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	Controversy surrounds Bolton's appointment as UN Ambassador. by The Nation / IPS / CNN USA   August 2, 2005   "The Bolton Embarrassment ", by John Nichols. (The Nation)   When the United States sought to be a true world leader, as opposed to a petulant global bully, this country's seat at the United Nations was occupied by great men and women. Consider just some of the amazing figures who have served as U.S. ambassadors to the international body: former Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., two-time presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, former Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton, former civil rights leader and Georgia Congressman Andrew Young, academics and public intellectuals Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jean Kirkpatrick, and Richard Holbrooke, former State Department aide and New Mexico Congressman Bill Richardson, former Missouri Senator John Danforth.   These ambassdors came from different parties and from different ideological backgrounds, they had different styles and different goals, but they had one thing in common: They served with the broad support of official Washington and the American people. When they spoke, they spoke for America. And they did so in a tradition of U.S. regard for the mission of the UN, which was perhaps best expressed by an American who served for three decades as a key player in the world council, Ralph Bunche. "The United Nations," said Bunche, "is our one great hope for a peaceful and free world."   To make that hope real, U.S. ambassadors had to be both strong and pragmatic advocates for the best interests of their own country and visionaries who recognized that all United Nations member states merited at least a measure of diplomatic regard. As Adlai Stevenson, who capped a brilliant career in American politics by representing his country at the UN during some of the hottest years of the Cold War, explained, "The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations--great or small--to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to, to be a part of the twentieth century."   Needless to say, John Bolton has never expressed any sentiment regarding international affairs or the United Nations so well or wisely as Stevenson. Bolton is a hack politician, a career retainer of the Bush family who is famous for nothing so much as his disrespect for the diplomacy and international cooperation in general, and for the United Nations in particular.   So creepy has been Bolton's partisanship -- he was a prime player in moves to shut down the recount of Florida votes following the disputed 2000 presidential election -- and so crude has been his behavior that thoughtful Republicans such as Ohio Senator George Voinovich determined that the nominee would not be an appropriate representative of the United States. But President Bush has forced Bolton on the U.S. and the UN, making a recess appointment that places his controversial nominee in the same position once occupied by Lodge, Stevenson and Moynihan.   Bolton will serve differently than his predecessors. For one thing, he is neither the intellectual nor the emotional equal of those who came before him. For another, he will be seen as a representative only of the Bush White House -- not of the United States or its people.   At a time when the United States should be a full and active participant in the United Nations, it will instead be marginalized force - an embarrassed land represented by one its most embarrassing sons.   U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been a leading advocate for bipartisan approaches to foreign policy, spoke well for America - and for this country's shattered tradition of respect for the UN - when he said on the day of the recess appointment: "Mr. Bolton is fundamentally unsuited for the job, and his record reveals a truly disturbing intolerance of dissent. Mr. Bolton did not win the support of a majority of members of the Foreign Relations Committee, and the Senate refused to make a final decision on this nomination pending review of documents that the Administration declined to provide in blatant disregard for the Senate's constitutional rights and responsibilities. But despite all of the warning signs and all of the red flags, the President has taken this extraordinary step to send a polarizing figure with tattered credibility to represent us at the United Nations. At a time when we need to be doing our very best to mend frayed relationships, encourage real burden-sharing, and nurture a rock-solid international coalition to fight terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the American people deserve better than John Bolton."   © 2005 The Nation   Aug 1, 2005   "Bush's Man at the U.N. Draws Cheers, Jeers", by William Fisher . (IPS)   U.S. Pres. George W. Bush poked a thumb in the eye of Senate Democrats today with his recess appointment of John Bolton as the United States' ambassador to the United Nations.   Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, called it a ”devious maneuver” that ”further darkens the cloud over Mr. Bolton's credibility.”   Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, a senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, ”The president has done a real disservice to our nation by appointing an individual who lacks the credibility to further U.S. interests at the United Nations.”   And Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said Bolton was a ”seriously flawed and weakened candidate.”   