GEORGIE ANNE GEYER Bolton's selection cause for concern

WASHINGTON -- The appointment of John Bolton to be American ambassador to the United Nations struck Washingtonians a little as if Michael Jackson had been made director of Head Start, or Karl Rove were caught in flagrante delicto in Georgetown, wearing dark glasses and enjoying croissants and French champagne with John Kerry.
Nobody knew what to make of it.
Two weeks ago, there were sighs of relief when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not pick Bolton, who cuts a punishing father figure with his dark hair combed down to his eyebrows, his white Victorian-style mustache and the eternally dyspeptic expression on his face, as one of her deputies at the State Department. Instead, she chose two moderate professionals. On top of that, with her and the president's recent fence-mending trips to Europe, it seemed that radical-right thinkers such as Bolton were out.
Now everybody is wondering what President Bush was trying to do. And so they started digging out John Bolton's quotes over the years, which did little to assuage the fears of American supporters of the United Nations.
UAt one point he said famously, "If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."
UIn a National Public Radio interview in 2000, Bolton stated: "If I were redoing the Security Council today, I'd have one permanent member because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world. And that one member would be the United States."
UIn 1999, as senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, which has become a hotbed of the neocon "conspiracy," Bolton wrote a column advocating that the United States give Taiwan diplomatic recognition. "Diplomatic recognition of Taiwan would be just the kind of demonstration of U.S. leadership that the region needs and that many of its people hope for," he wrote. "The notion that China would actually respond with force is a fantasy."
Such an act has been repeatedly condemned by the Chinese, who say it would start a war in the Taiwan Strait. But that seems to have perturbed Bolton no more than his raucous challenges to North Korea and Iran, both of whom he has refused to negotiate with over the nuclear question (a posture that ironically makes his hated Security Council the only option).
UFinally, bothersome questions like paying U.N. dues (he wouldn't), or abiding by treaties that America has duly signed, or respecting international agreements freely entered into by earlier American administrations do not keep Bolton awake at night. "Treaties are 'law' only for U.S. domestic purposes," he wrote in 1997 in The Wall Street Journal. "In their international operations, treaties are simply 'political' obligations."
So why Bolton, after pros such as John Negroponte and John C. Danforth in the U.N. role, even under George W. Bush? Is he expected only to continue railing and ranting once he gets to the U.N.? Does this, indeed, mean the U.N. may be "over"?
Perhaps it's not so simple. Let's look at some of the potentially positive sides.
Secretary of State Rice personally phoned U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan last Monday to assure him that appointee Bolton would seriously work with him on U.N. reform. In fact, several years ago when I was doing a comprehensive paper on the U.N. in the Balkans, I read a lot of John Bolton's early papers on the United Nations. Far from the radical rhetoric he spouts today, they were thoughtful and precise and did not recommend a world without the U.N.
Professional
Moreover, diplomats I have talked to said that when they worked with him behind the scenes on the 1991 Gulf War, he was serious, effective and professional.
Bolton's problem today with the United Nations, to put it briefly, is that he fears threats to America's sovereignty (and others') from international organizations; they have no basic world legitimacy of their own, no constituents to answer to, and tremendously ambitious and often greedy, but uncontrolled, bureaucracies. The problem we will likely have with him is that he seems to have no moral or ethical compulsion to obey the laws and treaties that America formally entered into -- and of which the American people approve.
Universal Press Syndicate