Memo to Sen. George Voinovich

Decision Brief     No. 05-D 22                                       2005-05-12

(Washington, D.C.): It is widely expected that, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee meets today to finish its consideration of John Bolton’s nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, yours will be the deciding vote. The Center for Security Policy would respectfully suggest that the following should cause you to come down squarely in favor of Mr. Bolton:

First, the postponement you initiated last month has permitted the Committee’s staff to interview dozens of witnesses about Secretary Bolton’s interactions with various superiors, subordinates, intelligence personnel and others over the past few decades. It seems clear from the testimony thus accumulated that Mr. Bolton has enemies. Most of them, however, appear to have had substantive disagreements with him on matters of policy. And it was those disagreements – not his allegedly intemperate or “serially abusive” behavior – that has given rise to opposition to the Bolton nomination.

What is important about that observation is that the policies such individuals found so objectionable were not simply Mr. Bolton’s. They happened also to be those of the President of the United States. It was George W. Bush who told Bob Woodward he “loathed” North Korea’s monstrous dictator, Kim Jong-Il. It was Mr. Bush who ran for office in 2000 on a very hard line against Fidel Castro. It was the President who has made no secret of his antipathy towards a Syrian regime that gave aid and comfort to Saddam Hussein, his family and cadre, that poses a threat to Israel and the prospects for regional peace, that colonized and repressed Lebanon and that was pursuing weapons of mass destruction.

Were you to help Democratic opponents of this President reject a man who has faithfully helped to devise and carry out his policies, in the face of steadfast opposition from the bureaucracy (both Foreign Service and intelligence) and from political appointees who aligned themselves with the permanent government, you will do more than reward insubordination to our elected chief executive. You will be making it infinitely more difficult for any future conservative president to recruit like-minded individuals to work for policies supported by the public who elected him.

Second, the principal claim that Mr. Bolton mistreated intelligence officers arises from interactions he and his staff had with a State Department analyst and the former National Intelligence Officer for Latin America. It is impossible to understand the nature of the relevant interactions – which had to do with the clearance of a speech by Mr. Bolton that alluded to Fidel Castro’s potential to manufacture offensive biological weapons – without knowing a critical fact: U.S. intelligence had been penetrated and disinformed for the better part of a decade by a spy, Ana Belen Montes, who had become the Defense Intelligence Agency’s senior expert on Cuba.

As a result of Ms. Montes’ activities on Castro’s behalf, every intelligence community assessment in which she participated required review and reconsideration. Mr. Bolton and his staff quite properly pressed for such steps to be taken. He found his efforts not only to be resisted by the State Department analyst and the NIO, but to be actively sabotaged by them. It is unlikely that you – or, for that matter, any other Senator – would not, at a minimum, experience what John Bolton did: a loss of confidence in these individuals.

Mr. Bolton’s conduct seems, moreover, entirely consistent with what one of your former colleagues, Senator Chuck Robb, recently determined along with other members of the blue-ribbon commission on U.S. intelligence capabilities that he co-chaired with Judge Lawrence Silberman:

The intelligence community needs to be pushed. It will not do its best unless it is pressed by policy-makers – sometimes to the point of discomfort. Analysts must be pressed to explain how much they don’t know; the collection agencies must be pressed to explain why they don’t have better information on key topics. While policy-makers must be prepared to credit intelligence that doesn’t fit their preferences, no important intelligence assessment should be accepted without sharp questioning that forces the community to explain exactly how it came to that assessment and what alternatives might also be true. This is not ‘politicization’; it is a necessary part of the intelligence process.”

Third, everyone says the United Nations needs to be “reformed.” It is far from clear whether everyone agrees as to what reforms are in order, or even that everyone who currently feels compelled to call for change at a clearly dysfunctional organization actually means it.

What is certain is that President Bush is determined to try to bring the organization back closer to its founding principles – principles it shared with those of this country: namely, to protect and promote freedom. John Bolton is a man who has long recognized the defects that have made the UN more than dysfunctional. It has become a reliable instrument for dictators to preserve their power and to impede efforts that would advance the liberties they detest.

Ask yourself: Is the United States more likely to see reform achieved at the United Nations if a man long committed to bringing it about – and who has actually done so with great distinction in the past (notably, in accomplishing the repeal of the UN’s odious Zionism is racism resolution) – is repudiated by the Senate, or approved by it?

The bottom line is this: President Bush defeated John Kerry and his party last Fall in part by running on a platform of American leadership and by repudiating the notion that the United States must bow to some “global test” administered by a legitimating United Nations. The Democrats’ attacks on John Bolton’s personality, conduct and integrity are a smokescreen designed to obscure their determination to refight the battle they lost in 2004 and to produce a different outcome.

Please do your part, together with every other Republican member of the Foreign Relations Committee to reject such efforts, to support President Bush and his determination to exercise the responsibility for America’s security policy vested in him and to realize the necessary goal of truly transforming the United Nations.