Bolton Pulled by White House from Libya Team. Bolton had to be taken out of the Libya negotiating chain of command at Tony Blair's insistence, Newsweek reports, for it to succeed. Bolton's supporters cite two meagre successes of his on the job he was supposed to be performing when he wasn't running his own ideologically-driven counterintelligence ops against US negotiators and intelligence underlings at State and CIA. That job was supposed to be nonproliferation, and the two successes cited are Libya's decision to abandon its WMD program and Bolton's pet Proliferation Security Initiative. Well, scratch Libya:

On several occasions, America's closest ally in the war on terror, Britain, was irked by what U.S. and British sources say were efforts by Bolton to undermine promising diplomatic openings. Perhaps the most dramatic instance took place early in the U.S.-British talks in 2003 to force Libya to surrender its nuclear program, NEWSWEEK has learned. The Libya deal succeeded only after British officials "at the highest level" persuaded the White House to keep Bolton off the negotiating team. A crucial issue, according to sources involved in the affair, was Muammar Kaddafi's demand that if Libya abandoned its WMD program, the U.S. in turn would drop its goal of regime change. But Bolton was unwilling to support this compromise. The White House agreed to keep Bolton "out of the loop," as one source puts it. A deal was struck only after Kaddafi was reassured that Bush would settle for "policy change"—surrendering his WMD.

Read the Newsweek piece which is testimony to the fact that the US's most significant ally, Britain, refuses to work with Bolton because of the destructive role he has played in sensitive negotiations to persuade countries like Libya and Iran to abandon their nuclear programs. We already have the principal US negotiators on North Korea coming forward to say Bolton was a dangerous disaster on North Korea -- and the proof is in the pudding. These are substantive policy failures, where the combination of Bolton's inability to work with others who don't share his ideological worldview, and gross misuse of intelligence made him a danger and a hindrance for US policy goals.

Posted by Laura at April 24, 2005 09:17 AM