Renegade Bolton

[housewolf]

Bolton did not only harass and try to get fired lower level intelligence analysts who refused to clear his intel manipulations, but that Bolton's regular refusal to clear his foreign trips with US ambassadors abroad created diplomatic crises for fairly senior US officials, including US assistant secretary for European Affairs, Elizabeth Jones and officials from the bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Writes Jehl:

As under secretary of state, John Bolton routinely arranged meetings with Israeli, Russian, British and French officials without first notifying the State Department offices responsible for relations with those countries, according to three former department officials.

The officials described the practice by Bolton, who has been nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as unusual and a violation of department procedures...

On at least one occasion, the officials said, Elizabeth Jones, then assistant secretary of state for European affairs, confronted Bolton to complain about meetings in Moscow that Bolton had sought with Russian officials without clearance from the European bureau.

<snip>

You can see why Bolton's freelance foreign policy running might have lead to some misunderstandings for the US ambassadors to France, Britain, Russia and Israel to clear up later. But more seriously, you can see why it is truly very dangerous for foreign officials to get the sense that the Bush administration has more than one foreign policy to nuclear hotspots like North Korea and Iran, and for there to be any confusion in their minds what it is. That Bush allowed and allows this to continue speaks to a central flaw in his leadership, a failure to reconcile the conflicting signals of his foreign policy to places like North Korea and Iran. There's certain to be more on this to emerge in coming days.


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http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001969.html