White Paper on John Bolton:
The Wrong Choice for UN Ambassador
Last year, senators on both sides of the
aisle expressed concern about the fitness of John R. Bolton for the position of
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations. By now, those concerns
have been legitimated. In less than a year as UN Ambassador, Bolton has
isolated the United States, pushed away allies, strengthened enemies, slowed
reform, and shunned the kind of old-fashioned consensus-building that has made
America’s diplomatic corps among the best in the world. Edward C. Luck, a
professor of international affairs at Columbia who has followed the UN for
three decades, said: “I actually agree with Bolton on what has to be done at
the U.N., but his confrontational tactics have been very dysfunctional for the
U.S. purpose…To be successful at the U.N., you have to build coalitions, and if
you take unilateral action the way Bolton has, you’re isolated, and if you’re
isolated, you can’t achieve much.”
Dr. Luck offers the best summary of Bolton’s tenure: high goals, high rhetoric, high
expectations, and low results. On reform, reasonable progress has been made on
the Secretary-General’s initiative, but in the General Assembly, where every
initiative requires sensitive lobbying and diplomacy, has taken precious few
steps forward. On Darfur and Iran,
agreements are only made when Secretary Rice intervenes. Meanwhile, Bolton has spent more time giving Congress and political
audiences a glass-half-empty look at the value and progress of the UN.
Simply put, Bolton’s
record at the UN is one of failure, but based on his background and stated
ideological beliefs, that should hardly come as a surprise to anyone. President Bush’s nominee for the nation’s top
diplomatic post has made a career developing the theory that diplomacy simply
does not work, since “war is often an entirely rational calculation, and
preventive diplomacy can no more stop it as it can reverse the power of
gravity.”[1]
He has spent his career arguing forcefully that the only reason a president
would embrace “‘multilateralism’ is that such an approach offers cover and
allows the White House to duck tough decisions.”[2] These
quotations are not flip remarks. They
are taken from sworn Senate testimony and carefully-considered opinion pieces,
and they are elements of a detailed ideological opposition to multilateralism
generally, and the UN particularly, that Bolton
has developed throughout his 25-year career.
This paper will first chronicle Bolton’s
recent, startlingly poor record as UN Ambassador; and will then recapitulate
the baggage he brings to the position due to his manipulation of intelligence,
his suppression and intimidation of colleagues with opposing views, and his
frequent clashes with U.S.
allies. It is no accident that Bolton’s
ideological bent, outlined above, is a common theme in nearly all of the
controversial episodes in his career.
I. The
Undiplomat as UN Diplomat: Failure to Reform
At a recent hearing of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Bolton ended his testimony
by referencing Joseph Schumpeter’s description of capitalism as a “gale of
creative destruction,” and calling for the same kind of force to reform the
UN. Bolton’s
behavior at the UN has certainly lived up to the goal of destruction, but has
created little aside from more tension and roadblocks. Despite claims that his goal is to reform the
UN, Bolton’s methods have primarily continued to demonstrate his philosophical
opposition to multilateralism, stymieing rather than advancing the major goals
that Bolton outlined when he began – creating and joining an effective Human
Rights Council, expanding the security council, implementing a review of
thousands of UN mandates, and increasing internal staff and budgetary oversight
by allowing the Secretary General more managerial power. The failure to secure these U.S. priorities is especially meaningful since
the trade-off for Bolton’s brash style was
supposed to be his ability to get things done.
As Scott McClellan argued during the controversy over Bolton’s
nomination, “A vote for John Bolton
is a vote for reform at the United Nations. A vote against him is a vote for
the status quo at the United Nations.” But Bolton’s
all-or-nothing approach, with his blatant dismissal of long-standing UN
diplomatic practices, has driven the international community apart rather than
helping to bring it together. More often
than not, lasting change has come in spite of Bolton;
the legacy of his intervention, on issue after issue, has been the status
quo.
This tendency to forego such diplomacy in
favor of laying out what the U.S.
would not accept, quickly earned Bolton a reputation for negativity that carried over into
his negotiations on UN reform. At the
beginning of his tenure in New York, The
New York Times reported, that some diplomats “complained that he devoted
too much time to talking about the American ‘red lines’ and about the red pen
he had in his pocket, ready to be used.”
That is a literal, rather than a
figurative, description of Bolton’s actions during at least one meeting, when
according to the Century Foundation’s Jeffrey Laurenti Bolton ostentatiously
drew a pen from his pocket, laid it on the table and said “This is a red pen, and I will draw the red lines
for this negotiation right now.” That meeting was over the World Summit
Outcome Document, a key blueprint developed over many months to codify
agreed-upon UN priorities and reforms.
As one of his first acts as UN Ambassador, Bolton
famously drew hundreds of “red lines” through the document, and in the ensuing
free-for-all, the entire document went back to a line-by-line renegotiation.
