Recent events make decisive case for Bolton

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UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

A U.N. eye-opener

Recent events make decisive case for Bolton

September 27, 2006

At least when it comes to the debate over whether the Senate should confirm United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, the angry, violent anti-U.S. rhetoric of Venezuelan President Hugo ChÁvez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad couldn't have come at a better time. If anything confirms the vapidity of Senate Democrats' views of Bolton and the U.N., it is the huge ovations that U.N. delegates lavished on ChÁvez and Ahmadinejad – two madmen thugs.

The applause was no surprise. Contrary to what Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and his allies would have us believe, the United Nations is not warm, fuzzy and lovable. It isn't just anti-Semitic, hostile to democracies and remarkably tolerant of tyrants. It is profoundly corrupt, home to the oil-for-food scandal, the largest financial scam in history. On a more prosaic level, it is perhaps the worst-run large institution in the world, with vast overlap among its various agencies, a work force larded with sinecures and a fierce resistance to basic accountability.

Even the U.N.'s most-praised program – its international peacekeeping efforts – has an appalling dark side. You wouldn't know it from listening to such U.N. admirers as Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., but peacekeepers are notorious for sex crimes. In recent years, U.N. forces have been credibly accused of rape, pedophilia and prostitution in Congo, Burundi, Haiti, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone and Kosovo. The perversion reached such extremes in one African town that UNICEF – the U.N. Children's Fund – felt the necessity to denounce peacekeepers' mass molestations.

“This is a problem in every [peacekeepers'] mission around the world,” a Refugees International spokeswoman said last year.

Why is little done to stop this? For the same reason all U.N. reforms go nowhere: institutional resistance, from the top (Secretary-General Kofi Annan) down.

Against this backdrop, it could not be more obvious that we need a tough, no-nonsense advocate of U.N. reform and U.S. interests. That is precisely what Bolton has provided, and precisely why he deserves Senate confirmation before his recess appointment expires in January.

It is no longer credible to argue, as many Democrats did a year ago, that Bolton is temperamentally unsuited to the U.N. job. As a Washington Post news analysis noted, “Bolton has surprised some critics with a more consensus-building style than they expected.” It has never been credible to argue that his criticism of the U.N. is inaccurate. That leaves the Dodd crowd with one reason and one reason only to plan a filibuster of his nomination: pure, ugly partisanship.

We have no hope that Boxer will end her shrill shilling about the U.N.'s glories, but why, exactly, is California's other Democratic senator hanging around with the anti-Bolton crowd? Dianne Feinstein has a reputation for independence and moderation. It's time she earned it by saying Bolton's nomination deserves an up-or-down vote – not a spite-driven filibuster. Well, senator?

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U.S. Public Law 87-297

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