Steve Clemons of The Washington Note is all about tipping his hat to outgoing UN ambassador John Bolton, who resigned yesterday as it was apparent his re-nomination by the president would fail.
How many hat tips can you give a man who has made it a point to stick it in your eye every chance he got? John Bolton, representing our nation in the principle forum of nations, took every opportunity to hinder and defile not just the actors within the UN but the very enterprise of international cooperation and power. As an ideologue utterly convinced of his own ideology, Mr. Bolton was, as has been the case for so many Bush appointees, completely wrong for the job. The destruction he has wreaked will impede American interests for some time to come.
Bolton fits the Bush model of employing people who are constitutionally opposed to the very institutions they are employed to oversee, leading to failure and destruction on most fronts. Brownie, Rummy, Ashcroft and Gonzales, EPA, all either incompetent or competent in their disdain for the institutions they have been employed to manage.
Now, just as Mr. "We don't need no stinkin' international cooperation" Bolton steps down from his post as chief international agreement wrecker, we find that the US is backed into a corner in Iraq with practically no good options for "Victory", and where are we looking for help? Lo and behold, there's all this talk about how we may need to negotiate assistance of some sort from Iran and Syria, Turkey, perhaps international peacekeepers.
I just wonder how many of the nations that have been slapped around by Mr. Bolton will be coming to the table looking to make nice with the US, help us out of our predicament. And how long before we realize that we actually need to cooperate with other nations (in a way that fosters good will as well as good agreements) in order to be successful. If the Iraq debacle is not a complete repudiation of Bolton's and the neocon anti-internationalist ideology yet, it should be.
I appreciate Mr. Clemons effort here not to make Bolton's politics personal, hence all the hat tipping, but much of what Bolton did during his tenure was reprehensible in its outright damage to our national interests, and a big part of Bolton's attitude in his job is a personal affront to me. That he would represent all Americans in his role as ambassador without giving one whit of care to either the American internationalist tradition of the past 60 years, nor the significant portion of us Americans who still actually respect the interests of people and nations around the world, Bolton's every step, every word, was a stick in the eye.
Perhaps Mr. Clemons would instruct us to, as in AA, hate the behavior, love the man. Fine. I say kick Bolton's policies in the ass on their way out the door.