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Bolton Genocide Appeasement Watch. This is really stunning. Bolton would not even in hindsight have the UN intervene to stop the genocide of 800,000 people in Rwanda. From Fred Kaplan's Slate piece on the Bolton hearings:
So all of Bolton's tiresome UN bashing and bull dog yap yap yap is not designed to make the UN more effective at carrying out the primary mission it was created for in the wake of the Holocaust: to save human life and stop genocide. It's purposeless, empty, hot air, designed to make the American right wing feel good about themselves.The second reason-Bolton's non-position on whether genocide should prompt U.N. action-was taken up by only one senator today, but, in an age of great debate over "humanitarian interventions," it should be a major issue. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., asked Bolton what he thought about the United Nations' inaction during the Rwandan genocide. Bolton evaded, saying it wasn't a "U.N. failure" but a failure of the member nations. OK, Feingold came back, what would you have done had you been the ambassador back then-and had you known everything that we know now? Bolton replied, "We don't know if, logistically, it would have been possible to do anything differently at the time." Feingold seemed dumbfounded by the answer. He said only, "Your answer is amazingly passive," then went on to another issue. But the answer was much more than that; it was a shocking evasion. Feingold was asking a pointed hypothetical question-whether we should have done something, if we had known exactly what was going on. It was meant to get at whether Bolton sees the United Nations as an organization that should intervene in such crises. Bolton reduced it to a question of logistics and refused to answer. Someone should ask him again and insist on a full answer. (In general, while a few senators asked Bolton about his views on U.N. structural reform, they showed an appalling lack of curiosity about his views of the world and the United Nations' place in it.)
Look, it doesn't take courage to bash the UN. The Democratic critique of the UN has been articulated perfectly well by people like Samantha Power and Richard Holbrooke. And that is, that it is structurally flawed at intervening quickly to stop genocide and avert humanitarian catastrophe.
But what's the Bolton/right's critique of the UN? That it somehow restricts American moral authority in carrying out its foreign policy. That's phony. The UN has hardly tied down any US administration from carrying out the national security policy it has intended to pursue, whether NATO intervention during the Clinton administration to stop mass ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq.
That Bolton's UN bashing serves no purpose, that it isn't designed to 'tough love' that institution to be more effective at saving human life demonstrates how utterly cynical is this Bush administration appointment. And it shows that Bolton would appease genocide while sitting in New York, just like his Russian and Chinese and Sudanese counterparts, who he believes poking at is his whole reason for being there. He's just a loud-mouthed appeaser of evil, not a genuine proponent of reform. Whether he survives this nomination hearing or not, Bolton's testimony yesterday on Rwanda makes clear he is a human being worthy of our deepest contempt.