John Lewis Gaddis, professor of history at Yale, writes in the
latest edition of the influential Foreign Affairs Journal,
“Second terms in the White House open the way for second
thoughts. They provide the least awkward moment at which to replace
or reshuffle key advisers.”
He is right, of course. The aftermath of a second election
victory for President Bush and his administration provides the
opportune time for them to sit down with a cup of fair-trade coffee
and talk about building bridges with America’s erstwhile
allies and the careful selection of the people to do it.
But this week, any hopes that Bush might try to pursue a more
conciliatory and dovish agenda were dashed by a quite startling
decision. On Tuesday, a man by the name of John Bolton was
appointed the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. This is the
same man who in 1994 reportedly told a panel discussion of the
World Federalist Association: “There is no such thing as the
United Nations. If the U.N. building in New York lost 10 stories,
it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”
Bolton is on the radical fringe of the already radical
neo-conservative movement ““ the people called
“crazies” in the Reagan era. He embodies the
unilateralist part of the Bush administration ““ the U.N. is
only legitimate if it does what the United States wants.
This is why he is such a hero of an administration that makes
the United States an anomaly in the international community by
refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol (the first legally binding
agreement on cutting the amount of greenhouse gases and signed by
141 countries), and the International Criminal Court (139 countries
having signed this historic institution of international
justice).
In his previous position as Under-Secretary of State for Arms
Control and International Security ““ you will appreciate the
irony of that title soon enough ““ he opposed all
international treaties on principal. In a 1997 op-ed piece in the
Wall Street Journal, America’s new face to the world wrote,
“Treaties are law only for U.S. domestic purposes. In their
international operation, treaties are simply political
obligations.”
But the strange paradox of appointing an isolationist super-hawk
to a multilateral international peace-seeking institution is not
some embarrassing fluke. A month ago, Bush appointed John
Negroponte, a man widely condemned for overseeing terrorist
operations in Honduras during the 1980s ““ in my opinion, a
veritable war criminal ““ as the first Director of National
Intelligence.
From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte ran the U.S. Embassy in Honduras
and his record speaks for itself. U.S. soldiers were bought in to
train the Honduran military and a clandestine unit formed. It was
the notorious death squad that went by the name of Battalion 3-16
which, according to the BBC, was responsible for the disappearance
of around 200 people. All done under Negroponte’s watch. He,
in fact, made sure the Honduran government, who was pursuing these
Nazi-like tactics, had their military aid from the United States
rise from $4 million to $77.4 million a year.
And even if Bush doesn’t appreciate the irony of
appointing this man as his main intelligence adviser, Larry Birns,
of the Council of Hemispheric Affairs, does. He says, “Here
you are going to have a situation of a man who chronically covered
for human rights violations taking place in Honduras … going to
New York and speaking at the U.N. condemning Cuba, North Korea …
for their human rights violations.”
But there’s even more. Thirteen days before the
appointment of Negroponte, Alberto R. Gonzales was appointed
Attorney General ““ the top law enforcer office and lawyer for
the government. This is the man who advised Bush, in a leaked memo,
that the Geneva Convention ““ the most central canon of
international law ““ was “rendered obsolete” by
the type of war the United States was fighting. According to
Francis A. Boyle, professor of law at the University of Illinois,
Negroponte constitutes “a prima facie war
criminal.”
Bush has shown in the last month that he is determined to force
us to live through an Orwellian nightmare where the U.S. envoy to
the U.N. thinks that same institution is irrelevant; where the
intelligence chief has been complicit with human rights abuses and
murder, and, where the Attorney General has advised against
adhering to the Geneva Convention ““ one of the foundations of
international law.
There have been none of Gaddis’s “second
thoughts” and no change from the reckless and lawless
violence that characterized the first Bush term. Rather, it is time
to buckle our seatbelts and, as the drumbeat begins to sound for an
attack on Iran, it can only be hoped that we, or the rest of the
world, can somehow restrain the governments of the United States
and United Kingdom.
Kennard is a third-year history student. E-mail him at
mkennard@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.