Democrats' reaction to the president's circumvention of the Senate confirmation process comes at a time when Bush needs all the support he can muster to confirm his nomination of John Roberts to serve on the Supreme Court.   Critics say Bolton, who has been accused of mistreating subordinates and has been openly sceptical about the United Nations, would be ill-suited to the sensitive diplomatic task at the world body.   John Gershman, director of the Global Affairs Programme at the International Relations Centre and co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus, told IPS, ”Pres. Bush's recess appointment of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations places a Bush administration loyalist opposed to the United Nations and international law in a position that demands a skilled diplomat. His appointment is a travesty for those that support international law and a stronger United Nations.”   A spokesperson for Human Rights First, an advocacy group, noted that, ”The recess appointment of John Bolton will add to the challenges faced by U.S. Foreign Service officers who work to promote human rights.”   ”These diplomats have faced formidable obstacles in part because of increased U.S. unilateralism and the rejection by the U.S. of international standards relating to humanitarian law and laws prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.”   Bush has the power to fill vacancies without Senate approval while Congress is in recess. Under the Constitution, the recess appointment will last until the next session of Congress, which begins in January 2007.   The appointment ended a stormy five-month impasse with Senate Democrats who had accused the conservative Bolton of twisting intelligence to suit a hawkish ideology and of abusing subordinates.   U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan welcomed Bolton's appointment and did not address the question of whether Bolton would be weakened by the recess appointment. He said the manner of Bolton's appointment was Bush's prerogative.   Bush had refused to withdraw the Bolton nomination even though the Senate had twice voted to sustain a filibuster against him.   State Department officials accused him of berating career officials and analysts who challenged his views, and of selectively choosing intelligence to support his assertions about the dangers posed by Cuba and other nations.   When a Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, Ohio Sen. George V. Voinovich, decided to oppose Bolton, the nomination moved to the full Senate with no recommendation -- a relatively rare action for the usually bipartisan Senate Foreign Relations Committee.   The nomination has been held up by Democrats' demands to see two sets of documents related to Bolton's State Department work. One involved national security intercepts of conversations.   On Aug. 29, 35 Democratic senators and one independent, Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont, sent a letter to Bush urging against a recess appointment.   ”Sending someone to the United Nations who has not been confirmed by the United States Senate and now who has admitted to not being truthful on a document so important that it requires a sworn affidavit is going to set our efforts back in many ways,” the letter said.   August 1, 2005 (CNN)   US Senator Christopher Dodd urged President Bush on Sunday to reconsider appointing John Bolton as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations without Senate confirmation.   Bush may make a presidential recess appointment this week to install the controversial Bolton -- an under secretary at the State Department -- two senior administration officials have said.   Such a move would thwart Senate Democrats who have blocked Bolton's nomination in a dispute over documents and amid accusations that Bolton doesn't have the temperament for the nation's top U.N. post.   Under the Constitution, a president has the power to make appointments without Senate confirmation when Congress goes into recess. Lawmakers began their current break on Friday.   Dodd, a senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said a recess appointment would send a negative message to the Senate and the United Nations. "I would hope the president would think a little longer about this from his perspective," Dodd said on "Fox News Sunday." "I just think Mr. Bolton's the bad choice here. ... He's damaged goods. This is a person who lacks credibility."   "This will be the first U.N. ambassador since 1948 that we've ever sent there under a recess appointment," said Dodd, the senior senator from Connecticut. "That's not what you want to send up, a person that doesn't have the confidence of the Congress, and so many people who have urged that he not be sent up to do that job."   A recess appointment would last until the end of the current term of Congress, which would put Bolton at the United Nations until January 2007.   Democrats say Bolton does not have the diplomatic skills for the post, arguing he has dismissed the value of the United Nations and often intimidated subordinates until they agreed with his viewpoint.
