The Boston Globe's Farah Stockman recalls when John Bolton collapsed the Biological Weapons Treaty to the surprise of US allies:

In December 2001, at a conference on biological weapons, John R. Bolton stunned his fellow diplomats by insisting, without warning, that the nations of the world abandon their years-long effort to enforce the global treaty on germ warfare, according to conference participants...

The Geneva meeting, which was supposed to close with a statement of cooperation, ended abruptly in chaos and anger shortly after the American position was announced. Allies from the European Union were so furious that a planned meeting with US delegates did not take place.

This is no doubt what Bolton's supporters hope he will engineer as a repeat performance if he gets to the UN on issue after issue. As a reader knowledgeable about US nonproliferation efforts writes, "Many of us agreed with Bolton that the draft protocol was problematic and was not acceptable in its current form. But instead of further negotiations to seek a compromise, Bolton chose to simply call for the termination of the international mandate to negotiate a protocol, enraging everyone in December."

According to the Globe piece, Bolton's opposition to the BWC treaty was in part because he didn't want the US to have to submit to the kind of verification measures that would have strengthened it. But interestingly enough, just a few months after Bolton's December 2001 pyrotechnics killing the bioweapons treaty at the UN, US investigators came to believe that the anthrax attacks that had killed five Americans in October 2001 were the work of a US bioterrorist, one most likely connected to the US government bioweapons program. America's bioweapons secrets that Bolton wants to protect haven't done us any favors.

Update: What's more, the reader adds, Bolton later seemed to regret the loss of some of the BW verification protocols he killed:

Another interesting irony: Bolton in 2001 argued that international inspections would not work vis-a-vis biological weapons programs, because they are too easily concealed and can be disguised as dual-use technology. Accordingly, he argued that any verification protocol would simply give the world "false hope" that it had constrained the problem.

Yet, in May 2002, during the now infamous row over the hardline Cuba speech he wanted to deliver at the Heritage Foundation, Bolton included in his original draft a proposal to place international inspectors in Cuba to ensure that it was not operating a BW program. Christian Westermann, the IC analyst whom Bolton wanted to get rid of, had to remind Bolton that official U.S. policy, e.g. the policy Bolton himself established, did not place much value in international inspections to monitor BW proliferation and hence this proposal should be removed from the speech.

Talk about pathological...

Posted by Laura at May 3, 2005 09:50 AM