Vote Postponed After Acrimonious Bolton Confirmation Hearing

By Richard H. Curtiss


	John Bolton at his April 11 confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski).

AS EXPECTED, Senate confirmation hearings on the nomination of John R. Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations were rancorous. As Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee pushed for a hasty vote, Democrats raised new allegations about President George W. Bush’s nominee. Republican Sens. Chuck Hagel (NB), George Voinovich (OH), and Lincoln Chafee (RI) expressed reservations about a quick vote, as did all Democratic committee members. Having already postponed it once, the committee on April 19 postponed the vote for another three weeks.

Sen. Joe Biden (DE), the ranking Democrat on the committee, had called for a closed session to consider new allegations about Bolton’s harassment of a lawyer working for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Kyrgyzstan. Bolton had chased her through a Moscow hotel, thrown things at her, and falsely claimed she had misused funds and could go to jail. In her letter to the committee Melody Townsel wrote, “His behavior back in 1994 wasn’t just unforgivable it was pathological.”

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) requested more time to deal with unanswered questions concerning Undersecretary of State Bolton’s history of “threatening intelligence analysts and others when they took positions in disagreement with his own.”

Carl W. Ford, Jr., former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, testified that Bolton was a “serial abuser” of underlings who had tried to remove an intelligence analyst who disagreed with him. Ford described Bolton as “a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy.”

Mysterious references also surfaced regarding Bolton’s use of his position as a senior State Department official to obtain information on individuals whose conversations had been electronically monitored by the National Security Agency (NSA). It is rare for government officials to request such information, which is highly classified for a number of good reasons.

Bolton also was instrumental in having the CIA and the NSA spy on Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, who had criticized the invasion of Iraq. He may have hoped to obtain information that would lead to their removal from their posts.

Senator Chafee, who had seemed undecided about Bolton’s nomination, had said he intended to vote for Bolton on April 19 unless “something surprising shows up” at the hearing. Since Republicans hold a 10-8 majority on the panel, only if some Republicans changed their minds would Bolton’s nomination be defeated. Given the nominee’s extraordinary lack of tact and his uncontrollable urge to damage his political enemies, there will be plenty more testimony to encourage them to do so before the final vote.

As a matter of fact, Bolton is an extremely unlikely candidate to be Washington’s ambassador to the U.N. Following President George W. Bush’s March 7 announcement of the nomination, former presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry (D-MA) said, “This is one of the most inexplicable appointments the president could make to represent the United States to the world community.”

Indeed, Bush’s nominee 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.

This is exactly the kind of brashness that people have learned to expect of Bolton. In fact, it is precisely because of his insolence that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not want him to become deputy secretary of state,the State Department’s number two position. According to friends of Rice, the secretary didn’t want Bolton free-lancing under her as he had under her predecessor, Colin Powell. According to current and former officials who have worked with Bolton, while serving in the State Departmenthe blocked Powell and, on one occasion, even Rice, from receiving information vital to U.S. strategies on Iran. Rice instead chose asher deputy former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick.

On the other hand, Rice had to find something for Bolton to do. Since he never would have agreed to a lesser position, he was nominated as U.N. ambassador. Rice has told her senior State Department staff she does not want any more information that could adversely affect his nomination coming out of the department.

In Congress, Democrats and Republicans know that 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. Even if tact is not that important to President Bush, it can’t help his administration if the international community sees the unvarnished Bolton in action just as the United States supposedly is trying to mend broken fences.

Rice clearly had her marching orders. Vice President Richard Cheney, who has the last word—always in private—on major appointments, has said bluntly that Bolton can have any job he wants. This is due to the fact that George W. Bush may well owe his presidency to Bolton. When Bush’s political future was to be determined by a few “hanging chads” in Florida after his heavily contested first election, Bolton appeared during the recount and said loudly, “I’m here to stop the count.” It was an astonishing statement, but through sheer bravado and aggressiveness he carried it off. The count never really re-started, and Bush became the 43rd president of the United States.

Bolton has managed to acquire plenty of friends in powerful places. Born in Baltimore in 1948, he graduated summa cum laude from Yale in 1970 and, four years later, earned his J.D. from Yale Law School. He then came to Washington, DC, 31 years ago, as an intern for Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, a former governor of Maryland. He was hired by conservative Agnew aide David Keene, who became Bolton’s friend. Keene has been a longtime chairman of the American Conservative Union (ACU).

Bolton’s mentors include former Secretary of State James Baker III and former Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1995-2001. Helms has described Bolton as “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.”

Bolton has maintained friendly relations with “the Armageddonists” and other extreme right-wing Republicans. According to Internet writer Mike Whitney, “Bolton is the most ideological of the Washington radicals; the maddest of the mad hatters.”

Prior to his current State Department position, Bolton held posts in previous Republican administrations, including general Counsel, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 1981-1982; USAID assistant administrator for program and policy coordination, 1982-1983; assistant U.S. attorney general, 1985-1989; and assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs from 1989-1993.

In an article posted March 7 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.”

Bolton also led the drive for U.S. refusal to sign the Rome Statute that created the new International Criminal Court (ICC), the first permanent tribunal with jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. In a recent article, Jim Lobe of the Inter Press Service wrote that Bolton described the International Criminal Court as the product of “fuzzy-minded romanticism…To support it is not just naïve but dangerous.”

In recognition of Bolton’s zeal in opposing the ICC, Secretary of State Powell permitted his subordinate to sign the May 2002 letter to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan formally announcing Washington’s withdrawal—an act Bolton later described to the Wall Street Journal as “the happiest moment of my government service,” and boasting of “taking a big bottle of White Out” to President Bill Clinton’s signature on the statute.

Bolton is equally proud of his successful 1991 effort to repeal the General Assembly’s 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism.

Coming Home to Roost

In 1993, 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.”

In 1999 Bolton signed a statement prepared by the Project for a New American Century criticizing the Clinton administration for its failure to offer unequivocal support of Taiwan. In a clear break with Washington’s long-standing “one China” policy, Bolton advocated that Taiwan be recognized as an independent state and be given a seat in the United Nations.

According to The Washington Post in April 2001, Bolton was motivated by more than his ultra-right-wing ideology: he was also on the payroll of the Taiwan government. According to The Post, over a period of three years in the 1990s, while promoting diplomatic recognition of Taiwan before various congressional committees, Bolton was paid a total of $30,000 by the government of Taiwan for “research papers on U.N. membership issues involving Taiwan.”

In the summer of 2001, Bolton shocked foreign delegations and non-governmental organizations as the U.N. Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons when he announced that Washington would oppose any attempt to regulate the trade in firearms or non-military rifles, or any other effort that would “abrogate the constitutional right to bear arms.”

At the same time, according to Lobe, “Bolton was also engaged in a lengthy row with U.S. intelligence agencies over his unprecedented public charge that Cuba had an offensive biological warfareprogram that U.S. military and intelligence officials had previously ‘underplayed.’ His statement became an embarrassment after intelligence officers and retired senior military officers, including the former head of the U.S. Southern Command, told the media that no such evidence existed and charged that Bolton was politicizing intelligence.”

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.”

Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.