Among the literally hundreds of cuts Bolton
made to the document, some seemed merely antagonistic, such as this change: “We
understand the critical important role played by major United Nations
conferences and summits.” Others seemed
to imply that the U.S.
was not entirely serious about giving a reformed UN the resources necessary to
carry out its mandates: “We pledge to
make the United Nations more relevant, more efficient, more accountable and
more credible, and to provide the organization with the resources needed to
fully implement its mandates.”
Particularly contentious was his deletion
of all 14 references to the anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals, a
diplomatic holy grail for many U.S.
allies.
The American Prospect reported that in an August 25 NGO briefing, Under
Secretary Nicholas Burns refused to support, defend, or explain Bolton’s
position on MDGs, leading attendants – and other nations – to believe that Bolton was ignoring instructions and acting without
authorization.
According to a September 10 story in The
Guardian, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw personally pled with
Secretary Rice to rein in Bolton and instruct
him to restore the consensus he destroyed on the OD. The American Prospect reports that Secretary Rice then intervened,
instructing Bolton to restore consensus and
find a compromise on the MDGs. By this point, the international community was
thoroughly confused by the U.S.
position, and the fragile consensus that held together the OD fell apart. On September 9, the U.S. released
three proposals for compromise in the text on the MDGs, the Kyoto Protocol, and
development assistance, but the damage had already been done. Only at the World
Summit itself was the U.S.
able to repair some of the damage, when President Bush and Secretary Rice
independently and unambiguously reaffirmed U.S. support for the MDGs.” As Stephen Stedman, former special advisor to
Kofi Annan and one of the document’s architects noted, “Bolton
has his own agenda. He honestly believes
that anything on paper is meant to constrain the United
States, and the United States is so strong it can
get whatever it wants without agreeing to constrain itself. Yet we couldn’t
call Condoleezza Rice every day and say ‘do you know what your guy is doing?’”
Judging by the results, Bolton’s
strong-arm-tactics were less effective than the multilateralism that he
deplores. After Bolton’s onslaught,
other countries declared open season on the document, and Libya, Cuba,
Iran, Pakistan, and Egypt gutted its tough stances on
human-rights violations and nuclear proliferation. Bolton himself remained inflexible and
brusque during the negotiations, repeatedly telling Kofi Annan’s staff that
“You have no standing here” when they attempted to find common ground between
the disputants. The final version of the document, which was
not approved until the night before the summit, did not include a definition of
terrorism, or a single word of its original references to nuclear
nonproliferation, an outcome that Kofi Annan called “a real disgrace.” One diplomatic ally who was involved in the
Summit negotiations was quoted by the New
York Observer as saying “We almost
had an agreement with the G-77…He came in and said ‘I want more, I want much
more, and I will get it in direct negotiations with individual nations.’“ As a result, the diplomat said “We got new
objections from all the tough guys in the G-77 – Pakistan,
India, Iran, of course
– because after he did what he did, they obviously thought they had nothing to
lose by going through every line too.” Annan’s special advisor Stephen Stedman later
blamed the process’ collapse directly on Bolton, noting that when he opened the
document up to line-by-line revision he had empowered “spoiler” countries to
remove language that was key to U.S.
interests: “Right from the start Bolton was
intent on dealing only with the spoilers.”
Bolton’s tenure as
President of the Security Council in February 2006 also failed to demonstrate a
thorough understanding of diplomacy.
When Bolton assumed the presidency he
immediately made a show of introducing what he called “discipline” by insisting
that all meetings began promptly at 10.00 a.m.
In a body devoted to consensus, Bolton’s
first act as President was to begin a meeting in which he was the only one
present: “I brought the gavel down at
10. I was the only one in the room,
though.” The stunt earned rave reviews from
conservative commentators, but did little to change the way business is
conducted at the UN. In fact, the practice was shrugged off by other countries,
who largely viewed Bolton’s approach as a
political move to generate news headlines. Ambassador Cesar Mayoral, who took
over the presidency in March pointedly ended Bolton’s
practice, noting that he would not begin meetings until all 15 members were
represented:
“I think it’s not very polite to start with 11 or 12,” he said. “The form is
important. You are working when you have the 15 members in the room ambassadors
or not ambassadors, but [every] seat occupied by the members.”
The problems with Bolton’s
procedural style were indicative of larger issues that had a direct impact on
the reform process. Even though Bolton
had noted before a Congressional committee, in September of 2005, that a
central struggle in UN reform was over the allocation of power between the
General Assembly and the Secretary-General, in the heat of key reform
negotiations and during his term as President of the Security Council he was
widely viewed as deliberately bringing up issues that were in the domain of the
General Assembly, such as procurement fraud and sexual exploitation involving
UN Peacekeepers. After Bolton called for
investigations of these issues in the Security Council, Stéphane Dujarric,
spokesman for Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that “There is obviously a lot
of tension right now between the General Assembly and other organs about who
has the lead in dealing with certain issues here at the United Nations,” adding
that whether countries contributed “$1 or $100 million you have the right to
expect that your money is well spent.” Annan said that there was suspicion of a
“power grab,” adding that “The General Assembly has generally felt that its
power and its influence is being diminished.” And after developing countries protested to
the assembly president, Jan Eliasson of Sweden, for the need of member states
“to stop any attempt to shift the issues under the agenda of the assembly to
the Security Council,” Eliasson was forced to discuss the issue with Bolton and
tell reporters that “we need to deal with” any encroachment on the powers of
the General Assembly. Characteristically, Bolton rubbed salt into
the wounds rather than soothing them, greeting the concerns with defiance: “The United States believes in taking action and being
effective, and we don’t apologize to anybody for that.”
