From tomorrow's WaPo we learn that John Bolton is out of the loop, and the UN nomination is more or less "movie money" from Bushco. The piece supports the popularly held belief that it was Condi Rice who apparently dictated this tactic. Here are highlights:
Policy Shifts Felt After Bolton's Departure From State Dept.
For years, a key U.S. program intended to keep Russian nuclear fuel out of terrorist hands has been frozen by an arcane legal dispute. As undersecretary of state, John R. Bolton was charged with fixing the problem, but critics complained he was the roadblock.
Now with Bolton no longer in the job, U.S. negotiators report a breakthrough with the Russians and predict a resolution will be sealed by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin at an international summit in Scotland next month, clearing the way to eliminate enough plutonium to fuel 8,000 nuclear bombs.
MORE BELOW THE JUMP
Without the hard-charging Bolton around, the Bush administration not only has moved to reconcile with Russia over nuclear threat reduction but also has dropped its campaign to oust the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and made common cause with European allies in offering incentives to Iran to persuade it to drop any ambitions for nuclear weapons.
Bolton had also resisted using the so-called New York channel for communications with North Korea, a one-on-one meeting used sporadically through Bush's presidency and most recently revived in May....
..."Throughout his career in the first Bush administration, he was always playing the stopper role for a lot of different issues and even when there was obvious interest by the president in moving things forward, Bolton often found ways of stopping things by tying the interagency process in knots," said Rose Gottemoeller, a Clinton administration official who worked on nonproliferation issues. "That's the situation we're seeing dissipate now."
The shift in Bolton's role occurred shortly after Bush named Rice as his second-term secretary of state. As the administration's point man confronting Iran's nuclear program, Bolton had blocked U.S. support for a European bid to negotiate a settlement with Tehran, arguing that such talks would legitimize Iran's clerical regime without stopping any secret weapons development." We weren't the ones who wanted to keep the meeting secret," one European diplomat said. "It was the American side that didn't want him there."
In March, after Bush met with the leaders of France and Germany, Rice announced that the United States would support the European bid to offer Iran incentives such as the right to apply for World Trade Organization membership and to buy badly needed airplane parts in exchange for stopping any weapons program.
The nuclear dispute with Russia attracted less public attention but proved important internally....the Bolton-led talks went nowhere for two years.
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.)... grew incensed that such a technical impasse could hold up a program of "global importance." He showed up at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee last year to berate Bolton on the matter.
...
Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, an advocacy organization. "But this Bush administration is not going to become the Adlai Stevenson administration just because John Bolton has left the State Department."
This is no smoking gun, but certainly gives more support to those who oppose Bolton's nomination to the UN position. The most embarrassing point would seem to be Bolton's apparent exclusion from the Iran negotiations.