31 Jul Steve Clemons Live-Blogging the Bolton Hearings
For those who are interested, Steve Clemons of The Washington Note is actively covering John Bolton’s confirmation hearings. If Clemons’ first few posts are any indication, things aren’t going very well for the nominee, whose disastrous interim stint at the UN seems to be rightfully coming back to haunt him:
1. Senator Hagel is now undecided on whether to support Bolton.
2. Lincoln Chafee wipes the floor with Bolton’s simplistic view of terrorism.
3. A possible Democratic filibuster of Bolton needs only one more vote.
4. Richard Lugar does not endorse Bolton in his opening statement.
Clemons also discusses a shocking sentence in Bolton’s “official statement,” distributed to the press by the majority staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which Bolton asserts that Lebanese civilian casualties are less important than Israeli civilian casualties:
[I]t is a mistake to ascribe a moral equivalence to civilians who die as the direct result of malicious terrorist acts, the very purpose of which are to kill civilians, and the tragic and unfortunate consequence of civilian deaths as a result of military action taken in self-defense.
Bolton never read the line. Instead, the majority staff quickly distributed a “new” official statement with the offending sentence deleted.
Read Steve Clemons. Oppose John Bolton.
this isn’t shocking at all. it’s merely an inartful rendering of a basic principle about the moral culbility of the actors–not the value of the lives of the civilians per se. Hezbullah’s intentional attacks against civilans are more morally blameworthy than Israeli attacks on Hezbullah armed fighters that incidentally kill civilians. do you disagree?
I concur with Mr. Rothenberg. This entire post seems a little out of place in this blog. I thought the subject of discussion was international law, not lobbying regarding one particular representative in the system.
It might be noted that Professor Julian Ku recently posted twice about Bolton (see under ‘Categories’ at left, click on ‘UN and other Int’l Organizations’ and scroll down a bit), and this subject has some bearing on international law and politics given that Amabssador Bolton is the U.S. representative to the United Nations! The topic is therefore fair game under the heading of ‘reports, commentary and debate’ on current developments in international law and politcs.
correction: politics
Larry,
Respectfully, I do not agree. Bolton could always have said what you did — that “Hezbullah’s intentional attacks against civilans are more morally blameworthy than Israeli attacks on Hezbullah armed fighters that incidentally kill civilians.” Or he could have said “all civilian casualties are tragic and unacceptable. But we have to remember that the Israeli casualties…” Either way, I would have agreed with him.
But that’s not what he said, as the sentence I quoted indicates. He very clearly expressed his opinion that Lebanese civilian casualties are not equivalent to Israeli civilian casualties — why else would have majority staff have immediately pulled the original statement and replaced with a different one?
Besides, if Bolton was simply being “inartful,” do we really want a UN Ambassador who is inacapable of expressing himself clearly, even when his remarks are prepared in advance?
Finally, I appreciate Seamus’s defense. This is a blog, not a news outlet. I don’t editorialize that often, but I reserve the right to do so and have no problem with my fellow bloggers, especially the ones with whom I disagree, doing so as well.