Failures
on the HRC, Budget, and Expansion
While Bolton was keen to enforce
“discipline” on his colleagues, his own habit of skipping meetings and failing
to announce the U.S.
position until it was too late caused frustration with key U.S.
allies. In the lead up to the adoption
of a new Human Rights Council, Bolton skipped
around 30 planning meetings. While most countries
sent their top officials to hash out the details of a council that the U.S. had identified as a key concern, Bolton
left the negotiations to mid-level staffers, putting Mark Lagon, the U.S.
deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, in
charge, and leaving daily negotiations to Lagon’s deputy, William Lucas. In mid-January, Ambassador Kumalo of South Africa,
who was also co-chairman of the Human Rights Council negotiations, was quoted
in the Washington Post as saying “I can’t remember a meeting where Ambassador
Bolton participated.... Maybe if he did participate he didn’t say anything, and
you know I’d have remembered it.” When Bolton finally did get engaged, he
seemed to muddy the waters, asserting in January that all five permanent
members of the Security Council (including human rights abusers China and
Russia) should have the right to sit on the Council permanently – a position
that was not part of the U.S. negotiating strategy and quickly retracted by the
State Department. Ambassador Kumalo
called Bolton’s remarks “unhelpful,” saying,
“It sends an indirect message back to the people that these five will be set
aside – you know, they will be forgiven and the rest of all of you will be
targets.” Then, in mid-February, when Bolton attended a
crucial negotiating session with Jan
Eliasson, Bolton did not mention the importance to the Bush Administration of a
2/3 vote to place a member on the council – even though this had consistently
been listed by the State Department as a must-have provision. The draft text subsequently came out without
the 2/3rds provision, allowing members to be elected by a bare majority and
leading Bolton to assert that the negotiations had failed and that it was now
time to get down “"real
international negotiations.” Saying he was “chagrined about the U.S.
position” Kofi Annan joined General Assembly President Jan Eliasson to warn
that opening the document back up was only likely to lead to more delays and
gridlock, noting that “I would appeal to member states to understand that it is
not a perfect world."
In the end, the new Human Rights Council had neither of the two key features
that the U.S. sought; the U.S.
lost its 2/3rds provision and failed to get a single other country to speak for
its other negotiating priority. After
six months of negotiations, the U.S.
was unable to support the draft text for the HRC and lost the vote that it
called over it by a vote of 170 to four, having only Palau,
Israel, and the Marshall Islands
in its corner. According to Ambassador
Ricardo Arias of Panama,
Ambassador Bolton failed to engage in the negotiations leading up to the vote. Emyr Jones Parry, the British Ambassador,
noted with icy frustration that the EU had endorsed the new HRC but that “The job now is to get clarity on what the U.S.
wants.’’
It
was not the only time during Bolton’s tenure that even our closest allies would
turn away in frustration and the U.S.
would have to delicately bring Bolton back
from the ledge. In December, Ambassador
Bolton chose to hold the UN’s budget hostage pending further management
reforms, again alienating allies. Rather
than moving reform forward, the budget cap led to political gridlock and to a
breach in the 20-year practice of consensus budgeting at the UN. Numerous diplomats described the cap as
“poisonous.” When Bolton continued to
threaten to withhold funding unless key reforms were passed – insisting instead
upon an interim budget that many said would leave peacekeeping and other
operations short – key allies Britain
and Japan
backed away. Emyr Jones Parry said that
“we’re not in favor of holding any individual items, or the budget, hostage to
other issues. The EU position is that we
want the budget adopted the normal way.” Ambassador Kumalo spoke on behalf of the
G-77, noting that “It should be clear to all of us that the imposition of the
spending cap has placed this organization and its membership in a very
difficult position. The spending cap has
become an obstacle to the trust among Member States
and work of the organization.” The cap
was eventually lifted, after the U.S.
ramped down its rhetoric, but the G-77 retaliated by stalling on mandate
reform, a top priority for both key contributors U.S.
and Japan.
The budget cap was only one of the
counterproductive tactics that Bolton used on
management reform. Bolton entered one
negotiating session in June (before the budget cap was lifted), produced a
cordless microphone, and scolded other Ambassadors for weakening a proposal out
of turn and out of order. When silenced by the Chair, he threw up his hands and
said, “Well, so much for trying something different.”
