WHITE HOUSE Ambassador nominee long critical of U.N.

Bush's pick for U.N. ambassador is not known for diplomatic language.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- John R. Bolton, President Bush's choice to be U.N. ambassador, once said it wouldn't matter if 10 stories of the world body's headquarters simply vanished. He has also said the United States is the world's only real authority.
He once lambasted the chief U.N. human rights monitor as a rogue bureaucrat whose conduct "is a threat that we ignore at our own risk."
Democrats are gathering an arsenal of such material, and predict a contentious confirmation debate in the Senate.
If confirmed, Bolton would enter the belly of the beast he has criticized as outsized and ineffectual.
"There is no such thing as the United Nations," he said in a 1994 speech. "There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that is the United States."
Somewhat out of step
Bolton's nomination is somewhat out of step with Bush's second-term emphasis on partnership and cooperation with European allies and with a recent detente in the administration's squabbles with the U.N. bureaucracy.
He would succeed John Danforth, a former senator and an ordained minister.
Currently the State Department's arms control chief, Bolton is a hard-liner in discussions about nuclear ambitions in Iran and North Korea. He was similarly hawkish about Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, and he is an enthusiastic proponent of a North American defensive missile shield.
Bolton keeps a model of a hand grenade in his State Department office, befitting his reputation for lobbing verbal bombshells.
"Admittedly, not all American governmental institutions are democratic," Bolton wrote in a 1999 opinion piece in the journal Legal Times. "But even if key government bodies are far removed from popular accountability and unelected bureaucrats have been delegated vast power, they nonetheless are part of a coherent constitutional structure. By contrast, we find no coherence in the United Nations, just a mass of institutions that has grown over the years like a coral reef. "
A Yale-trained lawyer, Bolton is known as brilliant, prolific, obstinate and mouthy.
He served in the previous Bush administration, made the rounds of op-ed pages and conferences as a conservative think tank scholar during the Clinton administration and helped out on the Bush-Cheney legal team during the Florida recount in 2000.
Two years ago, Bolton denounced North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as a "tyrannical dictator" when the official State Department line was much more accommodating.