Monday Bolton

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Another vote tomorrow to see if the Fristians can get cloture. Prevailing wisdom says it ain't going to happen.

First up, Walter Shapiro in the Huffington Post blog:

This is another week when an overwrought Senate will loudly dither over the endless saga of John Bolton's nomination to the UN ambassadorship once graced by the likes of Adlai Stevenson and Pat Moynihan. Judging from the signs and portents (okay, I've been reading newspapers not entrails), Senate Republicans on Monday will again fail to break the Democratic filibuster. Anticipating this legislative setback, a plaintive Condi Rice said Sunday on ABC, "We need to get an up-or-down vote on John Bolton...That's all that we're asking."

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1. Laura Rozen has this extremely provocative bit:

http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002181.html

Drastic improvements achieving key US counterproliferation policy goal since Bolton left State:

For years, a key U.S. program intended to keep Russian nuclear fuel out of terrorist hands has been frozen by an arcane legal dispute. As undersecretary of state, John R. Bolton was charged with fixing the problem, but critics complained he was the roadblock.

Now with Bolton no longer in the job, U.S. negotiators report a breakthrough with the Russians and predict a resolution will be sealed by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin at an international summit in Scotland next month, clearing the way to eliminate enough plutonium to fuel 8,000 nuclear bombs.

The prospective revival of the plutonium disposal project underlines a noticeable change since Bolton's departure from his old job as arms control chief. Regardless of whether the Senate confirms him as U.N. ambassador during a scheduled vote today, fellow U.S. officials and independent analysts said his absence has already been felt at the State Department.

This is really quite incredible. By so many measures Bolton has been a destructive force for stated Bush administration policy objectives. And as taking Bolton out of the loop furthered US policy goals on Russia's loose nukes, so did Rice's taking him out of the loop on Iran help that sensitive negotiation as well, the WaPo report continues:

But Bolton was shut out of Iran after Rice's ascension, according to two U.S. officials, and his policy was reversed. In early January, officials from France, Britain and Germany flew secretly to Washington for a brainstorming session on Iran. Bolton was not invited, European diplomats said...

"We weren't the ones who wanted to keep the meeting secret," one European diplomat said. "It was the American side that didn't want him there."

It's almost laughable.

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2. John Bolton, Downing Street, Mohamed ElBaradei, and Valerie Plame

Excellent detective work in this diary by Hunter on Kos.

One of the nagging questions of the Valerie Plame case has always been who in the White House would have even known who Valerie Plame, covert CIA operative, actually was. The identity of covert agents is strictly compartmentalized information; even in high-level briefings on the actions or intelligence gathered by those agents, the agents themselves are identified by alias or code, not by name. The reasons for this practice are obvious.

And, in the case of the White House, there was hardly a pressing need to know the identity of one Ms. Valerie Plame. It is middlingly possible that members of the Bush Administration knew Mrs. Valerie Wilson as wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson. It is less possible that more than a tight handful of persons -- if that -- would have known Valerie Plame, covert CIA operative. The highest crime in the Wilson/Plame case likely does not revolve principally around who, precisely, shopped the information about Plame's covert status to Novak and other D.C. journalists: instead, it rests with who told that political operative -- the one with a full rolodex and the skill to select presumed-friendly leak points -- that Plame was a CIA operative in the first place, and worthy of attack. Among the White House political staff, there was precisely zero need to know this information -- and if classified intelligence procedures were being followed, no opportunities to find out.

It is undisputed among all parties that Plame's covert work involved principally the gathering of intelligence related to weapons of mass destruction, which put her at an important nexus of operations in the runup to the Iraq War. At another nexus point across town, during the same period, was John Bolton...

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3. I'm so tired of the phrase, "All we want is an up or down vote",

give the dems a nominee whom deserves an up or down vote and they will get one.

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4. You and me both.

It's like every other repuke catchphrase: ultimately without meaning. But oh, they love to recite it, don't they??

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5. Recess appointment a possibility.

Steve Clemons:

John Bolton's nomination will fail yet again today.

Lots on the Republican side are now saying that a recess appointment is likely. It would be a historic decision as the July 4th recess is only five days -- and during the last 20 years, the shortest period of recess for such an appointment was 10 days.

But this administration is precedent-setting in many ways. Recess appointments are the President's right. If he wants to send his embattled nominee who failed to get confirmation in a Republican-controlled Congress, there is little that can be done to stop it.

But those in this battle who stood for principled American engagement in the world and who want to make international treaties and institutions instruments that promote American security as well as global stability and well-being will have won the war on Bolton.