The Bolton Mugging
The nominee dared to push the President's foreign policy.
Thursday, April 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
So John Bolton's nomination to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations is said to be in trouble, as a couple of Senate Republicans waver amid reports that he has been rude to subordinates. Pardon us for breaking up the mock horror, but someone has to point out that what's going on here isn't "advise and consent" but character assassination. Perhaps the White House will even begin to notice.
"My conscience got me," declared Ohio Republican George Voinovich on Tuesday, forcing a postponement in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote. And what so shocked his sensibilities? An accusation, from avowed liberal and anti-Bush partisan Melody Townsel, that Mr. Bolton had shouted at her and pounded on her door when they were both out of government in the 1990s.
This late political hit was dropped on the committee and leaked to the media only after Mr. Bolton had testified and before he could offer any response. But even if it were true, if raising your voice and pounding on doors is disqualifying for public service half of the Senate will have to resign. If Mr. Voinovich's "conscience" is outraged by anything, it should be that a nominee of his President is being treated in such a shameful fashion.
This smear campaign is all the more offensive because it is designed to avoid a genuine policy debate. Mr. Bolton, who has worked as a diplomat in two different Administrations, is being sent by Mr. Bush to lead a reform of the U.N. that desperately needs it if it is going to be effective. His skills helped repeal the U.N.'s "Zionism is racism" resolution in the early 1990s, and more recently he ran the successful and innovative Proliferation Security Initiative that helped put Libya out of the WMD business. But Democrats don't want to debate that record, because they know they'd lose. So they have set about to destroy Mr. Bolton personally instead.
Look closely at Mr. Bolton's accusers, and you can see through the agendas. There is former State Department career official Carl Ford, who claims Mr. Bolton rudely disagreed with his policy positions. There is also Latin America-specialist Fulton Armstrong, whom Mr. Bolton allegedly tried to have fired. Never mind that Mr. Bolton was not the only senior State Department official to complain about Mr. Armstrong. Or that Mr. Armstrong's forgiving assessments of Cuba's Fidel Castro were influenced by the work of Ana Belen Montes, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst convicted in 2002 of spying for Cuba. This is the testimony of career analysts who disagree with Bush Administration policy and want to show that any official who disagrees with the bureaucracy will have his own career ruined in Senate confirmation.
All of this is being orchestrated by Senate Democrats Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, who represent the foreign-policy views that lost the last election. More than that, they are carrying water for a foreign-policy establishment that tried desperately to defeat Mr. Bush and failed, but now wants to pin an embarrassing defeat on the President by humiliating a nominee closely associated with his policy. This is the same establishment that so believes in the mythology of "multilateralism" that it doesn't care if the U.N. was corrupted by Saddam Hussein's Oil for Food program. Mr. Bolton is a threat to their U.N. illusions because he wants to achieve actual results.
We should add that Mr. Bolton would nonetheless be sailing toward confirmation if Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee were doing their job. Senators Dodd and Biden are running rings around Chairman Dick Lugar, who should know on the day of a vote whether he has enough support to prevail. His defense of Mr. Bolton has been so weak that we almost wonder if he doesn't privately wish for the nominee's defeat.
Mr. Lugar's tepid opening statement on the nominee set the stage for the embarrassments that have followed, chief among them losing control of his own committee. Just as embarrassing has been Nebraska's Charles Hagel, whose waffling on the nomination should be understood as an attempt to curry favor with the liberal media and strike a blow for the permanent State Department bureaucracy that he has long allied himself with.
As for the White House, we trust Mr. Bush's advisers are waking up to the fact that if Mr. Bolton loses so does the President. The U.N. will take it as a sign that it can move ahead with Potemkin reform, while Democrats will be emboldened to take down other nominees. Mr. Bush's appointees will also understand that defending his priorities against the bureaucracy is a bad career choice. If this is how Republicans and the White House are going to fight on judges, they might as well roll over now.
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