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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
His job is to keep a hawk eye on dovish Colin Powell. And he's helped turn Bush foreign policy into an ideological hammer.
Jul 16, 2003 | When Jesse Helms, R-N.C., urged his fellow senators in March 2001 to confirm a longtime friend as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, he gave an endorsement that was, quite literally, out of this world.
"John Bolton," Helms said, "is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, or what the Bible describes as the final battle between good and evil."
Bolton, who passed by a 57-43 vote, plays a much more important role than the flow charts suggest. He's a hard-line conservative whose intellectual and moral views are simpatico with those of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and most of the higher-ups in the National Security Council and Defense Department. Well before the accuracy of the president's rationale for waging a war in Iraq was questioned, Bolton was installed to help forge the administration's aggressive new foreign policy. His philosophy? To exaggerate slightly, Bolton believes the relationship between America and the rest of the world should resemble that between a hammer and a nail.
His most obvious foil has been the moderate, internationalist man he technically works for: Colin Powell. But Bolton was clearly installed to provide an internal counterweight to the secretary of state, and the administration has long tilted toward Bolton and the conservatives -- from shunting numerous international treaties off the table to taking consistently hard lines with Iraq, North Korea, Russia and even much of Europe.
Bolton has maintained a low profile (he declined to speak to Salon for this story) but hasn't completely avoided public scrutiny. In mid-June, a State Department intelligence official named Christian Westermann accused Bolton of trying to pressure him on intelligence estimates of Cuba's biological weapons capabilities -- coinciding with charges that intelligence data about Iraq had also been cooked.
And on Tuesday, Bolton was caught up in yet another flap about the politicization of intelligence, when the White House was forced to delay his congressional testimony about Syria until September. The administration pulled back Bolton after the CIA and other agencies strenuously objected to its assessment of the threat posed by Syria's weapons of mass destruction.
But overall, Bolton may well be the most important administration official America has never heard of. Moreover, because of his background and connections, Bolton has played an important role in strengthening the crucial alliance within the Bush administration between the Christian right and the neoconservatives, a process detailed closely in Michael Lind's new book about Bush, "Made in Texas."
In a way, the Christian right can be thought of as a body without a brain. It has a power base of millions, but no leader capable of formulating a message that plays well among the non-believers, particularly the mainstream media.
The neoconservatives, however, the defense intellectuals now running the Bush administration's foreign policy, have always been a brain without a body. They run magazines and think tanks, and they type up policy papers, but they have traditionally lacked both popular support and the ability to get elected to anything.
Bush brilliantly has joined the brain to the body, giving power to the neocons and respectability to the Christian right -- even the rabidly growing number of dispensationalists, who believe that Jewish domination of Israel is a necessary precondition for the return of Christ, the battle of Armageddon, and then a 1,000-year reign of Christian peace.
Bolton isn't close to being the sole link that has created this colossus, though he is an important one. He agrees with the neoconservatives on almost all of the country's fundamental foreign policy issues. But, coming from a background outside their traditional working groups, he has been able to bring in additional sources of support for the administration. Boltons own religious faith is unclear, but regardless, he has helped Bush win trust from sectors that might otherwise be skeptical of the administration.
For example, while Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and the other neoconservatives who fill the Bush foreign policy apparatus were serving on committees redrawing maps for the Middle East in the late 1990s, Bolton was serving on the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom, an organization working, for example, to prevent the persecution of Christians in countries such as the Sudan.
Further, Bolton has credibility with Republican activists, many of whom are Christian conservatives, because, unlike the neocons, he is willing to enter the political fray. Asked by Salon how his massive enthusiasm for Bolton began, Jesse Helms first cited the now-undersecretary's role offering legal support in the late 1970s to the senator's troubled political fundraising committee. More important, when the rest of the neoconservatives were milling around Washington, Bolton served as a lead Republican lawyer in the Florida recount rumble, earning kudos and respect from the rank and file. According to a Newsweek account, after the Supreme Court halted the massive recount, Bolton strode into a library full of officials counting Miami-Dade votes. "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the vote," he declared.
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