Rice's #2 Choice Could 86 Her Nomination
With the nomination of Condoleeza Rice to replace Colin Powell, an interesting question arises: who will be her deputy? Richard Armitage, current Deputy Secretary of State, will be resigning with Colin Powell, so the position is open. The choice that seems to be getting the most talk is one of the people that Colin Powell is alleged to have referred to as a "fucking crazy": John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control in the first Bush term. Bolton is known as a very hawkish neo-conservative, who butted heads rather violently with Powell in his time in Washington, especially about North Korea.
Bolton was particularly active in derailing Powell's attempts to revive negotiations over North Korea's nuclear-weapons program. (Like Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bolton thought talks would only reward Kim Jong-il for bad behavior; he favored "regime change" instead, thoughalso like Cheney and Rumsfeldhe had no idea how to accomplish this goal.) In July 2003, just as Powell finally convinced Russia to join the United States, China, South Korea, and Japan in "six-party talks" with North Korea, Bolton gave a speech in which he called Kim Jong-il a "tyrannical dictator" and his country a "hellish nightmare." He was right, but it was an obstructive remarkand deliberately sofor the opening of a diplomatic avenue.
A Wall Street Journal profile reported that, in 2001, during a discussion about the international bioweapons conference, Bolton told foreign diplomats, "It's dead, dead, dead, and I don't want it rising back from the dead."
More ominously, Bolton is the chairman of the Project for a New American Century, the neoconservative group that calls for a more aggressive foreign policy to topple regimes hostile to America more readily, and was one of the groups calling most loudly for Saddam's overthrow.
As Fred Kaplan writes in his column in Slate.com, if Bolton does become the #2 at State, it probably means that Condi will just be a figurehead there. Bolton has shown no respect for the hierarchy of the State Department, and will likely make sure that Condi's State Department serves the aims of other administration neoconservatives including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
If Rice is to be an active top diplomat, as opposed to an errand girl, she will want her own deputy, someone she knows and trusts, someone who's clearly working for her. With Bolton, she'd have to assume he was always talking, operating, maybe even sniping behind her back.
In short, this is part of a larger pattern of this administration doing all they can to run out anyone who doesn't toe the Bush line. Whether it's Porter Goss making sure that that the CIA is stocked with analysts and agents who rubber-stamp Bush's foreign policy, or Condi possibly being yoked to a guy who's worked hard to undermine those who want a more multi-lateral, moderate foreign policy, this is an administration that continues to place raw political gain over the larger security and standing of this nation.
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