I believe it was Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana who actually said with a straight face that John Bolton was nominated to the position of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. in order to reform the U.N. and boost credibility of the U.N. to the American people.
How did Lugar keep a straight face when he made that statement? Did he struggle to maintain composure?
After all, Bolton is probably the single most vocal critic of the U.N. in world history — a man who clearly would prefer to subjugate the U.N. totally to U.S. interests and to absolutely ignore and even thwart interests of other U.N. members. Bolton wants to re-form the U.N., not reform it. Bolton wants to turn the U.N. into a puppet agency of the U.S. State Department, not a collective, collaborative, cooperative collection of sovereign nations willing to set aside national ambitions appropriately in the interest of the collective international community.
Bolton is the Pharisee to whom Jesus of Nazareth told to remove the rafter from his own eye before he considered removing the straw from his brother’s eye. Bolton is a reformer in the same sense the Donald Rumsfeld is a reformer of the U.S. military. Never in memory has the U.S. military been stretched so thin, with such difficulty in reaching recruiting goals, with such disregard for norms of following the laws of warfare and such division between professional military leaders and their civilian leadership as has been the case under the "reforms" of Donald Rumsfeld.
John Bolton wants to be Donald Rumsfeld in a U.N. setting. Bolton destroys morale wherever he goes, except among his ultra-extremist cabal of U.S.-firsters. Bolton is the dead opposite of what a diplomat and a U.S. ambassador to the U.N. should be. It is amazing that he has any support for this position whatsoever! It is alarming that this nomination was brought forward to begin with, and will be distressing if the nomination succeeds. This nomination will continue a pattern of alienation of the entire world from the U.S. cabal that entered into power with the illegitimate ascendancy of George W. Bush in 2000.
Many of us predicted that putting Bush in power would be a nightmare, but never could we have predicted the shamelessness of behavior and the far-ranging scope of damage to both America and to the world that this administration would bring. Bolton in the U.N. will be a bull in a china closet or a match in a locker full of dynamite. Reform will be the last thing he will ever accomplish, but he may destroy the place.
