Groucho Does Nureyev

Common Sense
John Maxwell

The United States is represented at the United Nations by a man named John Bolton, with a white, Groucho Marx moustache and a serious propensity both to embroider the truth and to invent new truths. Take this example, for instance: "While treaties may be politically or even morally binding, they are not legally obligatory. They are just not law as we apprehend the term."

Breathtaking - isn't it? Mr John Bolton was, at the time he said that, doing his damnedest to ensure that the United States did not join 150 other countries in signing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. His efforts, and those of others, proved successful. The US Senate did not ratify the treaty.

Because of this sort of behaviour, Senator Brian Dorgan said two years ago that President Bush's nomination of Mr Bolton to be undersecretary for arms control was "a terrible nomination".
Senator Dorgan went further:

"To nominate Mr John Bolton to be undersecretary of state for arms control defies logic. Are we going to be a world leader in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons or not? Are we going to be a leader in trying to make this a safer world? Are we going to be a leader in trying to reduce the number of nuclear weapons that exist in this world?

The answer from the president, it seems to me, in sending this nomination to the Senate is no; we don't intend to lead on anything.

We intend to do our own thing notwithstanding what anybody else thinks about it, and notwithstanding the consequences with respect to the reduction of additional nuclear weapons and delivery systems."

Mr Bolton's specialty in the State Department was, according to American authorities on the subject, to block initiatives designed to lessen international tension. According to the Washington Post's Peter Baker and Dafna Linzer "...a key US programme intended to keep Russian nuclear fuel out of terrorist hands has been frozen by an arcane legal dispute. As undersecretary of state, John R Bolton was charged with fixing the problem, but critics complained he was the roadblock."

Baker and Linzer quoted Rose Gottemoeller, a Clinton administration expert on nonproliferation issues. "Throughout his career in the first Bush administration, he was always playing the stopper role for a lot of different issues and even when there was obvious interest by the president in moving things forward, Bolton often found ways of stopping things by tying the inter-agency process in knots."

Many people in the State Department were therefore pleased when Bolton was shifted by Condoleezza Rice and sent to be the resident firebug at the UN. It was a position he was well qualified for, having stated publicly that the UN building could well do without its top 40 floors. Senator Dorgan thought the US would live to rue Bolton's nomination:

"All I know about this nominee is what he has said, what he has established as a public record. It is, in my judgment, antithetical to what we ought to aspire to be and what we ought to aspire to see from someone in the position we expect to provide leadership on arms control.

In my judgment, if this Senate sees fit today to vote positively on this nomination, we will have taken a significant step backwards. We will have impeded the efforts of this country to be a world leader in areas that really matter."

When Condoleezza Rice moved Bolton to the UN, she also moved him out of the circles dealing with a number of arms control issues in which he had played his usual obstructionist role.

Baker and Linzer reported that "As the administration's point man confronting Iran's nuclear programme, Bolton had blocked US support for a European bid to negotiate a settlement with Tehran, arguing that such talks would legitimise Iran's clerical regime without stopping any secret weapons development.

"But Bolton was shut out of Iran after Rice's ascension, according to two US officials, and his policy was reversed. In early January, officials from France, Britain and Germany flew secretly to Washington for a brainstorming session on Iran. Bolton was not invited, European diplomats said. Instead, they met with Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council.

"We weren't the ones who wanted to keep the meeting secret," one European diplomat said. "It was the American side that didn't want him there."

Unfortunately, the Americans weren't able to keep him out of the continuing discussion, and Mr Bolton apparently got his president's approval to move the subject of Iran from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to the Security Council where Mr Bolton feels more comfortable with the other North Atlantic representatives of the 'civilised world'.

That is not simply a cheap shot at Mr Bolton. As an acolyte of Senator Jesse Helms his résumé would seem to qualify him to be described as a racist. His performance in relation to Cuba would seem to disqualify him from ever being regarded as a witness of truth.

During his confirmation hearings before the senate last year it transpired that Bolton had deliberately perverted a CIA memorandum on Cuba to make it state, falsely, that Cuba was in the process of making and testing biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction.

It took former President Jimmy Carter's visiting Cuba with a bunch of American experts to nail that particularly dangerous and noisome lie. Mr Bolton has been doing a carefully choreographed dance around the truth for the last several weeks, his pas de seul and arabesques being faithfully recorded by a craven Press, trying to make it appear that the Iranians are even more intransigent and unreasonable than they actually are.

Mr Bolton believes that Iran wants nuclear weapons to destroy Israel, and nothing the Iranians can say will change his belief. With a president who has such a contempt for the language and for science that he will not properly pronounce the word 'nuclear', Bolton is unlikely to face any challenges from the direction of the White House.

Additionally, Mr Bush is woefully in need of a triumph of some kind, and the unconditional surrender of the Iranians and the removal of President Ahmedinejad would do nicely, thank you. The Iranians are firm.

They realise that nuclear war is out of the question and that for logistical and internal political reasons, the United States cannot launch any realistic invasion of their country. They see no reason to back down. They are prepared to deal with the IAEA, not the Security Council and John Bolton.

