Bolton and the Excuse of Criminals

It looks like Senator Voinovich actually managed to read up on John Bolton enough to form an opinion on him, which is that Bolton’s a mean man.

Voinovich cited officials who have described Bolton as a bully who abused subordinates, would not tolerate dissent and fostered “an atmosphere of intimidation” in the State Department. The senator said arrogance and bullying are among “the very characteristics we are trying to dispel in the world community.” Installing Bolton at the United Nations would “send a contradictory and negative message to the world community,” Voinovich said.

“This is not the behavior that should be endorsed as the face of the United States to the world community in the United Nations,” Voinovich said. In fact, he said, Bolton is “the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be.”

Even so, he’s going to let the nomination out to the floor for a full vote because “We owe it to the president to give Mr. Bolton an up-or-down vote…”

I feel prety confident that Bolton will be confirmed. Moreover, I believe that he should be confirmed.

I’m going to go way out on a rhetorical limb here, though. I believe that anyone who votes not to confirm John Bolton is voting in full support of graft, bribery, genocide, and mass rape.

The UN is, at present, rife with corruption. It tacitly approves genocide by not even mentioning the word, even when it’s happening right in front of its own peacekeepers. Its staff and peacekeepers under its command routinely participate in prostitution rings, rape of children and women, and extortion, without any apparent penalty.

None of these things are in any serious dispute. They’re a matter of documented fact. Yet, the UN refuses to do the bare minimum of conducting a serious investigation into any of it. Instead, it stonewalls, threatens witnesses, reassigns the accused to places where they merely do what they did before, and casts aspersions on the accusers.

Now John Bolton has a reputation. He’s seen as a very smart man but also as a very tough man and, at times, a very blunt man. He doesn’t brook incompetence nor is he inclined to to make happy noises with people who turn their faces to the rampant abuse of the weak and innocent. There is every reason to believe that John Bolton will, as ambassador, not only represent the interests of our country, but of those people the UN has, as a group, pillaged for far too long.

The Democratic Party accompanied by delicate flowers like Senator Voinovich, for reasons I can not begin to fathom, don’t want that to happen. What I have found inexcuseable in the past month are the Senators and their supporters who want so badly to send another person to the UN who is just like most of the other people we’ve sent to the UN. They act as if the UN is the home of rainbows and butterflies where we all get along like long-lost high school chums. They ignore the charred bodies, the wrecked lives, the despoiled children, and the flood of blood money that the inhabitants of Turtle Bay have left in their wake for decades. They simply do not care.

How can I say that? Easy. Answer me this. Can you point to one time in the entire Bolton hearing schedule when a Democratic Senator addressed any of these problems and suggested why John Bolton would not be suitable to address them? Can you find me one example when any of the UN’s crimes against humanity were detailed with anything approaching a reasonable explanation as to why Bolton wouldn’t be suitable to affect some reform? Can you show me one Senator who has expressed “concern” over Bolton’s nomination who has gotten equally “concerned” over anything the UN has done (or not done) in the past decade?

No, they either ignore the wrongs of the UN or simply say “I don’t believe he would be the right man” without ever really telling us why. They duck and dodge and fill the air with so much invective that most of us don’t notice that they really haven’t said anything substantive. For isntance, I just heard Barak Obama on C-SPAN Radio say, during today’s hearing, that there had to be a better man than Bolton for the job and that he “believed” that Bolton wasn’t the right man. Why? Who the hell knows? Even after five minutes of handwringing about how we all know the UN needs to be reformed and how terrible things are there I still can’t tell you. After all that, he still couldn’t come up with a cogent or concrete reason why John Bolton isn’t the right guy or who would be better. Just empty blather while innocents die, children are raped and sold into prostitution, and billions of dollars make their ways into the pockets of bureaucrats and dictators.

What we’ve gotten the past two weeks are sad, weak stories about how Bolton allegedly chased some woman down a hallway with a folder years ago. Except that he didn’t actually do that. He didn’t do anything close to that. But that’s entirely beside the point. I bet if you did a quick survey of a thousand Americans, you’d find that most of them wouldn’t be too upset if John Bolton were to chase the Ambassador from Iran, North Korea, the Sudan, or Rwanda down a hallway with a folder. Even assuming the allegation was true, how does that disqualify him from representing us in a place where the people apparently haven’t figured out that raping little girls is wrong or that naming Libya to a human rights committee is like naming Ted Bundy to a committee on sorority house security?

It doesn’t and the behavior we’ve seen from a huge part of the Senators on that committee has been inexcuseable.

No, I’m wrong. It’s not been inexcuseable. It’s been disgusting.

John Bolton may not be the perfect man for this job – who would be? – but he’s more than up to the task of doing what needs to be done at the UN. The Senators who have held up his nomination to this point ought to be ashamed of themselves.

UPDATE: Edited to include that bit about Obama’s speech, which I heard after I had already done the original post (and some grammar stuff, too).

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Category: Our Foreign Policy