April
25, 2005
Bush's
Bully
John
Bolton: the Undiplomatic Diplomat
By
GARY LEUPP
Boston,
Mass.
John Bolton, an evil man,
looks headed for a fall. But will he, foaming at the mouth, fall
for the right reasons? On May 6, 2002 Bolton, then Undersecretary
of State for Arms Control, in a speech to the rightwing Heritage
Foundation claimed that Cuba had a program to produce offensive
biological weapons. The Bush administration, he declared, “believes
Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research
and development effort,” and has “provided dual-use
biotechnology to other rogue states.” His talk, entitled
“Beyond the Axis of Evil” (recall that the term had
been introduced just three months earlier by President Bush in
his State of the Union rant), followed charges by anti-Castro
Cuban-American organizations that a joint Cuba-Iran pharmaceutical
research venture was actually a front for the development of such
weapons. The press made a big deal of the talk, the shameless
neocon groupie Judith Miller of the New York Times reporting,
“Bush administration officials report that the United States
believes that Cuba has been experimenting with anthrax and other
deadly biological pathogens.”
Cuba,
proud of its advanced biotech- and genetic-engineering programs
that provide medicines and vaccines at small cost to many Third
World countries, called the accusations “vile.” Fidel
Castro, planning to host former President Jimmy Carter on a Cuba
from May 12 to 17, labeled the allegation “an absolute lie”
and offered Carter “together with any experts of [his] choosing”
“free and complete access” to any of Cuba’s
science centers.
After
visiting Cuba’s Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology,
Carter stated, “With some degree of reluctance I would also
like to comment on the allegation of bioterrorism. I do this because
these allegations were made, maybe not coincidentally, just before
our visit to Cuba.”
He
said that U.S. intelligence officials had given him extensive
briefings before his visit and that they had told him they had
no evidence Cuba was either producing biological weapons or helping
other countries to do so. “I asked them specifically, on
more than one occasion: ‘Is there any evidence that Cuba
has been involved in sharing any information to any other country
on Earth that could be used for terrorist purposes?’ And
the answer from our experts on intelligence was ‘no.’
”
On
May 15, the day after Carter’s remarks, Secretary of State
Colin Powell (who has recently opined Bolton’s UN appointment
would be “problematic”) told reporters, “We
didn’t say [Cuba] actually had some weapons, but [that]
it has the capacity and capability to conduct such research.”
The Cuban Foreign Ministry noted with satisfaction in a statement
published in Granma, entitled rather cutely “Colin Powell
Recognizes that Bolton Lied,” “We appreciate the efforts
of Secretary of State Colin Powell to help clear up what happened.”
We haven’t heard much about those bioweapons since. Instead
we hear of the nefarious presence of Cuban doctors in the self-sacrificing
spirit of Che Guevara, providing medical care in countries like
Venezuela and (Aristide’s) Haiti and (as Bolton would have
us believe) by their very presence promoting anti-Americanism
in such countries.
Then
there was that delayed testimony to Congress regarding Syria.
In July 2002 Bolton was supposed to testify at a Congressional
hearing on Syria prior to deliberations on the Syria Accountability
Act, and to emphasize the threat from Syria’s alleged chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons programs. According to the Daily
Star, “Bolton had already infuriated U.S. intelligence officials
by claiming in May 2002 that Cuba has a biological weapons program.
Intelligence analysts declared themselves ‘fed up’
with such assertions and drew the line at Bolton’s July
draft testimony against Syria.”
The
CIA was indeed pleased that, as Seymour Hersh reported in the
New Yorker magazine: “(B)y early 2002 Syria had emerged
as one of the CIA’s most effective intelligence allies in
the fight against Al-Qaeda, providing an outpouring of information
that came to an end only with the invasion of Iraq.” Bolton
gave a watered-down version of his presentation in a partly closed
hearing September 2003, after some of the content had been leaked
through the Times’ Judith Miller.
Soon
afterwards the anti-Syrian act was passed into law amid unsubstantiated
charges originating in Israel that WMDs weren’t found in
Iraq because they’d been transported across the border to
Syria.
That
same month, a high-ranking official identified by the Guardian
as Bolton declared, “We tolerate nuclear weapons in Israel
for the same reason we tolerate them in Britain and France. We
don’t regard Israel as a threat.”
This
from the Bush administration’s top arms control official,
as he huffed and puffed about Syria’s paltry WMD menace.