Their position is simple. They are entitled under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty - which Mr Bolton despises - to carry out programmes of nuclear research for peaceful purposes. They did not tell the whole truth about the programme in the beginning, for good reason: they were then being attacked by Iraq, armed and egged on by the United States, and they had seen what happened to Iraq's nuclear reactor at the hands of Israel. The construction of nuclear weapons is not a simple or cheap process and it takes time. There is no way that Iran could possibly make nuclear weapons without the world being aware.

Similarly, there was no possibility that Israel could have done that either, but Israel and Apartheid South Africa were allowed to collaborate in making and testing nuclear weapons without a peep from the 'civilised world'.

Israel now has submarines equipped with nuclear missiles and can take out any country it wishes at a few hours' notice.
The Iranians say that the proper forum for discussion of their programme is in the IAEA, not the Security Council, where Mr Bolton expects his 'civilised friends' to support him, as they supported the US in Haiti and in Palestine.

The stakes in Iran are somewhat more critical, since they include the possibility of an oil crisis and global economic meltdown.
And Mr Bolton dances on, Groucho doing Nureyev. There is a pratfall in the script, but he doesn't know that, yet.

Ironist does Manolete

The annual White House Correspondents dinner is, under President Bush, a normally cosy affair, unlike the sometimes acerbic occasions when Democrats are in the White House. This year, to end the proceedings, someone had the wit - or misfortune - to hire a comic named Stephen Colbert.

Mr Colbert, posing, as is his wont, as a friend of the president's, proceeded to unmask himself as the Little Boy in the fable about the Emperor's New Clothes.

Having unfrocked the Emperor, Colbert then turned into an intellectual Manolete, producing elegant passes against two targets, the Presidential bull and the Judas Goat Press, placing his barbed banderillas with savage precision, provoking open-mouthed amazement from an increasingly abashed crowd of dinner guests. Some journalists walked out. They didn't find their defrocking funny. Nobody knows whether President Bush got the message.

They all should be reminded, as Colbert did remind them, that reality has a leftist bias, and that in the good old days, kings and emperors carried their own 'Fools' around with them, to remind them that they were not in fact Gods. Mr Bush has gone too long without a Fool at his side. Which is why Mr Colbert is on his way to becoming an American national folk hero.

Patterson turns Lobbyist

Last week's announcement that the former prime minister, Mr Patterson, is to become a lobbyist alarms me, though it does not surprise me. His choice of partners is even more alarming than his choice of occupation. Mr Patterson is to join a firm of international consultants named GoodWorks International, headed by Mr Andrew Young.

I met Andrew Young about 1978 when he came to Jamaica as the guest of Prime Minister Michael Manley. He was then President Carter's Ambassador to the UN and came with all the cachet of having been an associate of Martin Luther King and a pillar of the civil rights movement.

I confess that we took an instant dislike to each other, and on a television programme in which I was one of the journalists, we got into a short, sharp row about the direction poor countries like Jamaica should be taking. We were, at the time, under attack from the IMF and World Bank and I thought it was unreasonable for those worthies to demand that Jamaica should collapse its pretensions to any programme of self-reliance and poor people's politics. Young was all for dissolving all state-owned enterprise and simply turning to capitalism as the engine of development.

My position was that a people disfranchised by their history of slavery and colonial exploitation could not drag themselves up by their own bootstraps and that dependence on foreign investment would simply be another form of slavery.

Michael Manley was somewhat angry with me for treating this big 'Benefactor' from the US so roughly. I don't think Michael disagreed with my position, more, perhaps with the vigour with which it was expressed.

Since then, Mr Young has gone on to bigger and better things. In February 2005 he became chairman of 'Working Families for Walmart', an organisation sponsored by Walmart in response to public criticism that Walmart is anti-people and anti-minority.

Mr Patterson is still being paid the salary of a Jamaican Prime Minister, which I would have thought would satisfy anyone who was not an oil industry 'ginnigog'. That he should join Mr young and company alarms me. Despite his protestation that he will not involve himself in any deal involving Jamaica, I am afraid that I cannot believe his disclaimers, because he has broken too many promises to the Jamaican people.

I believe that the Jamaican government should take action to forbid any former high official of government from representing any company which has contractual dealings with this country. And I believe that if former prime ministers are to be paid as if they were still in office, the law should prohibit them from engaging in any enterprise of profit. He should be out doing good works if only as penance for his failures.

Palestine & the Haitian Solution

I do not have the space this week to reply to my friend Ainsley Henriques, who counselled me to confine my human rights concerns to Darfur. I simply wish to point out that much of his complaint is based on discredited Israeli versions of history.

Additionally, he should check the BBC website, where a recent study has highlighted the BBC's "failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation".

On the emotive issue of whether acts of violence perpetrated against either side should be called "terrorism", the review said the BBC should use the term because it is "clear and well understood" and that once it had decided on a policy for the correct use of language it should be more consistent in applying it.

Since the BBC is probably the least obviously biased Western news agency reporting from Palestine, its deficiencies should cause others to question their reporting.

Ainsley should also consult the Israeli human rights websites dealing with Palestinian issues, such as B'Tselem. Finally, the former head of the World Bank, Mr James Wolfensohn, has resigned as envoy from the Quartet group to the Palestinians, because of restrictions on dealing with the Hamas government.

Wolfensohn said: "It would surprise me if one could win by getting all the kids out of school or starving the Palestinians. And I don't think anyone in the Quartet believes that to be the policy. I think that's a losing gambit."