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Bolton thinks the White House is dangerously soft
Or at least that's the way the NYT is spinning it.

The White House’s effort to challenge Iran’s nuclear ambitions has been hobbled by “four and a half years of failed diplomacy.” Its policy regarding North Korea is a dangerous fraud. It is pursuing an improbable Palestinian-Israeli peace at the expense of its stance against proliferation in the Middle East. And that from a longtime Bush loyalist: John R. Bolton, the conservative lawyer who until less than a year ago was President Bush’s proudly unwavering ambassador to the United Nations.

Mr. Bolton, long viewed by liberal critics as a villain on the Bush team, has since emerged as the administration’s most outspoken critic from the right, rebuking his former boss in interviews, in op-ed articles and now in a book. For a man who rushed to Florida in 2000 to join the Bush campaign’s legal fight during the disputed vote recount, the disappointment sounds personal. “I didn’t spend 31 days in Florida,” he said, “to end up where we are now.”

Mr. Bolton’s criticisms reflect a growing unease among some conservatives that a weakened White House chastened by the war in Iraq is abandoning core principles in pursuit of a more moderate policy of negotiations.

“You see this at the end of every administration,” said Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republic of Michigan, who criticized the administration’s talks with North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. With Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, another staunchly conservative Republican, he recently wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, calling on the administration to disclose information about a reported Israeli airstrike in September against a site in Syria that was suspected of being a nuclear facility that North Korea was equipping. “I’m going to watch very carefully what they do in North Korea,” Mr. Hoekstra said in a telephone interview. “I’m going to watch what they do with the Israelis and the Palestinians and the Syrians.”

Mr. Bush’s turn to a more pragmatic policy coincided with the departure of some of the administration’s most hawkish officials and the ascendancy of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. Now, some of the debates that once occurred behind the administration’s closed doors are taking place in public. “I thought the policy had been moving in the wrong direction for quite some time,” Mr. Bolton said of his decision to leave when his recess appointment expired with the last Congress at the end of December. (The White House discussed keeping him on, though it was clear that the Senate would never confirm him as ambassador.)

“Not only was it moving in the wrong direction, it was going to continue in the wrong direction no matter what I did,” he continued during a recent interview at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative perch to which he returned. “So in the cost-benefit calculus of being in the government, I just felt that on policy terms I could do more outside the government than within.”

When Mr. Bolton stepped aside, Mr. Bush called his departure a disappointment, and for an administration sensitive about criticism, it has turned out to be one. When Mr. Bolton’s name came up in a recent conversation, an administration official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly recalled, the president curtly responded, “Interesting guy,” and changed the subject. Mr. Bush’s press secretary, Dana Perino, would say only, “He has a huge amount of respect for John Bolton.”
Posted by: ryuge 2007-11-09
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=206216