Kathreb

I don't mean to harp...but I will

This is the last time (I promise) that I will comment on John Bolton's nomination to the UN. But the article has some points which I agree with. A snippet:

"The president and I have asked John to do this work because he knows how to get things done," said Rice. A hard-line unilateralist and an aggressive opponent of multilateralism and international treaties, Bolton has served as the Bush administration's designated treaty breaker. From the early days of the first Bush administration, Bolton mounted a campaign to halt all international constraints on U.S. power and prerogative, fiercely opposing existing and proposed international treaties restricting landmines, child soldiers, biological weapons, nuclear weapons testing, small arms trade, and missile defense.

During the first administration, Bolton earned his reputation as a hawk who dismantled the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, renounced President Clinton's approval of the International Criminal Court, and blocked the efforts to add a verification clause to the bioweapons convention. Displaying what the Wall Street Journal described as his "combative style," Bolton told an international conference on bioweapons that the verification proposal was "dead, dead, dead, and I don't want in coming back from the dead."

And a bit more:

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 1997, Bolton articulated his dismissive view of international treaties. "Treaties are law only for U.S. domestic purposes," he wrote, "In their international operation, treaties are simply political obligations." In other words, international treaties signed by the United States should not be considered as a body of law that the United States should respect in its international engagement but rather just political considerations that can be ignored at will.

The rest of the article is worth a read as well.

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