BOLTON'S BIG MOUTH MAY DENY HIM THE AMBASSADORSHIP

A sampling of Bush's nominee for U.N. Ambassador, John Bolton's, comments on the U.N."

"There is no such thing as the United Nations ... There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world and that is the United States when it suits our interests and we can get others to go along. And I think it would be a real mistake to count on the U.N. as if it is some disembodied entity out there that can function on its own." -Global Structures Convocation, Feb. 3 1994.

More on Bolton:

Re Vietnam: "He'd say `How can you let 2,000 men die there in vain?'" recalled Marty McKibbin, Bolton's teacher at the McDonogh School, then a private military academy in Baltimore. "The next year he'd come back and say, `How can you let 4,000 men die in vain?' He had his mind set on his views, and they haven't changed in 40 years."
...
In advance of Monday's hearing, Democrat and Republican congressional investigators were looking into allegations that Bolton once visited CIA headquarters to demand the removal of a top intelligence analyst who disagreed with his assessment of Cuba's biological warfare capabilities.

If true, the alleged visit risked undermining the objectivity of intelligence judgments by sending a message that analysts who don't tell policy-makers what they want to hear could face punishment.

Bolton warned of Cuba's capabilities in 2002. intelligence analysts later rejected his claims.

"He's not a healthy skeptic about the United Nations, but widely known as a committed destructive opponent, an ideological lone ranger," said Jonathan Dean, a former ambassador and advisor to the Union of Concerned Scientists. "He's been a one-man death squad for arms control and disarmament."

Late last month, 62 former U.S. ambassadors signed a letter sent to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., labeling Bolton "the wrong man for this position."

UPDATE: WaPo has an interesting intro to today's beginning of hearings on Bolton's nomination:

During a meeting on North Korea in late 2001, John R. Bolton's repeated talk of overthrowing Kim Jong Il frustrated the State Department's specialist on the country. "Regime change" is not President Bush's declared objective in North Korea, Charles L. Pritchard recalled telling Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

"That is exactly what we are all about," Bolton snapped back, curtly reminding Pritchard and a colleague that U.S. troops had just finished overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan, Pritchard said.
...
For the past four years, as the administration's point man on weapons of mass destruction, Bolton has worked to reverse decades of U.S. nonproliferation and arms control policies. He maintains that the system of arms treaties established since World War II -- with milestones under presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush -- have constrained U.S. power and infringed on American sovereignty without holding other nations to account.

This is a great article, documenting Bolton's misuse and abuse of intelligence and intelligence analysts re Cuba and Syria, his manipulation of other agencies to counter Colin Powell and the administration's foreign policy, and other classic Bolton maneuvers.

UPDATE: The Washington Note is on top of the Bolton story, big-time.