	Meeting the changing threats to global security: 2005 as a watershed year by Gareth Evans International Crisis Group Belgium   Published: 6 July 2005   (Gareth Evans is President of the International Crisis Group. This article is from ‘G8 Summit 2005: Mapping the Challenges’, Gleneagles Summit Publication, July 2005.)   There is every reason for this G8 Summit to focus, as it will, on the two key themes of  Africa and climate change: both are huge problem areas, desperately needing new  momentum for their resolution.  But just two months later, at the Millennium Review Summit in New York, the world will be wrestling with an even larger agenda of  interrelated security, development and human rights issues –  essentially the whole range of threats to state and human security that we face in the 21st century – and it is critical that the Gleneagles G8 not drop the  ball in the messages it sends out on this wider front as well.   Security issues, particularly counter-proliferation and counter-terrorism, have loomed large on G8 agendas since 2002. They demand attention again in their own right this year, not least because some of them seem further away than ever from solution. The long-feared nuclear weapons breakout seems closer now than it has been for decades, with Iran and North Korea showing the hollowness of existing constraints and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference collapsing in May: there was no sign whatever of agreement on any of the four big activities crying out for shutdown by mutual consent - nuclear testing, new and continuing weapons programs, reprocessing or uranium enrichment – if a new cascade of proliferation is to be avoided.   Deadly terrorist attacks continue with alarming frequency, and nobody can be confident that one or more of the world’s major cities will not be laid to waste by nuclear, biological or chemical weapons some time soon. Major regional conflicts and tensions, not just in Africa, remain unresolved: the risks and horrors of new and ongoing war, not only within but between states, are very real in many other parts of the world.  And all of this is occurring in a wider human security context in which -  above all in Africa but not only on that continent -  there are still over a billion people living in extreme poverty, with life expectancy closer to 40 than the rich world’s 80; and with 100 of every 1000 children dying before their fifth birthday, compared with less than 10 in high-income countries.   What has been missing in the global response to these threats – including the reactions of the G8 itself -   has been any real sense of how they are woven together, and how crucial it is that we urgently revitalise the institutions of global collective security, above all the United Nations, if we are not to face a rapid deterioration in the global security environment. There is a very real sense around the world, not fully acknowledged by all the G8 countries, that not only are poverty, malnutrition, disease and environmental degradation not being tackled as effectively as they can and should be, but that the whole multilateral security system on which the world order was sought to be rebuilt in 1945 is once again at the crossroads. Almost strangled at birth though it may have been by the Cold War decades, the idea of a rule-based collective security system imposing universal constraints in the common interest flowered again the first heady years of the 1990s, but has since then lapsed back  into considerable disarray, with ineffective responses to major challenges in the Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and Iraq, and an accompanying resurgence of unilateralism and exceptionalism by major powers reluctant to accept those constraints and disciplines.   In this environment, it is not an exaggeration to say that 2005 is emerging as a make or break year for global governance.  Three things have come together to make it so: the recognition of  a need for change, as just described; the emergence of an agenda for change more comprehensive and well argued than ever before – with the reports of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change  and the Sachs Millennium Project now welded together brilliantly by the Secretary General in his In Larger Freedom blueprint; and the occasion for change created by the UN’s 60th Anniversary and all the high-level summitry associated with it.   What is most obviously missing, as so often, is the fourth and most crucial ingredient of all, the political will to make it all happen – the spark, the catalyst, the leadership necessary to stare down the spoilers and make it all happen. The G8 summit offers the opportunity for the leaders of the developed world, if they can rise to the occasion, to provide just that spark. They need to show not only their willingness to respond, constructively intelligently and generously, to the central issues of the development agenda  - poverty, disease, malnutrition and environmental catastrophe -  but also those that are at the heart of the more traditional security agenda, aimed at strengthening the multilateral security system and above all the UN’s own institutions and processes.   The G8 Summit needs to embrace and articulate the core notion at the heart of the agenda-setting reports now being debated – that the threats to state and human security of the 21st century are interconnected; that there are inextricable links between development, security and human rights; and that collective security in the 21st century means above all else that all members of the global community have a shared responsibility for each other’s security.  It is not a matter of a North agenda being weighed and traded against a South agenda: in the interdependent, globalised world in which we now live, threats to one are a threat to all, and we must act together to meet them all.   