from the United Nations or not.

In the run up to the Gulf War, Bolton insisted that no new international mandate was  needed to launch an attack against Saddam: “You don't have to wait for a mushroom cloud before you take appropriate  action,” he said . He ignored all the evidence about the lack of nuclear stockpiles and all the advice that an attack on Iraq would increase support for international terrorism.

Bolton was not satisfied with Saddam’s demise. Even before the Iraq war, Bolton warned that after removing Hussein “it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards”.  He also named Libya, and Cuba along with Syria as posing significant threats to the U.S. after the “axis of evil” nations - Iraq, Iran and North Korea.  

We know Bolton exaggerated the threat of Iraq; we know he exaggerates the threat posed by other countries too. Eariler this year Newsweek reported that: “Foreign Relations Committee staffers are looking into charges that Bolton attempted to intimidate or victimize two career intelligence officials for what he viewed as their insufficiently alarmist analyses of intel on purported Cuban biological weapons”.

The scary reality is that John Bolton is probably even more of a hawk than his President, if that is possible. He is more extreme. We know we live in dangerous times. John Bolton has a history of working with some of the most dangerous men ever to have walked the corridors of power in Washington. Now, because of Bush's disdain for democracy, he will be a man of supreme power too. As a result the world will be a more dangerous place to live in. Especially if you are outside the United States of America.
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