What? Oh..................never mind.
Posted on 01/12/2007 1:28:46 PM PST by Paul Ross
We have just lost the services of one of our greatest U.N. ambassadors, sacrificed at the altar of liberal appeasement. Aside from his most virulent opponents in Congress and the mainstream press, the folks who are the happiest about John Bolton’s resignation are the U.N. bureaucrats. They were not used to someone of Bolton’s stature and intellect challenging their entrenched ways. They simply wanted him out of the way.
When asked for his reaction to the news of Bolton’s resignation, Kofi Annan took a condescending swipe at Bolton’s forthright style by saying “that ambassadors understand that to get concessions, they have to make concessions.” Of course, Bolton did compromise when necessary. He led the way, for example, to agreement at the Security Council on sanctions against North Korea and the ceasefire ending the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict last summer. However, he would not back down from defending America’s values or from shaking things up at the U.N. to achieve some real reforms there.
John Bolton’s steadfastness cost him his job, but he could have been saved with a bit more courage from the Senate Republican leadership and President Bush.
Senator Frist had the power during the remainder of his term as Majority Leader to bypass the deadlock at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and bring Bolton’s nomination to the Senate floor for an up or down vote. Senate rules consider a nomination to be an item of executive business for the whole Senate to consider. Under these rules, a Majority Leader may offer a non-debatable motion to proceed with “executive calendar business” (including consideration of the nomination) without unanimous consent. Frist chose not to do so.
Of course, if Frist had pushed the nomination to the floor of the Senate, the Democrats (with a few Republicans-in-name-only like Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee) would surely have sought to block it with a filibuster. But while the Republicans still retained control of the Senate in the waning days of this session of Congress, Senator Frist could have finally invoked the so-called ‘nuclear’ option and changed the rules by majority vote to eliminate the use of the filibuster to block ambassador-level nominees. But he just sat on his hands because he did not get a clear enough signal from the White House to go all out and push the Bolton nomination over the goal line. No doubt they did not want to set a precedent for the Democrats to exploit when they take control of the Senate
next year.
Already the appeasement crowd – who like to think of themselves as both ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’, in Hillary Clinton’s words - are calling for President Bush to nominate some mealy mouthed sycophant to replace Bolton. They want the United States government to apologize to the U.N. for pursuing an assertive foreign policy in defense of freedom if it is at odds with the prevailing winds at Turtle Bay, and promise never to do such a thing again. We have to go along to get along in the sanctimonious sandbox in which U.N. diplomats like to frolic.
Here are just a few examples of how the kind of clear-eyed realism and moral clarity that John Bolton brought to his job, which we desperately need from his replacement, differs with the U.N. booster club’s agenda:
That’s too inflexible, say the appeasers, because you have to talk with even the most evil of your foes in order to achieve a stable peace. Annan referred to the Iranian Islamic-fascist regime as a “partner” in negotiations. Some old-thinking ‘realists’, like the members of Howard Baker’s Iraq Study Group, agree. They have all evidently forgotten the tragic results when Neville Chamberlain tried that route with Hitler and thought he had achieved “peace for our time”. Senator John McCain summed up best the objection to holding peace talks with Iran without any preconditions: “I don’t believe that a peace conference with people who are dedicated to your extinction has much short-term gain.”
Not if it jeopardizes achieving a consensus among the permanent Security Council members at the lowest common denominator, says Kofi Annan who never met a dictator whom he could not embrace. In his way of thinking, it is better for all the Security Council members to “speak with one voice” no matter what set of vacuous words that voice is forced to spout in order to reach a phony agreement.
That would not be diplomatic according to the appeasers who believed – incorrectly, as it turned out – that an imperfect Human Rights Council was still a major improvement over the discredited Commission on Human Rights. Bolton had it right when he held out for something better: “We want a butterfly. We’re not going to put lipstick on a caterpillar and declare it a success.”
Senator Chafee stymied Bolton’s nomination because he thought that our foreign policy was too pro-Israel. Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum was far closer to the truth, declaring recently that “when the United Nations says anything about the state of Israel, I generally discount it as what it is.” Incredibly, Chafee has been suggested as a possible replacement for Bolton when it is Senator Santorum who has the right stuff to do the job if he wants it.
