Bush's live grenade ?
Weekend Australian
New York correspondent David Nason
March 12, 2005
JOHN Bolton, the man US President George W. Bush has picked to represent him at the UN, is an outspoken right-wing ideologue who, for reasons never explained, keeps a toy hand grenade on a table in his office.
It's an ornamental feature that sits well with Bolton's reputation as the hawk's hawk of the Bush administration. A key strategist in the US's Iraq policy and for the past four years the under-secretary for arms control and international security, Bolton has also been dubbed "the anti-diplomat" and "the most combative man in US politics".
Of course, this is just part of a complex Bolton canvas. Yale-educated, Bolton is also a ferocious intellectual and a prolific - and sometimes comic - writer. His passion is the broad sweep of political philosophy.
And, as someone who has always liked having a say, Bolton has more than a passing interest in the power of political oratory. So it's interesting to note the influence on him of a speech made by a former US ambassador at the UN in 1975, when the US's international credibility was at rock bottom.
This was the post-Watergate period, when an out-of-depth Gerald Ford was occupying the White House and communists in Saigon and Phnom Penh were delivering final confirmation of the US defeat in Vietnam.
But when in December 1975 the UN passed resolution 3379 - a resolution equating Zionism with racism that had been pushed by an anti-US bloc of Arab, Third World and Soviet-controlled nations - US ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan demanded to be heard. "The US rises to declare before the General Assembly of the UN, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act," Moynihan said.
For the ultra-nationalistic Bolton, a man who believes in plain talk, Moynihan's speech was a defining moment of modern US history, the first time the US gave warning it would pay no heed to the world body if repressive states were going to use it as a vehicle from which to assault American values.
Sixteen years later, in 1991, Bolton, as assistant secretary of state for international organisation affairs in the administration of George Bush Sr, was the key man in the deal-making that led to the UN's repeal of that resolution.
Bolton regards this as a career highlight and often makes mention of it, as he did again this week after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice formally announced his UN nomination. The repeal of resolution 3379, he said, had "removed the greatest stain on the UN's reputation".
At the same time Bolton said US leadership was critical for UN reform. The clear implication was that he was heading to New York to get his way. On First Avenue, where the UN has been working hard to devise a formula for desperately needed reform, the groans were almost audible.
It was a reaction that did not surprise former Malcolm Fraser adviser Owen Harries, who got to know Bolton while working as editor of The National Interest in Washington from 1985 to 2001.
"John's temperament is the antithesis of the conventional diplomat," Harries says. "He is a man of extraordinarily strong views and he believes the essence of the [foreign policy] game is to get what you want without compromise. He also believes that the existing world order has one superpower, which is the US, and that the UN is used by other countries wanting to restrain the US dominance. That largely explains why John has been such a great critic of the UN in the past."
In fact, Bolton's antipathy towards the UN is the stuff of legend. Not only has he urged the US to withdraw its UN funding and taunted supporters of the UN-backed international court of justice as "fuzzy-minded romantics", he has never wasted an opportunity to make the damning claim that much of the UN's recent history in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda, in the oil-for-food program in Iraq and in Sudan and the Congo, has been about finding accommodation with terrorists and murderers.
It's this tendency to buddy up with bad guys that the US and Bolton in particular want the UN to address in its much-heralded 60th anniversary year of reform.
The Bush administration's greatest fear is that there will be a nuclear or chemical-weapons strike on the US. It wants the UN to modernise its creaky bureaucracy and get tougher by thinking less about human rights and more about cracking down on rogue states that shelter terrorists and that could one day provide the means for terrorists to take their evil to the next unthinkable level.
At the Centre for American Progress in Washington, DC, Brooke Lierman sums up Bolton's task at the UN as "preventing a nuclear Armageddon".
Writing in The Boston Globe, Nile Gardiner - a fellow in Anglo-American security policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC - says Bolton's appointment is a signal that the UN will be central, not peripheral, to US strategic thinking in the Bush administration's second term.
Gardiner also says the "clarity of moral insight" that Bolton will bring to the UN will be a breath of fresh air.
Harries, who describes Bolton as "intense and driven" and "not someone you go to for small talk", agrees that in sending Bolton to the UN, Bush has made an emphatic point.
"This is an appointment that clearly says American policy in Bush's second term is going to be no different in practice to his aggressive rhetoric about promoting democracy and freedom and American values to the rest of the world as a way of combating terrorism," Harries says.
If that also means a willingness to set up security mechanisms outside UN authority, Bolton will be perfectly placed to set the wheels in motion. He's the architect of the Proliferation Security Initiative, in which 15 European and Asian nations - including Australia - signed up to curb the international trade in weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems and related materials using measures such as the interception of suspect shipping on the high seas.
The arrangement, which is in line with UN Security Council statements calling on member states to prevent such trade, was negotiated outside the UN, partly to make the point that the US is willing to exercise its power independently.
Australia, which this week enthusiastically welcomed Bolton's appointment, might well end up in the role of peacemaker when the seemingly inevitable breakdown occurs in relations between Bolton and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Australia has been a strong supporter of Annan and his reform initiative, and is closely involved in working up proposals to address the threat of terrorism. At the same time, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer enjoys warm relations with Bolton, partly a by-product of Australian involvement in Iraq, but also because of Australia's decision in 2000 to withdraw from the conventions requiring UN oversight of human rights.
Bolton regarded that as a wonderful and brave decision that invoked the spirit of Moynihan in 1975. He and Downer have been mates ever since.
J R Bolton Bio.
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