Lugar Fails to Get Bolton Voted Through His Committee

Despite a second impressive success on Darfur at the U.N. Security Council, and following an even more impressive victory on the North Korea sanctions resolution — a resolution I predicted he’d never get — John Bolton has again been denied a vote before the full Senate. There is no honest basis to dispute the excellence of Bolton’s performance at carrying out the President’s policies. That is why George Voinovich and Chuck Hagel are supporting him, despite earlier reservations. Standing beside Bolton’s recent record in office, decade-old personal grievances are irrelevant. Those who oppose Bolton feebly cite such irrelevancies to mask their opposition to the President’s policies, which is a matter to be resolved by the political process.

Publicly, Richard Lugar supports Bolton’s nomination, but he is the one who made the decision to take this vote off the schedule, which causes me to wonder what Lugar has against John Bolton. Frank Gaffney suggests one answer:

During the first term, Colin Powell and Rich Armitage lost policy battle after battle to the president’s loyal subordinates. It fell to Mr. Armitage to try to overturn or undermine those policies Mr. Powell opposed, in the interagency process, through leaks to the press (whose appreciation has been reflected in generally kid-glove treatment of the revelation of his role in the Plame affair), via back-channels with foreign governments and, not least, through attacks on his bureaucratic rivals.

A prime example of such attacks was the Armitage-encouraged campaign against John Bolton, President Bush’s nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. During their four years together in the Powell State Department, the deputy secretary made no secret of his hostility towards then-Undersecretary Bolton. He encouraged insubordination, bureaucratic end-runs and personal attacks against Mr. Bolton by individuals assigned to State’s powerful regional bureaus and its intelligence organization.

Some of those responsible for such behavior — like Armitage cronies Carl Ford and Tom Fingar — subsequently sought publicly to sabotage the Bolton nomination, engendering a Senate filibuster that ended only when Mr. Bush gave his choice for the U.N. a recess appointment. It is hoped the Foreign Relations Committee will rectify this travesty by voting this week to confirm the renominated Ambassador Bolton, whose past year of service at the U.N. has forcefully demonstrated the baseless nature of the partisans’ attacks on this outstanding public servant.

….

Notably, Undersecretary of State Nick Burns has pursued in recent months diplomatic initiatives on such sensitive matters as North Korea’s missile tests and Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions that have mutated the president’s policies beyond recognition — and played into the hands of critics who accuse the Bush national security team of lacking coherence and competence.

The theory depends on the State Department’s establishment having pull with Lugar and exercising it to Bolton’s disadvantage. I have no knowledge of the latter, and can only say of the former that it’s plausible; his views tend to mirror theirs on North Korea. I’ve previously written of information I had heard, that Nicholas Burns continues to seek a new Agreed Framework with North Korea, something I would expect John Bolton to oppose.

An alternative theory, raised by anti-Bolton blogger Stygius, is that Lugar is peeved at Bolton for raising liaibility issues Lugar views as holding up Nunn-Lugar anti-proliferation efforts. But as Stygius himself notes, Lugar embarrasses himself by failing to get Bolton’s nomination out his own committee. Other means of resolving those disputes would seem more appropriate than holding up Bolton’s confirmation.

In other words, I can’t explain why the Foreign Relations Committe did not vote this nomination into the full Senate. If someone else can explain it, my mind is open. Anyone who has facts to add is welcome to do so.