Too draconian, cry the appeasers. The leader of the 132-member Group of 77, the largest single coalition of developing countries at the U.N. had this to say about the United States and the other top contributors to the U.N.’s budget : "We thank them for paying 82 percent of the budget, but we are saying that doing so does not entitle them to have a larger voice”. Representatives of the U.N. staff attacked the very notion of the "value-for-money" ethic that Bolton was pushing. The U.N. apologists who support this ‘play but not pay’ philosophy – and they dominate the leadership of the Democratic Party from Nancy Pelosi on down – simply do not understand that writing a blank check to the U.N. every year will only enable a perpetuation of its worst habits including corrupt mismanagement, waste and an entitlement culture.
How selfish of us, say the U.N.’s cheerleaders who have taken Bolton to task for daring to put the interests of the American taxpayers first over a more powerful United Nations. They are wrong again. There is no room in our carefully constructed Constitutional system of government for unaccountable global institutions to step in and impose their own taxes on the American people without our consent. Moreover, any notion of enforcing budget controls or transparency of operations on the United Nations would be destroyed because the U.N. would have a huge tax base of its own to draw from and not have to make its case every year for contributions from the member states.
Understanding that issues like global terrorism and nuclear proliferation require collective cooperation to resolve does not mean that multilateral diplomacy in the United Nations is the sole means to accomplish that goal, no matter what the outcome. How can any rational democracy entrust its security to a dysfunctional world organization where democracies and tyrannies are on equal footing? Bolton understood the problem. He worked hard to get things done within the U.N. structure but emphasized that there were multilateral alternatives to the U.N. that could facilitate cooperative solutions without sacrificing our national sovereignty and security. Yet we are told by Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and a host of other U.N apologists who are taking over the leadership of Congress that the United Nations needs to be strengthened with more of our money and more powers.
It is too late to save John Bolton’s job. But his replacement must continue to focus on representing the American people’s interest at the United Nations, not trying to promote the U.N.’s own agenda to the American people. One possible prospect who has been suggested to replace Bolton, Iowa Congressman John Leach, is an unabashed U.N. cheerleader who would be a disaster as our next U.N. ambassador. He supports the International Criminal Court as presently structured, which would trump the jurisdiction of the U.S. Supreme Court in certain instances and allow American citizens to be tried abroad without a jury of their peers. Leach also received an A for his support of the United Nations from the left-wing global governance group, Citizens for Global Solutions. That group even gave Leach extra credit for co-sponsoring their legislation to support the creation of a permanent United Nations peace force consisting of police, judges and military personnel.
A much better choice would be the current U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who is rumored to be the leading contender to replace Bolton. True, his record in helping to bring the sectarian factions in Iraq together is mixed, but no outsider could possibly accomplish that monumental task. Khalilzad has been blunt in telling the Iraqis that they are responsible for their own fate and cannot count on our support indefinitely. He did not need the Baker Study Group to tell him to issue that warning. Although indicating in the past a willingness to “discuss matters of mutual interest with Iranians without any pre-conditions attached to them”, he has come to recognize that Iran is only interested in fomenting more violence in Iraq and Lebanon as it faces off with the United States over its nuclear program. He is not likely to treat them or our other Islamic-fascist enemies as “partners” in peace or allow them to manipulate the U.N. to help advance their anti-Western strategies. At the same time, as the highest ranking Muslim in the Bush Administration, Khalilzad would have more credibility than any other candidate in working with those Muslim member states whose own interests diverge sharply from Iran’s.
In the end, whether Bolton’s replacement is Khalilzad or someone else, he or she must remember the wise counsel of the late Jeane J. Kirkpatrick who served as our U.N. ambassador under President Reagan: if the United Nations is to be a useful instrument for peace, or for anything, ways must be found to hold decision-makers accountable for their decisions – and their indecisions.” Otherwise, there will come a time when our only sensible course is to give up on the U.N. altogether and start over.
John Bolton’s steadfastness cost him his job, but he could have been saved with a bit more courage from the Senate Republican leadership and President Bush.
Which leads one to wonder if he was truly sacrificed at the altar of liberal appeasement?
SAD...
Seems like that line applies to a lot of issues over the last few years.
John Bolton for President.
Seriously.
What? Oh..................never mind.
I second. All in favor?
How about Duncan Hunter for President, Rick Santorum or Alan Keyes for Vice President, Oliver North for Secretary of Defense?
Can you just picture Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy faced with the END of UNANSWERED "Drive By Media" Sound-Bites. Faced with the prospect of FULL SALVOs from an intellectually-upt-to-speed Administration, consistently supported across an entirely-conservative Cabinet?
Odds are these guys would simply shut up rather than be embarassed and ridiculed...unendingly. It would be awesome.
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