Victor David Hanson places the arrow directly in the little black circle in this piece on the John Bolton nomination in the Jewish World Review. The resistance to Bolton has nothing to do with his credentials or abilities. It has everything to do with denying George Bush a successful nomination and protecting the U.N. from anyone who would hold its feet to the fire. Hanson writes:
The marathon confirmation hearings of John Bolton to be the American ambassador to the United Nations have become pathetic. Bolton is supposedly discourteous to subordinates. He was a hands-on-his-hips boss! Heaven forbid, he sometimes bellowed.
The "disclosure" of these supposedly hurtful flare-ups has little to do with Bolton's fitness to navigate in the United Nations, whose General Assembly includes miscreants from Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Zimbabwe. Otherwise, Bolton's occasional gruffness would be seen as a real asset in an international jungle where a murderous Syria sat on the Commission on Human Rights while member states perennially castigated democratic Israel as racist.
So the Bush administration wants to unleash a barking watchdog to patrol the United Nations, reeling from its multi-billion-dollar oil-for-food scandal, sexual misconduct among its operatives in Africa, and inaction as thousands perished in the Congo and Darfur. It tires of subsidizing an unaccountable organization that institutionalizes graft, excuses criminality and ignores genocide - but somehow regularly blames its chief democratic patron, the United States.
Bolton's critics apparently feel that such global organizations, for all their faults, nevertheless provide a useful brake on George Bush's exuberance abroad. And now they appear confident that their own barroom tactics will eventually wear down the patrician complacency of Bolton's strangely nonchalant supporters.
Those who roast Bolton prefer an ambassador who would not rock the boat of multilateralism, or, better yet, lack the zeal and skills even to try - and certainly would not employ Bolton's characterization of Kim Jong Il as a "tyrannical dictator." The last time we heard such provocative talk Ronald Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" under the curious assumption that it was both evil and an empire.
The rest of the essay is even better. Hanson reminds us of the minimalist ethical standards of three of Bolton's foremost senatorial critics, Senators Boxer, Dodd, and Biden, and highlights the hypocrisy of such people as these preventing the confirmation of a man to an ambassadorship because his subordinates sometimes found him demanding.
