WSJ Is Furious That Senate Panel Wouldn’t Rubberstamp Bush’s U.N. Pick

By M.P. Prabhakaran

            The Wall Street Journal, President Bush and John Bolton have one thing in common: They all hold the United Nations in utter contempt. The President has proclaimed to the world that contempt one more time by nominating John Bolton to be the next U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

            While the general public and impartial media in America were aghast that the President should nominate a well-known U.N. baiter for the job, The Wall Street Journal was ecstatic about it. The paper was hoping to see the man, who once said that if the U.N. building lost ten stories it wouldn’t make a bit of difference, work from within toward accomplishing something close to his wish – which will be making that institution irrelevant. It became so furious when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee decided to delay until next month a vote on the Bolton nomination. “The Bolton Mugging” was how it characterized the committee’s decision (editorial, April 21, 2005).

            The Republican chairman of the committee, Richard G. Lugar, reluctantly agreed to the delay, not in deference to the wishes of the committee’s eight Democratic members. He did so when a last-minute defection by Senator George Voinovich of Ohio, one of the 10 Republican members of the committee, put the prospect of the nomination being sent to the full Senate for its final vote in jeopardy. Mr. Lugar realized that, even if all the remaining nine Republican members voted in favor of the nominee, the result would be a tie. This is not to say that an affirmative vote from all the nine was guaranteed. Three of them – Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – had already expressed their reservations on the nomination. “I think the charges [against Bolton] are serious enough that they demand, or cry out, for further examination,” Mr. Hagel had said at the committee meeting.

            Since then, the committee has been doing precisely that. It has been examining thoroughly all the allegations that have been leveled against the nominee. Since the committee’s decision on April 19, 2005 to put off a vote until May 12, more and more people have come forward with more damaging charges against Mr. Bolton. Four of those who have so far expressed reservations about his fitness for the job were senior aides to Colin Powell, Secretary of State in the Bush administration’s first term. The four – Carl W. Ford Jr., John R. Wolf, Lawrence Wilkerson and A. Elizabeth Jones – have worked with Bolton and known him well. Mr. Bolton has been an undersecretary of state for arms control and international security since May 11, 2001. Mr. Powell himself has let it be known how concerned he is about his former deputy being considered for a job that requires superb diplomatic skill to be effective.

            The diligent way the members of the Senate panel have been handling the issue shows that they are taking their constitutional obligation very seriously. Article II, section 2 of the U.S. Constitution says: “The President … shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors ….” Admittedly, the Constitution does not expect senators to be mere rubberstamps on the President’s ambassadorial appointments. It does prescribe for them a clear role – the role of advice and consent. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t see it that way. According to its April 21 editorial, “what’s going on here isn’t ‘advise’ [sic] and consent’ but character assassination.” (Note to the editorial writer: the word, when used as a noun, is ‘advice,’ not ‘advise.’)

            What annoyed The Journal so much is that the particular allegation that prompted Voinovich to change his mind on the nomination, which in turn resulted in the delay of vote, came from an “avowed liberal and anti-Bush partisan.” Under the paper’s scheme of things, no allegation is worthy of being examined if it is made by a liberal. But then, not all those who oppose the Bolton nomination are liberal – a term the paper loosely uses all the time to describe those who don’t subscribe to its paleolithic views. Carl W. Ford Jr., a former assistant secretary for intelligence and research, who told the Senate panel that Mr. Bolton was a “serial abuser” of people under him and “a kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy,” is not an “avowed liberal.” He has it on record that he is a conservative Republican and enthusiastic supporter of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the policies of Mr. Bolton. He doesn’t buy, however, The Journal’s Republicans-can-do-no-wrong line of argument. His loyalty to the country comes before his loyalty to the party. That loyalty dictated that he bring to the attention of the committee what he knew about Bolton. What was at stake was the credibility of the country in the rest of the world.

Distortion of Intelligence

            Mr. Ford had first-hand knowledge about what Mr. Bolton did to Christian P. Westermann, a biological weapons analyst at the State Department. In February 2002, Bolton prepared a speech which was to be delivered at the Heritage Foundation in May. When the draft of the speech arrived at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research for clearance, Mr. Westermann found Bolton’s assertion in it – that “the United States believes that Cuba has a developmental, offensive biological warfare program and is providing assistance to other rogue state programs” – way beyond the prevailing view of the intelligence community. The prevailing view, as stated in the 1999 National Intelligence Estimate, was that Cuba had a “limited, developmental, offensive biological warfare research and development effort.”

            Before forwarding the draft for the CIA’s clearance, Mr. Westermann attached to it his comment, reflecting what was in the NIE. When Bolton came to know about it, he flew into a rage. He summoned Westermann to his office. He wanted to know “what right I had trying to change an undersecretary’s language…. And he got very red in the face and shaking his finger at me and explained that I was acting way beyond my position…. And he basically threw me out of his office and told me to get Tom Fingar (Westermann’s boss) up there,” Westermann told the Senate panel.

            According to Mr. Fingar’s testimony, Bolton said to him that “he wasn’t going to be told what he could say by a midlevel … munchkin analyst.” Bolton wanted Westermann to be fired. Fingar didn’t oblige. Thanks to him and his boss Carl Ford Jr., Westermann still has his job. Mr. Ford, during his testimony, likened Bolton’s behavior to “an 800-pound gorilla devouring a banana.” In his 35 years in government, he had never seen such abusive behavior toward a subordinate, he told the senators.

            The episode involving Westermann is revelatory of Mr. Bolton’s propensity to exaggerate intelligence data (he did it about Syria’s weapons program also) with a view to influencing the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Does that sound familiar? It also adds credibility to another charge the Senate panel has been looking into – that Mr. Bolton is in the habit of harassing those who disagree with him. We will know more about his offensive pattern of behavior by the time the panel completes its investigation.

            And who is the “avowed liberal” The Wall Street Journal is referring to in its editorial? She is Melody Townsel, a Dallas public relations consultant, who had sent an “open letter” to the Senate committee, accusing Mr. Bolton of uncouth behavior toward her. It happened a decade ago in Moscow, where both she and Bolton were working, she as a consultant for the Agency for International Development and he as a private lawyer working for a contractor in a foreign aid program of the agency. When Bolton came to know that Ms. Townsel had complained that his client was inefficient, he got incensed. How did he retaliate? “Mr. Bolton proceeded to chase me through the hall of a Russian hotel, throwing things at me, shoving threatening letters under my door, and genuinely behaving like a madman,” Townsel’s letter to the Senate panel said.

            Is it the kind of behavior one would associate with a prospective diplomat who will be representing the country in the community of nations? The Journal dismisses it as no big deal. “But even it were true, if raising your voice and pounding on doors is disqualifying for public service half of the Senate will have to resign,” says its April 21 editorial. What a profound piece of thought! The editorial goes on to say that the testimony of those critical of Bolton is “the testimony of bureaucrats who disagree with Bush Administration policy and want to show that any official who disagrees with the bureaucracy will have his own career ruined in Senate confirmation.” This line of argument is silly. The main accusation against Bolton is that he persistently tried to ruin the careers of those who disagreed with him.

            No matter what the accusation, President Bush still stands by his man. In his April 28 press conference, the first since his second term began in January 2005, he extolled the main virtue of his nominee: “John Bolton is a blunt guy.”

            It’s a pearl of wisdom only President Bush is capable of uttering: that bluntness is an essential qualification for a diplomat.