Six Ambassadors of countries closely allied with the U.S. anonymously reported the
incident to the New York Times.
Another priority for both Japan and the U.S.
is UN Security Council expansion, as Bolton has outlined in his role as UN
Ambassador: “The United States
supports an expansion of the Security Council that can contribute to its
strength and effectiveness.”
Official U.S.
policy is to support expansion, and more specifically, the Japanese bid for a
permanent seat. Bolton, however, dismissed all of the various plans put forward
for expansion, without offering a U.S. alternative: “I know there are a lot of proposals for Security Council reform, none of which
we've endorsed and none of which we see as commanding two-thirds support in the
General Assembly.” Bolton’s
apparent lack of interest in working toward an acceptable proposal for this
reform may betray an underlying hostility toward the idea. In 1993 he wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal with the
straightforward title “No Expansion for UN Security Council” – an article still
cited approvingly by Bolton’s allies at conservative think tanks like the
Heritage foundation. In that article, Bolton warns ominously that “The danger of the
‘multilateral temptation’ is that one will resort to the U.N. reflexively. That
reduces America's
unilateral or non-U.N. options, and could even erode its sovereignty.” And he adds that “the most dangerous
temptation multilateralism offers” is “giving Japan
and Germany
permanent seats on the Security Council.” In 1997, Bolton
again made clear that he thought the notion of “enlargement” should be
“relegated to history’s junk pile.”
At the end of his first six months as
Ambassador, Bolton was forced to concede that
his “progress has not been good” in bringing reform to the UN. The U.N. has taken important steps to become
more responsive and efficient, such as establishing a new ethics office and
instituting new whistleblower and financial disclosure policies. Yet, these
reforms were enacted under the authority of the Secretary-General. In the
General Assembly, where progress requires thorough and deft diplomacy on the
part of reform proponents, little has been done. Indeed, the failures have been
so pronounced that an unnamed European diplomat told the New York Observer that “A lot of us wonder what his real agenda is.
First, we think maybe he wants things to fail because then he can say, ‘We
cannot reform this place.’ The other question is, does he really reflect the
position in Washington?
That is always the question: Is it Bolton or is it Washington?” Neither the questions, nor the suspicions,
are without basis.
A year into his term, the reviews are in,
and they are not good. Warren Hoge, UN Bureau Chief for the New York Times,
spoke to nearly thirty Ambassadors in tandem with the U.S. for management reform progress
who “expressed misgivings over Mr. Bolton’s leadership.
One Ambassador with close ties to the U.S. said:
“My
initial feeling was, let’s see if we can work with him, and I have done some
things to push for consensus on issues that were not easy for my country…But
all he gives us in return is, ‘It doesn’t matter, whatever you do is
insufficient…He’s lost me as an ally now, and that’s what many other
ambassadors who consider themselves friends of the U.S. are saying.”
An
envoy from Europe said “that Mr. Bolton was a
difficult ally for his traditionally pro-American group because he often staked
out unilateral hard-line positions in the news media or Congress and then
proved unwilling to compromise in the give and take of negotiations.”
Another Ambassador from a country “close to the United
States,” said of Bolton: “We are all like cooks, and the U.S. is sitting on the sidewalk and when we have
this platter cooked, the U.S.
comes in and says it was the wrong dish, you were cooking chicken and we wanted
meat.”
Swiss Ambassador Peter Mauer came forward publicly, calling Bolton’s approach
on the Human Rights Council “intransigent and maximalist” and adding, ““All too
often…high ambitions are cover-ups for less noble aims, and oriented not at
improving the United Nations, but at belittling and weakening it.”
Having embraced heavy-handed negotiating tactics and rejected cooperation and
compromise, few should be surprised that other countries want a new Ambassador
to work with.
Undermining
U.S.
Diplomatic Goals
At least some of Ambassador
Bolton’s failure to achieve U.S.
goals on UN reform can be attributed to his incendiary rhetoric and
glass-half-empty assessment of the UN. While speaking at the 33rd annual
Conservative Political Action Conference in the nation's capital in February,
Ambassador Bolton made the following comments: in
one instance of the incendiary rhetoric that has become a hallmark of Mr.
Bolton’s Ambassadorship, Bolton inaccurately
called sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers – a serious problem that
the U.N. must address – a "rampant practice."
He speaks regularly of a “culture of inaction” at the U.N. and, contrary to
Secretary of State’s and President’s message, has discussed reform as a U.S.
project. He went as far as to say that the U.S. effort to reform the U.N.
“could be like the irresistible force meeting the immovable object."
One of Bolton’s speeches was so inflammatory
that the Associated Press, which covered the event, entitled its article,
“Bolton Blasts U.N. ‘Sex and Corruption.’”
When giving the “Status Report of United Nations Reform” in May 2006, he told the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee that the U.N. could use “a gale of creative
destruction.”
Bolton
also undermined U.S.
goals by promoting his own, radical views.
