John Bolton is surpassing all expectations

all the speculation about what kind of trail of destruction john bolton would blaze up and down the halls of the united nations evidently wasn't of the idle variety...

For months, we have been arguing that the Bush administration has generally the right substantive agenda for badly needed changes at the United Nations, but that Ambassador John Bolton's scorched-earth alternative to diplomacy is undermining the prospects for successfully achieving these reforms. Now it turns out that our criticism has been only half-right in at least one crucial area - in restoring the United Nations' moral authority on human rights by excluding egregious violators from a new human rights monitoring council. Mr. Bolton's latest proposal on this gets the substance wrong as well.

The problem with the current discredited Human Rights Commission is that its members are chosen by a system of regional rotation that fails to take into account the actual human rights performance of prospective members. The reform was originally intended to change that, by requiring the approval of at least two-thirds of the 191 member countries to win a seat on the new council.

Mr. Bolton wants to defeat the whole purpose of that reform by automatically assuring seats for all five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council - regardless of their own human rights records.

That would, of course, guarantee a seat every year for the United States, despite what other countries may think of Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the death penalty, or Washington's practice of secretly flying suspects to be interrogated in countries that countenance torture.

oh, by all means, let's set the u.s. up as THE arbiter of human rights and further cement our reputation as the biggest bunch of hypocrites on the planet...

i hope steve clemons is making progress on putting together the bolton watch site he's promised us for the new year...

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