Bolton Asseses Progress Toward UN Changes

By Anne Gearan
September 28, 2005
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/28/AR2005092800263.html

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's hard-charging ambassador to the United Nations hit a bureaucratic wall this month as he failed to persuade other nations to go as far as the United States wanted toward overhauling the world body's management and operations.
Despite those difficulties, U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton will defend those efforts so far when he faces skeptical House Republicans on Wednesday. Bolton and a top aide to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan were called to answer questions at the House International Relations Committee, whose chairman wants to withhold dues to the United Nations if targets for change slip. The Bush administration does not want to use dues as leverage.
Announcing Wednesday's hearing, the committee noted that the reform outline has been criticized as a worthless compromise which sank to the lowest common denominator needed for approval.
The House has passed a measure championed by committee Chairman Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., that establishes a timetable for reform and ties progress to the payment of U.S. dues. The Senate has not passed the measure.
Bolton cast the U.S. vote for a watered-down reform document with obvious disappointment, calling it a first step. The document backed off bureaucratic and other changes proposed by Annan and by the United States as the U.N. reeled from scandals in its oil-for-food and peacekeeping operations.
Bolton is expected to follow up with new resolutions, but it is not clear how much appetite U.N. diplomats will have for the subject now.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in her first speech before the U.N. General Assembly this month, called on the 191 member nations to try harder.
The time to reform the United Nations is now, she said. And we must seize this opportunity together.
Bolton was addressing the committee in his first appearance on Capitol Hill since Senate Democrats blocked his confirmation over the summer. Bush used a rare recess appointment to give Bolton the U.N. job, calling him an agent for much-needed change at the world body.
The reform document adopted after weeks of wrangling takes a stab at revising the way the United Nations deals with human rights. In her speech, Rice called for a much tougher approach.
She said the new council that is being established should have more credibility. And that, she said, means it should never, never empower brutal dictatorships to sit in judgment of responsible democracies.
The council, Rice said, must have the moral authority to condemn all violators of human rights _ even those that sit among us in this hall.
For this institution to become an engine of change in the 21st century it must now change itself, Rice said. The United Nations must launch a lasting revolution of reform.