John Bolton is a good man. He did a great job and didn't deserve his fate. My friend, ace journalist Claudia Rosett sums up this latest U.N. saga rather nicely..."John Bolton's resignation this week as ambassador to the United Nations was hardly the result of his being - as some have charged - ineffective, or a bully, or abrasive. The real problem is the shrunken character of the U.N.
Bolton was a Gulliver dispatched to Lilliput, a truth-teller in a den of diplomats. As a principled man in a dishonest institution, he was a threat to a whole raft of special interests that feed off the U.N. system.
If anything, Bolton was polite in a setting where bullying and abrading hardly count as sins. This is the U.N. where Secretary-General Kofi Annan, when queried last year about the Mercedes on which his son saved a bundle by making false use of U.N. perquisites, chose to bully the reporter - and avoid answering a good question. This is the U.N. whose deputy secretary-general, Mark Malloch Brown, set out this past spring, in violation of the U.N. charter, to meddle in U.S. politics - insulting a number of right-wing media outlets and sneering at their audience in the "heartland." This is the U.N. whose "excellencies" this past September applauded the histrionics of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - behavior that in civilized quarters might well be deemed abrasive.
This is the U.N. that in recent years has incubated such scandals as oil-for-food, procurement bribery, and peacekeeper rape. This is the U.N. whose "reforms," in answer to these scandals, have consisted largely of demands for more money, and a revamped so-called Human Rights Council that has devoted itself entirely to condemning Israel. This is the U.N. system that still does not provide coherent accounts of how it spends about $20 billion per year, about one-quarter of that supplied by U.S. taxpayers...."
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