Bolten too good for UN

Claudia Rosett:

John Bolton's resignation this week as ambassador to the United Nations was hardly the result of his being - as some have charged - ineffective, or a bully, or abrasive. The real problem is the shrunken character of the U.N.

Bolton was a Gulliver dispatched to Lilliput, a truth-teller in a den of diplomats. As a principled man in a dishonest institution, he was a threat to a whole raft of special interests that feed off the U.N. system.

If anything, Bolton was polite in a setting where bullying and abrading hardly count as sins. This is the U.N. where Secretary-General Kofi Annan, when queried last year about the Mercedes on which his son saved a bundle by making false use of U.N. perquisites, chose to bully the reporter - and avoid answering a good question. This is the U.N. whose deputy secretary-general, Mark Malloch Brown, set out this past spring, in violation of the U.N. charter, to meddle in U.S. politics - insulting a number of right-wing media outlets and sneering at their audience in the "heartland." This is the U.N. whose "excellencies" this past September applauded the histrionics of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - behavior that in civilized quarters might well be deemed abrasive.

This is the U.N. that in recent years has incubated such scandals as oil-for-food, procurement bribery, and peacekeeper rape. This is the U.N. whose "reforms," in answer to these scandals, have consisted largely of demands for more money, and a revamped so-called Human Rights Council that has devoted itself entirely to condemning Israel. This is the U.N. system that still does not provide coherent accounts of how it spends about $20 billion per year, about one-quarter of that supplied by U.S. taxpayers.

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Within the U.N., Bolton was astoundingly effective. On his watch, the Security Council finally got around to asking Iran to stop its nuclear-bomb program, agreed on limited sanctions on North Korea, began at least trying to address the genocide in Sudan, and passed a resolution giving Annan his much-desired cease-fire this summer in Lebanon. Bolton dared to table such issues as the in-house corruption and peacekeeper rape. He even did the U.N. the large favor of helping to keep Venezuela's sulfur-sniffing Chavez off the Security Council.

Unfortunately, reform within the U.N. is blocked by a system in which too many have grown comfortable with the customary immunities, secrecy and corruption....

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There is much more on the failings of this dysfunctional organization. While the story is mostly about the problems with the US, the inability to get Bolten confirmed had little to do with his performance and a lot to do with Christopher Dodd's obsession with lifting sanctions on the Cuban despots. His brief for tyranny in Cuba got in the way of a rational examination of a very effective diplomat who opposed Dodd's appeasement of Castro. By embracing the evils of the Cuban regime Dodd also embraced the failures of the UN that needed Bolten's firm hand to direct it back to sanity. If you think this is an unfair attack on Dodd, consider how unfair his thwarting of democracy in refusing to permit the Senate to approve this fine man was.