Surrender Is Not an Option by Bolton John

Author:Bolton, John [Bolton, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2007-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

“We Never Fail in New York”

I am confident John Bolton will bring peace to the world before he brings peace in his relations with the New York Times.

—HENRY KISSINGER, SEPTEMBER 27, 2005

After an enjoyable but cold New Year’s Eve at the center of events in Times Square with Gretchen and JS, thanks to an invitation by Mayor Mike Bloomberg to join him on the stage for the ball-dropping ceremonies, and an even chillier attendance at Bloomberg’s second inauguration the next day at City Hall, it was back to work.

On UN reform, that meant primarily abolishing the discredited and disgraceful UN Human Rights Commission (HRC), which the Outcome Document pledged to replace with a new “Human Rights Council.” So bad was the existing HRC that in January 2003, Libya had been elected chairman by a vote of 33–3–17, with only the United States, Canada, and one other country voting “no” in the secret ballot. Most of the HRC’s work focused on criticizing Israel or the United States, while real human rights abusers devoted their efforts to ensuring that the commission never took up their abuses. Unfortunately, however, before my arrival in New York, the U.S. position had become incoherent because of concessions Washington had already made. In fact, Annan and the EU were so hungry for a deal—so they could then declare another success—that I could only see a further worsening of our position. French deputy perm rep Duclos said during the Outcome Document negotiations, for example, that failure to agree on a new HRC “would be supporting the hardest-line part of the Bush administration,” which would take failure as evidence that the UN as a whole was irreparably flawed. I demanded an apology, which Duclos later made, but it was a very revealing incident. State’s human rights bureau was also among the most desperate to announce “success,” and therefore most ready to give away the store (such as by agreeing to change the geographical distribution of HRC seats, to the disadvantage of “Western” countries, the staunchest human rights defenders). Even worse, groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were also in full retreat, agreeing to these busy EU efforts to water down our proposed improvements, all the while blaming the United States for standing in the way of “reform.” Of course, as Jeane Kirkpatrick might have said, these groups “always blame America first.”

Certainly, I was “standing in the way” of capitulation to the opponents of true reform. As I said to the press, “We want a butterfly. We’re not going to put lipstick on a caterpillar and declare it a success.” We hoped our proposals—such as reducing the HRC’s size; excluding the worst offenders (those under Security Council sanctions, as Iran and North Korea would soon be) from membership; and breaking the regional group lock on selecting members from their regions—taken together, would contribute to changing the HRC’s composition. Each time one of these proposals (agreed on with the EU) was weakened or dropped it became more and more likely that a new HRC would look and act substantially like the old one.

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