The Anti-Schindler

John Bolton has asserted he would stand by as a million people are slaughtered. But his supporters dig it as long as he keeps up his harangue against the UN. How's that for priorities?

Well, David Brooks gets Bolton half right:

I don't like John Bolton's management style. Nor am I a big fan of his foreign policy views. He doesn't really believe in using U.S. power to end genocide or promote democracy.

As far as I am concerned, those are the chief qualities that disqualify Bolton from a position that other US ambassadors to the UN have used to mobilize coalitions and armies to stop genocide and massive humanitarian suffering, even when that action ultimately bypassed the Security Council. Bolton is indifferent to human suffering and is apparently quite consistently content to let the millions perish. He doesn't believe in either US or UN intervention to stop humanitarian suffering. Read his comments on not being inclined to act to stop genocide in Rwanda or Kosovo. It's genuinely shocking stuff. Bolton is the anti-mensch, the anti-Schindler. Not exactly the kind of guy with a vision, and not a humanitarian impulse in his body.

But then Brooks starts poking at a strawman that no Democrat I know believes. "Other people saw [the UN] as the beginnings of world government...We'll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. "

Oh, please. Why does the right imbue the UN with powers or a moral authority that it does not have? Of course it is undemocratic, and it has no real teeth, and certainly no teeth the US has to be so exercised about. Brooks is really poking at a strawman here.

Look, as I just wrote a friend, the left and right can agree that the UN is no good at controversial political questions. It can't even come up with a definition of terrorism. The one thing even neocons like Joshua Muravchik who is writing a book on the issue acknowledge is that the UN is good at humanitarian missions such as post-conflict peace building, refugee relief, etc. etc. Missions that are not terribly politically controversial. It is essentially useful to the US as a forum for mobilizing international coalitions to do missions we would otherwise have to neglect or do alone. And its agencies -- particularly the UN Development Program and the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) -- have built up real, unparalleled institutional knowledge and expertise at saving lives and rebuilding countries. The utterly unglamorous nitty gritty grind that transforms wartime hell holes into places with sustainable life. This is just the kind of stuff the right has argued is not the best use of the US Army in a time of conflict!

So why send someone to the UN who doesn't have a humanitarian impulse in his body? Who proudly rejects US or UN intervention to stop genocide? Who doesn't concern himself with ending humanitarian suffering? Who has no inclination to make the famously messy UN more effective? Who's whole reason for being there is to take it down a peg?

Just to send someone who rejects UN moral authority is pointless. U.S. administrations Democratic and Republican have consistently acted to reject the UN's non-authority over national foreign policy decisionmaking when it saw fit, along with most of Europe, as during the Kosovo crisis; as it has enlisted it to grant a patina of international legitimacy to an intervention, as during Gulf War I. At no cost to our sovereignty.

That's my point. Bolton may have a place somewhere as a rejectionist to global cooperation; but that place is not as Washington's chief representative to the UN, at a time when even the Bush administration has discovered it wants to use the UN for missions where it otherwise would have to act alone or not at all (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Haiti, etc.)

Update I: Look, the cause of stopping a genocide or massive humanitarian suffering goes beyond partisan politics. It is something that Americans on the right and left overwhelmingly agree on. It is also something that the US can't do alone. The US ambassador to the UN plays perhaps the most crucial role at the UN in exercising leadership to mobilize support both in Washington, New York, and foreign capitols in overcoming the tremendous obstacles logistical and political to save human life. Darfur presents that kind of challenge today, and Chinese opposition on the Security Council to a more robust intervention is not something Clinton didn't face regarding the Kosovo intervention six years ago. John Bolton has no interest in playing that role of exercising leadership at the UN to save lives. He wants to use it to bash the UN. For people who care about this mission, it should automatically disqualify him. Either it's more important to stop genocide, or it's more important to kick the UN, not both.

Posted by Laura at April 14, 2005 10:14 AM