Blog For Arizona

Michael: John Birch... er, Bolton

Wow. What a freak. Just watch video footage of him speaking, ranting really, at a preofessional conference about how the "UN doesn't exist" and you would be hard-pressed to invent a character who was more manifestly unsuited to the role of UN Ambassador than John Bolton.

This is the man who is leading us into another pre-emptive war, this time in Iran, by setting an unrealistic, and extra-legal, conditions on the Iranian nuclear power sector. As Under-Secretary of Defense for Arms Control he swore before Congress, with no factual support whatever, that Iran has a nuclear arms program.

This is the man whom Bush refered to as "the equivalent of dropping a neutron bomb" on the UN, and who ran the food for oil smear campaign. And this person is supposed to work with the Secretariat and diplomats of other nations? This is the man who continues to spin the lie that Lybian consessions had anything to do with our aggression in Iraq, and to claim that threats work better than engagement despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Bolton's only virtue is that I can't really claim that he is worse in any relevant dimension than Negroponte was. Of course, the single most notoriious lie, costing America immense amounts of goodwill and trust in the world and plunging us into a ruinous war, happened on Negroponte's watch, so that's not high praise.

Bolton has already demanded that Iran must abandon all efforts to enrich uranium fuel, contrary to their rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And now he is being sent to the UN to ramrod through a sanctions regime against Iran for the Bush Administration and to grease the skids for making war on Iran at Bush's discretion. The Congress will be too cowed to do anything but rubber-stamp more international aggression, if they are even allowed the courtesy of voting on whether we go to war.

The Senate will almost certainly confirm Bolton along partisan lines, unless the Democrats decide to filibuster the vote. They won't so long as Bolton does't start screaming and beating the Senators with furniture while ranting about the black helicopters and the chips in his head: then again, even that might not stop his confirmation.

The Administration's purpose, marching us toward a needless war in Iran (and maybe Syria too), is practically written across Bolton's forhead. Yet Senate Democrats, and even Republicans who should know better, continue to act as if all is business as usual. The Senate is fiddling as the world order, built by our fathers with 70 years of sacrifice and toil, is torched by this ammoral Administration.

posted by Michael Bryan @ 4/14/2005 12:45:00 AM