Meanwhile Bolton crusaded against the United Nations’ International
Atomic Energy Agency, headed by Mohamed ElBaradei, for its unwillingness
to declare that Iran was seeking to produce nuclear weapons. While
the U.S. bugged the phone of ElBaradei, Bolton called his November
2003 report on Iran to the United Nations, which concluded that
he “found no evidence” of an Iranian nuclear weapons
program, “impossible to believe.” Is that ambassadorial,
or what? Despite U.S. efforts to unseat him, ElBaradei, one of
the most respected and popular U.N. officials, retains his post
for a third term.
Bolton’s
diplomatic skills were much in evidence when on July 31, two days
after North Korea had agreed to U.S. demands that it participate
in multilateral talks on its nuclear program, he told a South
Korean audience that North Korea was a “hellish nightmare”
ruled by a “tyrannical leader.” Pyongyang replied
reasonably that it would not attend talks if Bolton (a “blood-sucker”
and “human scum”) represented the U.S. No matter.
As Vice President Cheney, Bolton’s chief patron, has said
of the administration, “We don’t negotiate with evil;
we defeat it.”
In
the last week or so Bolton’s personal bullying has weakened
his prospects for Congressional approval as ambassador to the
United Nations, an organization he once disparaged in a speech
to a World Federalists audience. “There are 38 floors to
the U.N. building in New York. If you lost 10 of them, it wouldn’t
make a bit of difference.” That comment’s come back
to haunt him, I suspect in part because it conjures up a mental
image of planes crashing into the UN headquarters in New York.
The extraordinary unilateralism of Bush policy, and incessant
gripes about the UN’s failure to meet its “international
responsibilities” (to rubber-stamp U.S. imperialism) suggests
that Bolton’s nomination might indeed be intended to smite
the international body bringing it down like the walls of Jericho.
Others
past statements haunt him too. He allegedly screamed “You’re
fired,” at his subordinate Lynne D. Finney when they both
worked in the General Counsel’s Office of the Agency for
International Development in the 1980s. Why? Because she’d
refused to try to persuade World Health Organization delegates
to weaken restrictions on the marketing of infant formula in the
developing world that would in her judgment cause product misuse
and infant deaths. As she tells it, Bolton shouted that “Nestle
was an important company and that he was giving me a direct order
from President Reagan.” Turned out that he was lying about
Reagan and the top USAID administrator allowed her to keep her
post.
In
1994 Bolton went berserk when another USAID worker, Melody Townsel,
reported to her superiors that a contractor for an AID project
in Kyrgystan was performing poorly. Bolton, then legal counsel
for the contractor, “proceeded” in her words “to
chase me through the halls of a Russian hotel --- throwing things
at me, shoving threatening letters under my door and, generally,
behaving like a madman.” She says that he kept pounding
on her hotel door for two weeks shouting threats, making her life
a “hell.” (You know, like North Korea.) Despite Bolton’s
efforts to smear her as a felon headed for jail time, and to label
her a lesbian, she kept her job and won promotion.
Then,
to return to where I started, there was the matter of those Cuban
bioterror weapons. Carl W. Ford Jr., the former director of the
State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research at
the State Department (which by the way, concluded that Iraq did
not have WMD threatening the world) has told Congress that the
bureau’s chief bioweapons analyst Christian Westermann questioned
Bolton’s assessment of Cuba’s weapons programs.
Maybe
he was one of those who’d talked with Carter. Bolton again
exploded and threatened Westermann, causing Ford to intervene.
Bolton nurtured a grudge, telling Ford last year before he retired,
“I’m glad you’re leaving” before hanging
up the phone. Human Scum, Ford states, is “an 800-pound
guerrilla” who likes to stomp on bananas. He “abuses
his authority with little people.”
These
issues of management style and people skills will no doubt determine
the vote on Bolton’s nomination, now postponed for obvious
reasons to mid-May. Or perhaps he will see the handwriting on
the wall and withdraw. In any case, one would prefer that the
big issues would determine his political fate. He cares little
about human life, as the Finney case reveals. He puts corporate
profit above everything, as the Townsel case reveals. He lies
through his teeth to demonize governments and remake the world
according to the neocons’ plans, as the Westermann case
reveals. No doubt a Republican or two on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee will decide not to support Bolton because of his “confrontational
personality,” his “abrasiveness” or lack of
diplomatic polish. But don’t expect George Voinovich or
Lincoln Chafee or any of them to list the really big reasons this
man does not belong at the UN.
Gary
Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and
Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of
Servants, Shophands and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa
Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality
in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan:
Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor
to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan
and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.
He
can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu