The Bolton paradox

JOHN BOLTON'S nomination to serve as US ambassador to the United Nations became one of those battles of wills that sometimes engulf presidential appointments. Democrats solidly opposed him, and the administration, struggling for traction in its second term, feared the consequences of diminishing momentum if it lost.

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A string of Bolton's erstwhile colleagues at the State Department have come forward to describe him as a bully, and he has not been shy about showing his contempt and dislike of the organization in which he would serve. But that may be just what the Bush administration wants. White House officials, according to National Public Radio, have said that the Bolton nomination was not a referendum on the man but on the reforms President Bush wanted to achieve in the United Nations.

And one could hear that point of view in attack ads that conservative interest groups ran on Ohio radio. ''Did you hear how disloyal Senator Voinovich was to Republicans and President Bush? Voinovich stood with the Democrats and refused to vote for John Bolton. He's the guy President Bush has chosen to fight for the United States at the UN." George Voinovich was one of four Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee who expressed doubts about Bolton.

In Wisconsin, an ad said: ''Fraudulent deals with Saddam Hussein and repeated anti-American attacks, that's the UN President Bush is trying to reform."

So if the Bush administration's first priority with the UN is to beat it up and twist its arm to reform it, then who better than the bully Bolton?

But what about President Bush's pledge that in his second term he would ''do diplomacy?" What about the need to heal the wounds of the first term, to woo rather than bludgeon? Was Bolton the right choice to do diplomacy? The record suggests not. Yesterday, Voinovich called Bolton ''the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be."

He drove Colin Powell's State Department nuts with undiplomatic remarks that may have been true -- i.e., that Kim Jong Il is a creep -- but that hurt America's efforts at a diplomatic solution to its North Korea problem.

Bolton was looked upon as Vice President Cheney's man at State, the conservative fox in Colin Powell's chicken coop, and Powell himself let it be known, subtly, without having to say it, that Bolton is not the right man for the UN job.

The most serious charge against Bolton is that he tried repeatedly to twist intelligence to fit his ideological convictions by trying to force analysts into gross exaggerations on Cuban and Syrian weapons of mass destruction programs. The evidence suggests: Guilty as charged.

As former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Robert Hutchings, said of Bolton: ''When policy officials come back day after day with the same complaint and the same instruction to dig deeper for evidence to support their preformed conclusions, that is politicization."

But politicization of intelligence was the pattern of the entire Bush administration, going back to the president's admonition to White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke to look especially hard for an Iraqi connection right after 9/11.

An optimist might regard the Bolton nomination as Condoleezza Rice's way of getting rid of a troublemaker at State by kicking him upstairs. She may figure that Bolton can't make a move in New York without checking it out with her, and better to have him out of town. That same optimist might suggest that Paul Wolfowitz can do far less damage to this nation at the World Bank than he could if he remained in the Pentagon. And for the same reason one might wish Douglas Feith well in whatever he does when he leaves the Defense Department.

Bolton has received a string of high-level endorsements; one from Margaret Thatcher, who admired his forthrightness, and another from former secretary of state James Baker, who would never have allowed, not for five minutes, Bolton's behavior in Colin Powell's State Department.

In his deliberations, Voinovich spoke of the ''kitchen table test." Would he want Bolton to join him at his table? Diplomats at the UN were worrying about another kitchen table test: Would Bolton eat their lunch?

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.