Lot’s of great information in today’s LA Times article about the Master of Disaster, John Bolton:
U.S. Ambassador John R. Bolton’s mission to overhaul the U.N. is a lot like Hercules’ mythical labor to clean a mountain of manure from the Augean stables, joked a friend while introducing him before a recent speech. The difference for Bolton, she said, is that the animals making the mess are still there.
Recounting the story, Bolton leans his head back and laughs. And laughs, until his face turns red.
“She said it. I didn’t,” he says.
After four months as ambassador, Bolton is still shoveling hard. Most of his fellow diplomats agree that the blunt-spoken envoy is indeed unconventional. Some call him “a bully,” and others say he is “brilliant.” But opinion is divided about whether he is effective ? if he is cleaning up the mess, or adding to it.
“He is having a definite impact,” said Ambassador Mihnea Motoc of Romania, a temporary member of the Security Council. “Others wish they could do things the same way.”
But Bolton’s methods have often put him at odds with the United States’ traditional allies here, particularly Britain, which has worked to broker face-saving compromises.
[…]Just as member states were brushing themselves off from the last collision Bolton precipitated, over an agreement on how to reform the U.N. before the World Summit in September, the U.S. ambassador is setting up a new showdown.
He has threatened to block the world body’s budget for 2006-07 unless diplomats commit to “real reform” by the end of 2005, a year that has seen the organization severely damaged by revelations of corruption and mismanagement in the Iraq oil-for-food program, the disclosure of sexual exploitation by peacekeepers and the U.N.’s difficulty in remaking itself.
The budget battle prompted Secretary-General Kofi Annan to cancel a trip this month to Asia and warn that Bolton’s gambit could exacerbate the very problems it is meant to solve.
“He has an agenda, and he’s pursuing it with a conviction that is uncommon here,” said Algerian Ambassador Abdallah Baali, who sometimes clashes with Bolton in the Security Council but considers him a friend. “He’s doing it his way, which is not the way we do it at the U.N. We are used to a little more compromise.”
[…]The ambassador clearly relishes a fight. He recalled that when he was applying at law firms for a summer job back when he was a young man, one lawyer told him to rethink his desire to be a litigator, saying that most of his interactions every day would be with people who wanted to “rip your clients’ lungs out.”
“He asked me, ‘Is that really what you want to do?’ And I thought about it and I said, ‘Yeah, that is exactly what I want to do.’ ”
Bolton is still comfortably contrarian, standing out among sleekly groomed diplomats with his trademark walrus mustache and mop of once-auburn hair, now graying. (It is not a toupee, as some have wondered.)
The new ambassador wakes up every morning at 4 to prepare for the day’s battles. He wants to make sure the U.S. message gets across, and he doesn’t do it softly. “I think it’s important to say clearly what the U.S. position is?. And I think when you say we hold this position and we hold it strongly, for some people, that is a new experience.”
[…]At receptions, Bolton hates to schmooze. Instead he is trying to meet all the U.N. ambassadors one at a time and has seen 121 so far. “Sixty-four to go,” he said.
[…]Since Bolton arrived in August, he has shaken up the 60-year-old institution. His first move was to unravel the carefully negotiated document on U.N. reform in an attempt to force delegates to try to reweave it into what he considered a tighter, more effective treatise. Talks stalled as a result, and a last-minute compromise document secured few of the gains the U.S. was pushing for.
He has floated the idea of a sort of a la carte diplomacy, in which the United States would fund only the U.N. agencies it thought were effective.
This month, he sharply criticized the U.N.’s human rights chief, Louise Arbour, for her statement that the U.S.-declared “war on terrorism” was undermining the global treaty against torture and losing the U.S. its moral high ground. He called her comments “illegitimate and irresponsible.”
And now, the budget bomb.
“That’s just the way practical politics works,” Bolton said in an interview in his spartan office. “There is no one decisive encounter in that conflict, but it could be quite important in the next two weeks to see what happens.”
When Bush came to the U.N. for the global summit three months ago, TV boom mikes eavesdropped on him joking with Annan: “How’s my boy John doing? Has he blown up the building yet?”
I have to say, placing Bolton in the UN was one of Bush’s great moves. Who else would of come up with the idea of only funding missions we agree with, and then have the balls to say it in public. Not any politicians that I know of, except for Bush of course.
I have to say, placing Bolton in the UN was one of Bush’s great moves. Who else would of come up with the idea of only funding missions we agree with, and then have the balls to say it in public. Not any politicians that I know of, except for Bush of course.
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