All in a day's work

Not surprisingly, John Bolton's gig at the U.N. is leading to nothing but conflict:

John R. Bolton, in his first public initiative as American ambassador, told envoys at the United Nations on Wednesday that time was running out on efforts to create institutional change, only days after the United States began privately pushing for major revisions to a draft of reforms that was already close to completion.

The new American approach recommends scrapping more than 400 passages in the 38-page draft prepared under the General Assembly president, Jean Ping of Gabon, that was being readied for a summit conference next month after nearly a year of intensive negotiations.

According to the article, the objections are predictable: the U.S. wants no mention of the ICC, the Kyoto Protocol, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, aid targets or disarmament. All this is after the changes in the current draft already sound like something out of a Bush foreign policy address (assuming his typical wilfully blind eye to U.S. human rights abuses):

Among the changes under consideration are the substitution of the Human Rights Commission with a more powerful Human Rights Council that would no longer allow rights violators onto the panel; the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission to help countries emerging from conflict; the defining of terrorism to exclude its justification as a national resistance or liberation tool; and the empowerment of the international community to intervene in countries that fail to protect their people from genocide and ethnic cleansing.

There can be little doubt that the U.S. proposal will fail utterly in any attempt to radically change the draft version, and with good reason. The world at large has worked hard to reach agreement on the current draft and conceded to U.S. interests on at least a few of the above points, especially if the U.S. (as seems likely) will have an effective veto in defining "terrorism" and "human rights violators".

The big question is whether the new demands will completely undercut the consensus version, and result in other states deciding to add a wish list as well. If that happens, the U.N. reform that Bush and Bolton supposedly want will be impossible.

Usually even the neocons aren't quite this efficient in directly undercutting their own stated goals. But apparently Bolton makes it possible.