While trying to jump-start sensitive
negotiations over the Human Rights Council and management reform, Amb. Bolton
created a ‘study group’ in the State Department to consider whether the U.S. should
push to abolish the system of mandatory assessed contributions to the U.N. core
budget.
The study group never reached any public
conclusion, but that didn’t stop Amb. Bolton
from publicly airing his personal views while these important negotiations were
in progress. He asked numerous times: “Why shouldn’t we pay for what we want,
instead of paying a bill for what we get?”, adding that it was unfair for the U.S.
to pay 22 percent of the budget and get only one vote in the General Assembly. This helped further the impression at the U.N.
that Amb. Bolton and the U.S.
were more focused on power-grabbing and cost-cutting than building a strong and
effective institution capable of responding to global problems that affect
everyone.
Senators must also ask whether
Bolton really is the best person to confirm as UN Ambassador at a time when the
Bush Administration has chosen an international legal and diplomatic rationale
to deal with the key threat of Iran
and the escalating crisis in the larger Middle East. As Ambassador Vassilakis of Greece said in a
recent interview, Ambassador Bolton “is not an easy man to get close to…Some
people have the possibility to build consensus.
Others operate in other ways.” Or, to quote Warren Hoge, the UN bureau chief
for the New York Times, “Bolton’s critics believe that by being so assertive
and so combative, he is emboldening the enemies of the United States at the United Nations and making
it more difficult for the United
States to win the argument.” And his old pattern of
abusiveness toward colleagues has not disappeared entirely. One European diplomat noted an instance in
which things got “quite ugly” in the Security Council when Mr. Bolton believed
that another nation’s delegation had leaked details of sensitive negotiations
to the press.
Already, Bolton’s bellicosity
on Iran has been cited as a factor in heightening tensions with Iran and our allies, such as his insistence
that “This
is put-up-or-shut-up time for
Iran” and his implication that the U.S. was considering unilateral military
action. Privately, officials have noted that
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has attempted to keep him out of key
negotiations on Iran. Indeed, publicly Bolton made clear his own
reservations about Rice’s outreach efforts to Iran. Noting that he was “not much of a carrots
man” Bolton told the Financial Times that
he would not expect much from Rice’s talks, “It would be a mistake to think
these negotiations are a first step towards some kind of grand bargain
[involving US recognition]. We are only addressing the nuclear issue and
stopping their pursuit of nuclear weapons.”
According to the Financial Times, even
as the negotiations were pending, Bolton reverted to the same rhetoric of
regime change he used when explaining why negotiations with Iraq were
futile: “He said US security guarantees
for Iran were ‘not on the table’, and argued instead that regime change could
remove a nuclear threat: ‘Our experience has been that when there is a dramatic
change in the life of a country, that’s the most likely point at which they
give up nuclear weapons.’”
Should the U.S. Senate confirm Bolton as its chief diplomat, it would be sending to a
multinational body a man who apparently works against even the bilateral
negotiations of his own country. At a
time of heightened Middle East conflict, as the U.S. pursues multilateral
solutions, it would be sending as its standard bearer a man who has harshly
deplored UN involvement in the Middle east, saying that “for 50 years on a
bipartisan basis, we have tried to keep the UN out of the Middle East conflict
because it is not an honest broker. And now it’s been invited in. We can’t tell
the consequences of that.” There is no real indication that Bolton’s views have changed in the six years since he
made that comment. In fact, as recently
as November, 2005, at a private dinner after he’d begun his tenure at the UN,
Bolton reiterated his view that the UN was essentially an anti-American
body: “Since the fall of the Berlin
Wall, the UN has become the focus for a lot of people who have an agenda
against the United States.
We are having the same debates we thought we were having 20 years ago.” He continued by restating his view that the
UN was only useful insofar as it acted at the behest of the world’s only
superpower, conceding that it “can be an effective instrument of US
foreign policy. There are times when it can serve US interests." That is essentially the same view Bolton
expressed twelve years earlier when he said that if you “lost ten stories” from
the UN building in New York it “wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” adding that
U.S. power is the world’s only truly effective force:
“There is no United Nations. There is an
international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power
left in the world, and that’s the United States, when it suits our
interests, and when we can get others to go along. I think it would be a real
mistake to count on the U.N. as if it’s some disembodied entity out there that
can function.”
It is the same view that he expressed,
perhaps most fiercely, in an article for the Cato Institute that describes the
UN historically as a collection of “sycophants” and “cynics posing as
idealists,” before going on to reiterate that on the rare occasions when the UN
worked “The UN was an instrument of U.S. policy, not a policymaker itself.” John Bolton has staked his intellectual career
on UN failure. And like the 16th and 17th century astronomers
who attempted to shore up their reputation and life’s work by insisting that
the solar system revolved around the earth long after observation had proven
otherwise, there is no indication that Bolton
is ready for the kind of paradigm shift required to pursue multilateralism in
good faith. For Bolton, every crisis is
a test for the UN, an experiment to try his theories – a view that came across
when he recently noted that “I think that an inability on the part of the
Security Council to deal effectively with the Iranian nuclear weapons program
would be a signal that, if we are, as we are, committed to preventing Iran from
obtaining nuclear weapons, then we have to look at other alternatives.” It is telling, and chilling, that the
situation must get worse, not better, for the experiment to work out as Bolton’s theories would predict.
