Jim Lobe is Washington bureau chief for Inter Press Service, an international newswire, and writes for Foreign Policy in Focus, a joint project of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and the New Mexico-based International Relations Center.
One question in the Bolton investigation remains unasked. Why are leading neoconservatives supporting John Bolton? Bolton's narrow definition of U.S. national interests and his rejection of humanitarian intervention in the face of mass slaughter should be anathema to the internationalism of neoconservatives and their conviction that the U.S. must confront evil everywhere, particularly in cases of genocide.
Deploring Washington's failure to take strong action to stop genocide in Rwanda ten years ago and in Darfur, Sudan, today, neoconservative networker par excellence Richard Perle recently told a conference in Almaty, Kazakhstan, ''It is a tragedy every time we stand by and ignore...the killing of innocents."
Perle's statement was the latest in a series of similar declarations by prominent neo-conservatives going back more than 30 years that have insisted that it is precisely because Washington has been willing to fight for the oppressed that gave the United States the moral standing to take unilateral action abroad, even in defiance of the "international community" or the UN Security Council.
Indeed, in a path-breaking essay in Foreign Affairs nine years ago, neoconservative ideologues William Kristol and Robert Kagan called on increasingly isolationist Republicans to embrace a "Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy" based on "moral clarity" and a "sense of the heroic," arguing that the combination of Washington's overwhelming military power and its moral goodness compelled to intervene overseas against evil-doers.
Citing John Quincy Adams' famous admonition that America should not go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy," they asked: "But why not? The alternative is to leave monsters on the loose, ravaging and pillaging to their hearts' content, as Americans stand by and watch."
Yet, John Bolton is a man who clearly believes that the United States should never act on behalf of anything greater than its own narrow national interests, a man who makes even Fox News' Bill O'Reilly look like a bleeding heart.
It was, after all, in a 1999 televised exchange with O'Reilly that Bolton argued that humanitarian interventions, as in the Balkans in the 1990s, and even in cases of genocide, as in Rwanda, the United States should, in Kristol's and Kagan's words, "stand by and watch."
O'REILLY: And I find it difficult to stand by and watch another Cambodia, another Rwanda, unfold. And I believe the United States has a responsibility here.
BOLTON: Let me ask you this, Mr. O'Reilly. How many dead Americans is it worth to you to stop the brutality?
O'REILLY: I don't think I would quantify that because...
BOLTON: I think you have to quantify it. I think if you don't answer that question...
O'REILLY: ... I think if you're going to be a superpower...
BOLTON: ... you're ducking the key point that the commander in chief has to decide upon before putting American troops into a combat situation. We are now at war with Serbia. And the president has to be able to justify to himself and to the American people that Americans are about to die, or may well die, for a certain specific American interest.
O'REILLY: ... I do not believe in standing by while people are slaughtered.
BOLTON: ... Our foreign policy should support American interests. Let the rest of the world support the rest of the world's interests."
The question is: how does Bolton's position (of which, incidentally, more than 70 percent of the American people disagree, according to a 2004 Chicago Council on Foreign Relations poll) square with neo-conservative notions of "moral clarity" and America's moral responsibility as the world's only superpower to prevent mass slaughter? This is a man, after all, who not only thinks that morality in foreign policy is contemptible; he flaunts his disdain.
In this context, Kristol's endorsement of Bolton's nomination in the Weekly Standard can only be characterized as bizarre. According to Kristol, Bolton's long-time "skepticism" about the UN is fully justified, particularly in light of "its ineffectiveness (to be kind) in Rwanda in the '90s and in Sudan in this decade." Is there anything in Bolton's record that suggests he would make forceful and persuasive advocate for intervention in either case?
Make no mistake: if this were the 1930s—an era to which neo-conservatives love to refer when scolding their liberal or realist critics for "appeasement," "failure of will," and lacking "moral clarity"—can there be any doubt that Bolton would have lined up alongside right-wing isolationists who called for the U.S. to build a "Fortress America" and stay out of Europe's affairs?
Again, it is Richard Perle who makes clear the distance between Bolton's isolationism and the neoconservative animus: "For those of us who are involved in foreign and defense policy today, my generation, the defining moment of our history was certainly the Holocaust," Perle told BBC two years ago. "It was the destruction, the genocide of a whole people, and it was the failure to respond in a timely fashion to a threat that was clearly gathering. We don't want that to happen again..."
Most neo-conservatives believe that, because of the benevolent and redemptive character of the U.S. influence in the world, anything that expands that U.S. influence is ipso facto good for the rest of the planet. Some may believe that applying U.S. military power to international crises in far-away places remote from vital U.S. national-security interests could weaken U.S. influence—and hence its ability to do good—in the long run.
Meanwhile, people, in O'Reilly's words, get slaughtered, innocents get killed, and monsters ravage and pillage to their heart's content. "Our foreign policy should support American interests," says John Bolton. "Let the rest of the world support the rest of the world's interests."
