No to Boltonism! No to Globaloney!

Lots of predictable hand-wringing over President Bush’s appointment of John Bolton to the post of UN ambassador. Bolton has, after all, said things like this:

“If the UN Secretariat building in New York lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”

Well!

In more temperate moods, Bolton has written things like this (via Justin Logan):

We should…eliminate assessments altogether, moving toward a UN system that is funded entirely by purely voluntary contributions from the member governments. Such a system of voluntary contributions would allow each government to judge for itself whether it was getting its money’s worth from the UN and each of its component agencies.

Now, as far as your humble scribe is concerned, the problem with Bolton is not that he’s anti-UN, but that he’s an ultra-hawk. As David Corn points out:

Bolton is a hawk’s hawk in the Bush administration. He is the agent conservateur in Colin Powell’s State Department. He has led the administration’s effort against the International Criminal Court. Last year, he single-handedly tried to revise U.S. nuclear policy by asserting that Washington no longer felt bound to state that it would not use nuclear weapons against nations that do not possess nuclear weapons. (A State Department spokesman quickly claimed that Bolton had not said what he had indeed said.) Bolton also claimed that Cuba was developing biological weapons–a charge that was not substantiated by any evidence and that was challenged by experts. In July, he was about to allege in congressional testimony that Syria posed a weapons-of-mass-destruction threat before the CIA and other agencies, who considered his threat assessment to be exaggerated, objected to his statement. When England, France and Germany recently tried to develop a carrot-and-stick approach in negotiating an end to Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, Bolton huffed, “I don’t do carrots.”

However, where Bolton and the UN-niks agree is in thinking that someone’s gotta run the world. They just differ on whether it should be done “unilaterally” (i.e. by the U.S.A.) or “multilaterally.” What’s never put on the table is unilateral mind-your-own-business-ism (=non-interventionism=”isolationism”=my preferred policy).

As far as the UN – that continuing object of inexplicable devotion and reverence in some liberal circles – goes, I’m with lefty Alexander Cockburn who called it a “repellent harbinger of world guv’mint.”