Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2007, pages 31-32

United Nations Report

Departing the U.N.: Bolton the Contemptuous, Annan the Diplomat

By Ian Williams

IT WAS SOME consolation for Kofi Annan that his departure from the United Nations was followed closely by the exit of pro-tem U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, which has been euphemized as a resignation. In fact, the American electorate fired the U.S. ambassador in the mid-term elections, which doubled as a referendum on the administration’s foreign policy that Bolton epitomized.

While most of the reality-based public welcomed his exit, a significant constituency of the pro-Israel community, ranging from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to the American Jewish Committee (AJC), loudly lamented his going, praising Bolton for his devotion to Israel. One has to consider the implications of this. American Jews voted overwhelmingly against Bush and his team, including Bolton, because they could see that his policies were bad for America. Yet these organizations, purporting to represent American Jewry, supported John Bolton because, they said, he was good for Israel.

This really is most indiscreet. Casting my mind back, I never heard anyone declare that Daniel Patrick Moynihan should stay in office because he was good for Ireland, or that Kissinger was good for Germany—not least because, whatever one thinks of these worthies’ policies, they were always framed in terms of American interests.

What the organizations said about Bolton was true, of course. As the State Department official for arms control and disarmament, he was a frequent visitor to Israel, where he would cluck along with the Israeli Ministry about the threat of Iranian nukes—without ever being so rude as to mention his host’s 200-plus nuclear warheads. On the Security Council he consistently wielded the veto on Israel’s behalf.

However, far from being grounds for his retention, one would have thought that most American taxpayers shelling out for his office and salary would regard working hard for another country as grounds for dismissal, not praise!

And while Bolton has tried to represent the most regressive elements of Israeli politics, it is difficult to see how he has represented the interests of Jews, most of whom, in the wake of the Holocaust and Nuremburg, would profess support for international justice.

Bolton’s proudest achievement in his previous job at the State Department was to “unsign” the treaty that committed the U.S. to the International Criminal Court, and then to bully and browbeat small countries across the world into signing agreements not to send U.S. citizens to the Court. And then, this year, he was forced to allow through a Security Council resolution setting the Court’s prosecutors on the perpetrators in Darfur.

As pro-Israel lobbyists attempted to rally support for Bolton’s nomination and confirmation, one of the issues for which he has been taking the credit is the 1995 overturning of U.N.’s “Zionism is Racism” resolution. It is true that he was working under James Baker at the time, but Bolton was the office boy carrying out instructions of the secretary of state and President George H.W. Bush. Moreover, it is worth remembering the circumstances.

Bush and Baker tried to pay their debts to the Arab leaders for their political and military support in the first Gulf war by pressing a reluctant Likud leadership into peace talks. One of the more memorable images was of Baker holding up the State Department phone number at a congressional hearing and inviting anyone in Israel who wanted peace to call the number.

As part of the same process, Bush and Baker refused to allow Congress to pay up $10 billion in loan guarantees that the Israeli leadership was using to build illegal settlements. With strong support, the two faced down AIPAC and defeated the lobby, which has never forgiven either of them.

In order to win back some ground with American Jews, Bush and Baker moved in the United Nations to overturn the “Zionism is Racism” resolution. Significantly absent from the General Assembly for this significant event was the Israeli ambassador, who pleaded the ceremonial pressures of Succoth.

Unrelenting, the lobby refused to give them any credit for this deed. Instead, even today, Bolton has been getting the credit, not those who gave him the orders. It is interesting that the converse has not happened. Bolton does not share the Bush-Baker obloquy for their firm stand against the Lobby.

Bolton has spent decades vilifyng the United Nations, and, like preacher Ted Haggard with sin, is so obsessed with it that he can’t keep away from it. It will be interesting to see where he goes now. He does seem well equipped to launch a career in politics in one of the more xenophobic redoubts of the Confederacy, where he began his political activity backing Barry Goldwater all those decades ago.

But he does have this track record of obsession with the United Nations. The nightmare scenario would be that a grateful George W. Bush, remembering that it was Bolton who stormed into the Tallahassee, FL library in 2000, announcing, “I’m with the Bush-Cheney team, and I’m here to stop the count,” would coerce incoming Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon into giving Bolton a senior position in the organization.

With friends like these.

OK, having John Bolton as the U.S. ambassador was a good excuse for a lot of silly behavior by alienated Third World delegations. But it is not a good enough excuse to collude in covering up human rights violations. Since the controversial Human Rights Council was established, it has behaved as if it were deliberately trying to vindicate John Bolton and the pro-Israel, anti-U.N. lobby.

Of course I am not complaining that the Council sees fit to criticize Israel for its human rights violations—often. After all, Israel frequently violates the human rights of its Palestinian and Lebanese neighbors. But to cover up for tyrannies like Uzbekistan or Belarus, as the non-aligned majority has done this year, blocking resolutions on their practices, is to give the Palestinian cause a bad name.

In particular, of course, is the case of Darfur, where all the objective evidence shows that the Sudanese government is backing a murderous militia in mass killings, rapes and ethnic cleansing of local people. Having outvoted a resolution that named the government,  the Non-Aligned and Muslim countries on the Human Rights Council supported an African Union  resolution that passed  condemning the killings—without mentioning the government that was organizing the murders.

This is a travesty that plays into the hands of Israel’s supporters. Most of those campaigning for Darfur are sincere humanitarians, but there many among them who see it as a wonderful opportunity for anti-Arab propaganda. And who can blame them—it is a wonderful opportunity, handed to them on a plate by the Arab and African governments who will not speak up against Khartoum.

In a valedictory speech to Human Rights Watch, Kofi Annan pointed out this and more. In a recent interview with this reporter, he commented that “The question of double standards is a question you never get away from when you touch the Middle East, whether you are discussing the Middle East in the region or outside the region. We’ve often been accused that U.N. resolutions are implemented selectively, and I try to explain that we can only implement these resolutions with the cooperation of the member states. In situations where the member states concerned do not cooperate it’s extremely difficult for the U.N. to impose any resolutions.”

As we have pointed out here before, Annan has tried to cultivate American Jewish organizations and American politicians, and he has tried very hard to normalize Israel’s position in the organization. Yet he still firmly states the international legal and humanitarian positions on Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians. Even on this occasion he pointed out that he was not saying that Israel should get a free pass.

It is a measure of his skill that he is accused of bias by both sides, but his calls to moderate the anti-Israel campaign in the Human Rights Council certainly led to accusation of bias from Palestinian supporters.

Diplomatically, the Palestinians have lost ground, not least because of the large, and very important, European Union bloc. It has come under heavy pressure from Washington, and has a Trojan horse in its midst, in the form of Tony Blair’s Britain. But externally, the non-aligned’s stance on overall human rights issues certainly has made it easier for Blair and Bush to get the EU to abstain on issues.

That is a much larger threat than the handful of coral atolls which are the only active supporters of Israel that the U.S. can muster. And the way to deal with it is to do the right thing by supporting human rights wherever they are violated, regardless of which government is doing the violating.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.

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