In policy terms there are five touchstone security policy issues emerging as crucial,  as defined by the High Level Panel and refined in the Secretary-General’s own report. They are being greeted initially with varying degrees of enthusiasm by the G8 countries, but all are crucial in the mix, if the credibility and effectivness of collective security is to be restored.   The first is improving conflict prevention and resolution capability:  this means better peacemaking capacity (though better prepared and supported mediators and negotiators); far more readily available reserves, both military and civilian, for peacekeeping and other peace operation; and a far more systematic and coherent approach to post-conflict peacebuilding – the failure to follow through on which is the most depressingly familiar reason for the recurrence of avoidable conflict.   The second is disarmament and non-proliferation:  this means action on the supply side to constrain the availability of fissile material; on the demand side to reduce the motivations for acquiring weapons of mass destruction; improved international verification machinery; and more effective public health defences, in particular to cope with the ravages of biological weapons, the hardest of all to prevent being used.   The third is confronting terrorism:  the need here is to embrace a broad based policy response going beyond intelligence, policing and military cooperation to addressing root causes, including political grievances; and to find common cause at last on an international definition of terrorism making  attacks against civilians and non-combatants as indefensible as piracy and slavery.   The fourth is responding effectively to genocide, ethnic cleansing and similar massive human rights violations within states:  the prime need here is to give further momentum to the emerging international norm of the responsibility to protect in all its dimensions, both preventive and reactive  - the responsibility of the international community to step in when a sovereign state, through incapacity or ill-will, fails to protect its own people.   The fifth is redefining the rules governing the use of force,  both to clarify the scope and limits of what is legal under the UN Charter and, beyond that, to set some guidelines, especially for the Security Council, as to when the use of force is legitimate – the key criteria  being seriousness of threat, right intention, last resort, proportionality and balance of consequences.   The institutional reforms on the table in 2005, many of which are also up for endorsement in the Millennium Review Summit, are equally crucial if the multilateral system is not to lapse into irretrievable disrepair and irrelevance. Five reform areas are particularly crucial.   - Reconstruction of the Security Council.  If the Council does not come to better represent, in terms of its permanent or usual membership, the world of the 21st century rather than that of 1945, it will not fall apart immediately. But the powers of the present Permanent Five will be steadily diminishing assets. A Security Council without any guaranteed presence  of the major African powers, or India, or Japan or Brazil simply cannot remain credible in perpetuity.   - Creation of a Peacebuilding Commission.  Creation of a new institutional structure to deal effectively with the endemic problem of failed, failing and fragile states, particularly in the context of post-conflict reconstruction, is the most immediate need in the international system at the moment, and one that is widely recognised.   - ECOSOC and the General Assembly.  Both these crucial norm and direction-setting global debating chambers have become conspicuously  dysfunctional, and must be restored to pre-eminence: much of which is achievable simply through better agenda and process management.   - Secretariat Reform.   The central issues here are empowerment and accountability – the Secretary-General, presently probably the most impossibly micro-managed chief executive in the world, needs much more freedom of action to choose and deploy resources where and when they are needed, subject to full accountability. Those  who are committed to an effective multilateral system do it no service by leaving it inefficient and ineffective  - but change cannot happen without member states allowing and encouraging it.   - A new Human Rights Council.  Probably, the most  counterproductively dysfunctional of all the present institutions of global governance, a new body of higher stature, preferably smaller numbers, more credibly elected, and with less highly politicised procedures is critically needed to match with achievement some of the global lipservice now paid to human rights.   As we approach the critical decision-making period of this critical year, the need above all is to change our mindset as leaders, as policy makers and as those who influence them, to recognise that we stand together or we fall apart, and that it really is in everyone’s interest to move forward simultaneously on all elements – peace, development and human rights - of the state and human security reform agenda now before the international community.    That kind of change is what great leaders-  have shown themselves in the past capable of delivering  at great moments in history. If that leadership is not forthcoming – starting with this year’s G8 summit – we run a grave risk, all of us, north and south, of living in a vastly more dangerous world in the decades to come.
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