II. Before Turtle Bay:
Abusing Intelligence and Subverting U.S. Foreign Policy
An aggressive personality is not
necessarily a negative trait in a UN ambassador. As some of Bolton’s
own defenders have noted, effective UN ambassadors like Jeane Kirkpatrick and
Senator Patrick Moynihan were known for being tough and “plain spoken.” But, by any measure, John Bolton’s behavior
goes beyond “tough” and his motivation seems to be to promote his ideology and quash
dissenting views rather than to negotiate hard-driving diplomatic solutions. His
involvement in U.S.
policy toward the International Criminal Court is a case in point.
The
Failure of Bolton’s Stand Against
International Law
For example, while President Bush has
insisted that Iran comply
with “international law,” and Condoleezza Rice has said that “One of the
pillars of [US] diplomacy is
our strong belief that international law is a vital and powerful force in the
search for freedom,” Bolton has forcefully argued that international law simply does
not exist. In an article against the International
Criminal Court for Foreign Affairs, Bolton argued to the contrary that “international law” is
a concept only good for its emotional appeal:
“While treaties may well be politically or even morally binding, they are
not legally obligatory. They are just not “law” as we apprehend the
term. And what happens to countries when they do not adhere to international
law on some matter? Usually nothing. Why, then, do we continue to talk about
international “law”? Because the word has a strong emotive appeal.”
Again, this is no mere slip of
the tongue, but a position developed over a career-long devotion to the idea
that “the United States
and its Constitution would have to change fundamentally and irrevocably before
binding international law becomes possible.” It was motivation to this ideology that made Bolton pursue Article 98 agreements with a missionary
zeal during his time at the State Department.
There, Bolton was the most outspoken advocate of the Administrations
strategy on the agreements, under which countries agree not to hand over U.S.
citizens or officials to the International Criminal Court. Typical of Bolton’s approach, the incentive
was not a carrot, but a stick – refusal to sign an Article 98 agreement with
the U.S.
meant forfeiting all military and security aid.
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff at the State
Department, describes Bolton as pursuing the
agreements with blinders as to their larger effects:
Let me tell you, 8:30 every morning -- I rarely missed
a meeting – Secretary Powell convened the meeting, or Deputy Secretary Armitage
convened the meeting…and the only thing Mr. Bolton talked about, primarily, at
those meetings -- he rarely said anything, but when he did say something, it
was about another Article 98 agreement having been achieved. And, frankly, I
used to sit there and think to myself, as a -- again, as a diplomat --
"How much damage are we doing to other relations as we achieve this sort
of baseball score on Article 98 agreements?"
By cutting off countries in Latin America and elsewhere
from U.S. military aid and
training assistance, military and State Department officials complained, the
sanctions not only impaired our ability to build stable, competent, and
friendly militaries around the world, but also drove our allies into the arms
of countries that were less favorable toward U.S. foreign policy goals. At particular issue was the International
Military Education and Training program (IMET), which is widely credited with
helping nations across the world advance the shared U.S. goals of anti-terrorism and
drug interdiction. A 2005 article in Defense News reported that “a number of
U.S. military and State Department
officials interviewed for this story in Brasilia, Buenos Aires and Santiago
expressed resentment at the up-or-down, take-it-or-leave-it attitude thrust upon
them by John Bolton,” with at
least one official calling Bolton’s directives “a disaster” for the U.S. Rather than moderating his position, however,
Bolton apparently wanted to push it even further: the Washington
Post reported that Bolton lost an internal State Department debate in which
he wanted to refuse military aid even to countries that were about to join NATO
(which is exempt from the sanctions) unless they signed Article 98 agreements,
despite the fact that the decision to grant them waivers had already been
made. The Post reported on allegations that, after loosing that debate, “Bolton, in the midst of the Iraq war,
delayed efforts to provide military funding for Baltic and Central European
countries that were to join NATO,
because they had not signed agreements exempting U.S. military personnel from
prosecution at the controversial new International Criminal Court. Some of the
countries wanted training to assist in their deployments in Iraq.”
However, after achieving 100 of the agreements by May
2005, progress stalled. The sanctions
were now clearly achieving no purpose except to alienate allies, weaken our
military ties, and were, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “''sort
of the same as shooting ourselves in the foot.'' General Bantz Craddock, head of U.S. Southern
Command, told a U.S. Senate hearing that the sanctions had ``unintended
consequences”:
''If we are not there, if we can't provide
this opportunity, someone else will. `We see more and more military [Latin
American] commanders and officers going to China for education and training.
We see more and more Chinese nonlethal equipment showing up in the region.''
Senator John McCain agreed that the U.S.
was paying ''a very heavy price,'' and in June, 2006, the Senate agreed to lift
the aid ban tied to the International Criminal Court, while a House version of
the bill criticized the sanctions and called for expanded use of waivers. Bolton, one of the harshest long-term critics
of the ICC, has been left further behind as the Bush Administration has
accepted the court as the venue for trying Darfur
war crimes. As the Wall Street Journal reported, the U.S. “now considers the ICC
perhaps the only chance to bring Darfur war criminals to justice,” conceding
that a court with 100 member countries cannot be delegitimized. The new U.S. was on display in June, when
the ICC’s chief prosecutor reported to the UN Security Council, and the State
Department’s chief lawyer, John Bellinger noted that “we do acknowledge that it
[the ICC] has a role to play in the overall system of international
justice.” U.S. Ambassador Bolton has not
publicly embraced the new position, and sent a deputy to attend the
prosecutor’s briefing.
Iraq, Syria, and the “Politicization of
Intelligence”
Bolton’s authoritarian style and ideology
clearly causes problems beyond alienating U.S. allies and weakening
alliances. And there is an even more
direct connection between Bolton’s abuse of colleagues and damage to
international American standing: in a striking number of cases outlined in
Bolton’s 2005 confirmation hearings, Bolton abused underlings because they were
not willing to distort intelligence to fit his preconceived policy objectives
on Iraq and other states
where Bolton favored an aggressive approach. As former Assistant Secretary for
Nonproliferation John Wolf noted, when Bolton
explained that he wanted intelligence analysts fired because they failed to
provide “diligent service,” what he really meant was that “he didn’t agree with
the views they were expressing.” Bolton’s pressure on the intelligence
community was a key part of the landscape in the months leading up to the
invasion of Iraq. Now, it is difficult to say whether Bolton’s
opposition to alternative views, or the implication that he is an unreliable
conduit for the unvarnished truth on U.S. intelligence, is the more
fatal flaw in a UN Ambassador.
This is why former assistant Secretary of
State for Intelligence and Research Carl Ford, a self-described “loyal
Republican,” who is “a huge fan of Vice-President Cheney,” felt compelled to
come forward after “a lot of soul searching” to testify against Bolton’s
appointment. Yes, Ford described Bolton as a “serial
abuser” for his mistreatment of the Intelligence Officer on Latin America,
Christian Westermann, when the officer objected to Bolton’s desire to use
dubious and controversial intelligence in May 2002 to suggest that Cuba
had a biological weapons program. But
worse than Bolton’s behavior was his effort to
simply make opposing views disappear.
After meeting out a tongue lashing to Westermann, Bolton sought out Carl
Ford and, as Ford related, “I left that meeting with the perception that I had
been asked for the first time to fire an intelligence analyst for what he had
said,” adding that “whether the words were ‘fire,’ whether that was
‘re-assign,’ ‘get him away from me, I don’t want to see him again,’ I don’t
remember.” But the upshot was the
same.
By now, the basic narrative of the events
Ford described has been clearly established by hours of interviews and Senate
testimony. When then Undersecretary of
State John Bolton sought to use dubious and controversial intelligence in May
2002 to suggest that Cuba had a biological weapons program, the Intelligence
Officer on Latin America, Westermann, objected and sought to change and limit
those assertions. In response, Bolton called Westermann on the carpet, as Ford
explained: “Secretary Bolton chose to
reach five or six levels below him in the bureaucracy, bringing analysts into
his office and giving them a tongue lashing.”
As Ford described Bolton’s behavior “He
was so far over the line that he’s one of the, sort of, memorable moments in my
career.” As Westermann described Bolton,
“he was yelling and screaming, and red in the face,
and wagging his finger. I’ll never forget the wagging of the finger. That’s
perhaps his style.” Westermann said the
incident caused so much stress that it affected his physical health.
Ford described a “chilling effect” among
intelligence analysts who felt that dissenting views could harm their careers
-- and the personal intervention of Secretary of State Colin Powell was
required to help bring about a thaw. Recalling the incident in which Bolton had requested the reassignment, then deputy
director for Central Intelligence John McLaughlin recalled that he had said
“we’re not going to do that. Absolutely not. No way. End of story.” McLaughlin emphasized just how
out-of-the-mainstream Bolton’s request was:
“It’s perfectly all right for a policymaker
to express disagreement with an NIO or an analyst, and it’s perfectly all right
for them to challenge such an individual vigorously, challenge their work
vigorously. But I think it’s different to then request, because of the
disagreement, that the person be transferred.”
However
singular Bolton’s behavior was in this case,
further testimony revealed that he had attempted to thwart the careers of multiple analysts who disagreed with him
in much the same way. When a national
intelligence officer named Fulton Armstrong (referred to through most of the
Senate hearings as “Mr. Smith”) objected to Bolton’s inflated bioweapons
rhetoric, Bolton also sought to have him
removed. Bolton testified before the
Senate that this was because he and Otto Reich, the assistant secretary of
state for Western Hemisphere affairs, were
“not satisfied with Mr. Smith’s performance.” But when the officer’s boss, then head of the
NIC Stuart Cohen, was asked if he ever acted on Bolton’s
desire, he made it clear that he considered the officer an exemplary
analyst: “Quite the contrary. I worked
harder to get him promoted than any other officers that I think has ever worked
for me.” The problem, as witnesses testified
repeatedly, was not analysts’ performance, but their views.
Bolton’s own views, and
his views about what the intelligence should express, were clear. As early as 1998, Bolton
had joined Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and other members of
the Project for the New American Century as a cosigner on letters to President
Clinton and the House and Senate majority leaders insisting that Saddam Hussein
should be removed from power. According
to the letters, the doctrine of “containment” had failed, Saddam was acquiring
banned weapons, and “U.S.
policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein’s regime from
power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place.” The letters also made it clear that Bolton thought multilateralism was the wrong approach,
arguing that “we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition
to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or
evades UN inspections.”
Elsewhere, Bolton became increasingly
strident about toppling Saddam, decrying President Clinton’s support for Kofi
Annan’s “Baghdad
deal” of February 1998 to allow weapons inspectors back into the country. For Bolton, what was “harder to understand
[than Annan’s motives] is why the Clinton
administration allowed him to go at all, or permitted him any negotiating flexibility.” Simply put, since Saddam was known to have
lied in the past, Bolton said, he could never
be trusted again, and no amount of intelligence information or weapons
inspection could alter the need for his removal:
“[T]he Saddam Hussein regime can never be
trusted. They have lied so persistently for so long that the only way to get to
an acceptable level of tolerance, if you will, for Iraq’s position militarily, is to
remove Saddam Hussein from power.” This conviction, and Bolton’s general belief that
the U.S. should act free
from the hindrances of multilateralism in pursuit of its policy objectives, was
responsible for Bolton’s repeated clashes with
the intelligence community.
Alan Foley, the former head of the CIA’s
weapons proliferation center who describes Bolton as “a friend,” nevertheless
detailed Bolton’s willingness to break with
the intelligence community’s assessments and insist that they bend to his own
views:
“John strongly believed that just because
the intelligence community had a
conclusion on an issue, that didn’t
necessarily have to be his view… in other words, John felt he had every
right to interpret what the evidence meant and come to a different conclusion
than the intelligence community.”
Bolton did this
regularly, according to Foley. Robert
Hutchings, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, also
confirmed, for example, that Bolton clashed repeatedly with officials over Syria. The New
York Times reported that when Bolton submitted for approval a speech he planned
to deliver on Syria
to the House International Relations Committee in 2003, the CIA responded with
a 35-page memo on how the proposed speech went beyond the accepted intelligence
assessment. Particularly contentious was
Bolton’s plan to tell the committee that Syria’s
development of chemical and biological weapons posed a threat to the Middle East. Hutchings described Bolton’s
use of intelligence as “cherry picking”:
“Let’s say that he took
isolated facts and made much more of them to build a case than I thought the
intelligence warranted. It was a sort of cherry-picking of little factoids and
little isolated bits that were drawn out to present the starkest-possible case.”
According
to Hutchings, the kind of pushback exhibited by Bolton
as he wrangled with analysts over the speech amounts to a “politicization” of
intelligence that ultimately compromises it:
“When policy officials come
back repeatedly to push the same kinds of judgments, and push the intelligence
community to confirm a particular set of judgments, it does have the effect of
politicizing intelligence, because the so-called “correct answer” becomes all
too clear. And, you know, even when it’s successfully resisted, it has an
effect.”
The
effect must have been particularly chilling since, as detailed above, Bolton actively sought the removal of analysts whose
views did not align with his own.
Specifically, it is notable that all
of the intelligence analysts with whom we know Bolton clashed had attempted to
moderate an intelligence picture that Bolton
wanted to use to make the case for unilateral military action. Fulton Armstrong and Christian Westerman
objected to Bolton’s inflated bioweapons rhetoric, and Former Assistant
Secretary for Nonproliferation John Wolf also related that Bolton
attempted to thwart the career of a rising star in the State Department, Rexon
Ryu, and at least two other non-proliferation officers with whose views he
disagreed.
Ryu
worked with Secretary Colin Powell and “threw away a lot of trash” from the materials
that Powell presented in his speech to the UN Security Council on the brink of
war in February of 2003. During this time, Bolton apparently became
convinced that Ryu was conspiring to withhold information from him, accusing
him of “duplicity” when Ryu did not provide a copy of a cable related to the
UNMOVIC inspections that Bolton
requested. Typically, Bolton
called Ryu on the carpet, but when Wolf investigated he found that the cable
had in fact been widely circulated by Ryu and decided that his failure to CC
Bolton had simply been “inadvertent.”
Ryu was, Wolf maintained, a “remarkable civil servant, indeed, an