Tuesday, March 08, 2005

UN Basher Named UN Ambassador

Critic of U.N. Named Envoy (washingtonpost.com)

How far to the extreme right is John Bolton? He is an ideologue of the Project for a New American Century (along with William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Abrams, Richard Perle, and Dan Quayle) and the American Enterprise Institute (along with Richard Perle, Newt Gingrich, Michael Novak, Lynne Cheney, Michael Ledeen, and Fred Thompson). Jesse Helms said of him in 2001, "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." He has said that after the situation is stabilized in Iraq, "it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea." So he fits in very well with the Bush administration.

He has worked against the Rome Treaty that established the International Criminal Court. He has worked against treaties that seek to stem the global proliferation of illicit small arms and light weapons ("We do not support measures that would constrain legal trade and legal manufacturing of small arms and light weapons.") Since he became the Bush administration’s Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security in May 2001, he has overseen the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, undermined the Biological Weapons Convention, and shown public contempt for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. At the same time, it was under Bolton's "Arms Control" watch, that Pakistan sold nuclear technologies and resources to Iran, Lybia and North Korea.

He has said at various times "if the U.N. Secretary Building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference," and--in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq--"There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States."

US Ambassador to the United Nations? I'll say this about the Bush administration: these folks are audacious.

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