Control Freak: John Bolton would rather ...

[struggle4progress]

... keep America free of commitments than keep the world free of nuclear weapons

By Wade Boese
Web Exclusive: 04.07.05

<snip> After assuming his post in May 2001, Bolton wasted little time in stamping his imprint on the administration’s arms-control approach. In July, the administration rejected an agreement (then six years in the making) to deter and detect cheating on a treaty banning biological weapons and opposed more stringent worldwide restrictions on small arms. Bolton argued that the measures would have infringed too much on the United States or done little to dissuade and catch cheaters. The administration would return to these arguments in July 2004 for objecting to formal verification provisions for a proposed treaty to ban production of two key ingredients for building nuclear weapons.

Bolton delivered the U.S. positions in his characteristically blunt and uncompromising fashion. He shocked U.S. allies with a vehement warning against resurrecting the biological-weapons treaty measures by reportedly pronouncing them as “dead, dead, dead.”

In the course of spurning the anti–biological weapons proposal, Bolton unveiled what would become another hallmark of his approach: “naming names.” Departing from past diplomatic practice, Bolton accused countries by name of pursuing biological weapons. Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and North Korea were the alleged guilty parties. In Iraq’s case, Bolton asserted, “The existence of Iraq’s program is beyond dispute.” U.S. arms inspectors scouring the country after the U.S.-led March 2003 invasion, however, found no evidence that Iraq had actively pursued biological weapons in the past several years. Bolton’s allegations about Libya also have gone unverified following Libya’s December 2003 renunciation of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.

The scuttling of biological-weapons and small-arms measures, however, was only a prologue to Bolton’s and the administration’s top arms-control priority: freeing the United States from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which barred nationwide defenses against strategic ballistic missile attacks. <snip>

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=9475