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Another reason to support Bolton Jack Straw Doesn't Like Him

 
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Rasker



Joined: 03 Feb 2005
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 28, 2005 3:50 am    Post subject: Another reason to support Bolton Jack Straw Doesn't Like Him Reply with quote

Wall Street Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006617
Who's Afraid of John Bolton?
The agendas behind the smears.

Thursday, April 28, 2005 12:01 a.m.

Maybe we should be grateful to Richard Lugar after all. Now that the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has given his colleagues three more weeks to figure out whether John Bolton wagged a left or a right forefinger at some aggrieved minion, the rest of us can sort through just what the charges against the U.N. nominee are, who is making them, and what the Stop Bolton campaign is really about.

That isn't as easy as it seems, for the case against Mr. Bolton keeps morphing to suit the convenience of the accusers. Early on, the charge was that he holds unacceptable views about the U.N. "It's hard for me to know why you'd want to work at an institution that you said didn't even exist," Senator Barbara Boxer told the nominee. Yet her Democratic colleague Chris Dodd insists he does not oppose Mr. Bolton based on his "substantive views," and that "in fact, I agree with some of Mr. Bolton's conclusions about the United Nations."

Next we heard the nominee's problem was his temper. "You have a habit of belittling your opposition and even some of your friends," said ranking Committee Democrat Joseph Biden at the opening hearing, whereupon his investigators dredged up every alleged instance in which the nominee lost his cool. Yet on Sunday, Mr. Biden told an interviewer that the issue was "not whether [Mr. Bolton's] a nice guy or not."

The latest line on Mr. Bolton is that he's unfit because he may have sought the removal of two intelligence analysts he deemed incompetent and insubordinate. Mr. Bolton says he merely sought their transfer. But even if he had tried to get them fired, so what? A main conclusion of the recent Robb-Silberman report is that policy makers have a duty to question and challenge intelligence analysts.

We recall the time Mr. Biden publicly berated an intelligence analyst--Iraq weapons inspector Scott Ritter--for taking issue with his civilian bosses. Senior Administration officials, Mr. Biden told Mr. Ritter in 1998, "have responsibilities above your pay grade. . . . That's why they get paid the big bucks. That's why they get limos and you don't."

Such are the reasons--the patently disingenuous reasons--given by Mr. Bolton's opponents.



The real motives are a combination of ideological animus and bureaucratic score-settling. On the latter, we know Mr. Bolton tangled with State Department officials who were profoundly antagonistic to President Bush's agenda on issues ranging from the ABM Treaty to the International Criminal Court, and that he usually got his way. Now it's payback time.

Thus we have Larry Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, telling the press Mr. Bolton "would be an abysmal ambassador." This is the same Larry Wilkerson who last year said, "I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians I don't like." He has also described his own Administration's policy toward Cuba as "the dumbest policy on the face of the earth."

Or consider the unnamed State Department official who recently told Newsweek that in November 2003, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had complained personally to Mr. Powell that his Undersecretary was taking too tough a line on Iran's nuclear weapons program. "Get a different view of [the Iranian problem]," Mr. Powell is reported to have told the aide. "Bolton is being too tough." Remember that at the time, Britain, along with France and Germany, had recently negotiated a nuclear-freeze deal with Iran, a deal Iran violated within months. (For the record, Mr. Straw denies Newsweek's report.)

And then there is Thomas Hubbard, the former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, who objected to portions of a speech Mr. Bolton delivered in Seoul in which the Undersecretary called North Korea a "hellish nightmare" ruled by a "tyrannical dictator." Mr. Hubbard does not formally oppose Mr. Bolton's nomination, but he has let it be known that he considered the speech "counterproductive" and overly "antagonistic."



None of this, however, quite explains the depth of hostility that Mr. Bolton inspires. The deeper explanation is that he set out to explode the consensus views of the foreign-policy establishment--and succeeded.

This was the consensus that held, or holds, that North Korea and Iran can be bribed away from their nuclear ambitions, that democracy in the Arab world was impossible and probably undesirable, that fighting terrorism merely encourages more terrorism, that countries such as Syria pose no significant threat to U.S. national security, that the U.N. alone confers moral legitimacy on a foreign-policy objective, and that support for Israel explains Islamic hostility to the U.S. Above all, in this view, the job of appointed officials such as Mr. Bolton is to reside benignly in their offices at State while the permanent foreign service bureaucracy goes about applying establishment prescriptions.

John Bolton would have none of this. For this, he has been smeared by his partisan critics and maligned, often anonymously, by his former colleagues. But he has also been vindicated by events, and by his accomplishments, in the last four years. If this makes Mr. Bolton unconfirmable in the eyes of the Senate, then talented Americans have no place in our government.


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