Global Policy Forum

By Ian Williams*

"Do you want me to look happy?" snapped an exasperated Kofi Annan last year when aides suggested that the United Nations secretary general speak to the press about John Bolton's initial appointment to the UN as the United States' ambassador. We can be sure that Annan, and most others connected to the UN, will not look excessively lugubrious when they intone their formal tributes on the occasion of Bolton's going.

US President George W Bush on Monday accepted the resignation of Bolton, less than three weeks after Bush had resubmitted Bolton's nomination to the Senate for confirmation. Bolton was given a "recess appointment" 21 months ago after it became clear that Bush lacked the required support to get his nomination confirmed in the Senate.

It is not often that foreign policy is a big issue in a US election, so it is quite reasonable to give American voters the credit for putting Bolton out of office. His resignation allays the sneaking fear that the Bush team had something up their sleeves to bypass senatorial resistance to his confirmation.

Amusingly, the White House claimed the support of a bipartisan silent majority for his appointment - even though it was vociferous defections from Republican ranks that have thwarted Bush's attempts. In fact, Bolton's determination to hang on up to this late point suggests that his obsession with the United Nations is as deeply rooted as evangelical pastor Ted Haggard's obsession with sin. He just can't keep away from it. For three decades Bolton has angled for appointments that would in some way keep him grappling at close quarters with the organization, even if they sometimes involved him in contradictory positions.

Even when the Bushes were out of office, he filled in his time working with James Baker for the United Nations on the Western Sahara issue. The Moroccan annexation of that territory has been on the UN agenda for more than 30 years and a standing invitation to complaints about the organization's ineffectiveness. Bolton has been remarkably reticent to highlight it, not least since the only legal way forward is by pressuring US, French and Israeli ally Morocco to comply with its own promises, let alone the law. Bolton's other job in exile was advising the Taiwanese government on how to get into the organization that he had spent decades advising the US to get out of.

However, no one can accuse him of staying bought. No sooner had he arrived at the UN than he cooked up a deal with Beijing's ambassador to scupper the efforts of Germany, Japan and India, all US allies, to get permanent seats on the Security Council. He may have had a point about the undesirability of the changes, but a more diplomatic envoy would not have left US fingerprints so messily obvious.

From the White House point of view, Bolton's appointment last year appeased the equally obsessive America-first crowd while rewarding his long-standing loyalty to the Bush dynasty. That loyalty had been shown most memorably when the man who has spent the past year preaching democracy to the members of the United Nations strode into a library in Florida in 2000 yelling, "I'm with the Bush-[Dick] Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count."

Now that he is going, we can expect all sorts of eulogies. It has been amusing seeing UN ambassadors trying to keep a straight face while murmuring the customary platitudes and then catch them smiling afterward. Annan damned with typical faint praise, "I think ambassador Bolton did the job he was expected to do. He came at a time when we had many tough issues. As a representative of the US government, he pressed ahead with the instructions that he had been given, and tried to work as effectively as he could with the other ambassadors."

To be fair, while Bolton has been a diplomatic disaster by any rational standards, it has not been a totally unmitigated disaster. Despite an abrasive turn of phrase that would have had Venezuela's Hugo Chavez pilloried if he had emulated it, he has been a very well-trained attack dog. He has always come to heel when the White House wanted and chewed his own words when necessary.

For example, his proudest achievement in his previous job at the State Department was to "unsign" the treaty that committed the US to the International Criminal Court, and then to bully and browbeat small countries across the world into signing agreements not to send US citizens to the court. And then this year, he had to allow unvetoed a Security Council resolution setting the court's prosecutors on the perpetrators in Darfur.

Perhaps what should be his most memorable "achievement" was when he was in charge of arms control at the State Department before moving to the UN. He was a major saboteur of the efforts to improve and tighten the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. If they had been passed, countries would not have been able, like North Korea, 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.

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 according to 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, though remaining silent on Israeli nuclear capabilities.

However, perhaps his biggest legacy was his semi-successful attempt to wreck UN reform proposals last year. By barnstorming into sessions with hundreds of unilateral amendments after long months of painstaking negotiations among the members, he certainly managed to destroy the efforts of Annan to convince Third World members that managerial reforms were not some form of US and Western plot. In fact, his almost every public statement pretty much confirmed their suspicions.

He leaves unfinished business. His attempt to enforce international law that he professes disbelief in on Iran are coming to nothing as Security Council members try to ensure that Washington has no excuse to take military action against Tehran. The UN resolution is stalemated and diluted. Although he is now implying personal credit for the appointment of Ban Ki-moon, the incoming South Korean UN secretary general, the latter is astute enough to know that he was far from Washington's first choice for the position. Ban differed from Bolton on issues ranging from the International Criminal Court to how to deal with Pyongyang.

Bolton has clearly relished his role at the UN, and one nightmare scenario would be intense White House pressure on Ban to give him a senior UN appointment. If that sounds far-fetched, just consider the recent similar appointment of a Bush supporter and former Washington Times editor, Josette Sheeran Shiner, as head of the UN's World Food Program. However, Bolton's media prominence and his newly acquired status as a martyr for conservatism would certainly equip him for a political career in the Republican Party's new confederate heartland where tough talk regularly obscures lack of achievement.

Who next?

Among the most frequently named possible successors to Bolton, according to Washington insiders, writes Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service, are Bush's current ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad; and the State Department's neo-conservative under secretary for global affairs, Paula Dobriansky.

Also mentioned for the post have been three moderate Republican lawmakers who were defeated in their bids for re-election last month: Iowa Congressman Jim Leach; Ohio Senator Michael DeWine; and Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee, whose outspoken opposition to Bolton's nomination during the past year, however, was deeply resented by the White House. State Department counselor Philip Zelikow has also been considered a strong candidate, but he announced two weeks ago that he was leaving the administration.

In the past several months, State Department and White House lawyers considered a number of different ways that Bolton might legally stay on - such as appointing him to a post that did not require Senate confirmation and then making him "acting ambassador" - but eventually concluded that such maneuvers were likely to create more ill-will, not just among Democrats, who will take over the Senate next month, but also among Republicans who increasingly see Bush's stubbornness as a major political liability.

"President Bush's decision to accept ambassador Bolton's resignation should serve to more closely align US foreign policy with the wishes of the American people," said Don Kraus, director of the Washington office of Citizens for Global Solutions, a lobby group that also opposed Bolton's resignation. "It is our hope that he nominates a new UN ambassador who can help to return the United States to the partnership-driven, consensus-building and problem-solving approach that characterized its first six decades of relations with the UN."

Bolton's departure is the latest in a number of prominent hawks who have resigned over the past two years, including former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz; former under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith; and Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Since last month's election, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and his intelligence chief, Stephen Cambone, have announced their resignations, and the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, Peter Rodman, is also expected to leave soon.

About the Author: Ian Williams is author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.