Whither the Naval Reserve? Posted by Suzanne Nossel

I was having lunch yesterday with a member of the naval reserve.  I asked whether she was at risk for being called to serve in Iraq.  She replied that there seemed to be little chance, since ships weren't involved in the conflict, and few people she knew from the navy had been called up.

Given all the discussions we've had here (and here, here, and here) about the personnel crisis confronted by the military, this came as a surprise.  After all - as she and I discussed - the naval reserve has got plenty of specialists in everything from intelligence to piloting airplanes to maintainance to medicine to food service.  These are servicemembers whose skills should be fairly readily transferrable to the Iraq conflict and other pressing needs around the world. 

Some quickie research suggests that the naval ready reserve is mobilized at a level significantly below the other services.  The naval ready reserve stands at 142,000 of which just 3290 (just 2%) were deployed as of July 13.  By contrast, of the 327,000 in the army ready reserve, 62,000 are deployed worldwide (about 19%).  The Marine Corps has 57,300 in its ready reserve, of which 9022 are mobilized (15%).

According to this analysis, the navy has been working hard to make its forces better equipped for contemporary warfare, including counter-terrorism missions.   It states: "In their civilian careers, many [naval reservists] have established expertise in such fields as computer technology, security operations, business practices and foreign languages."

Call me crazy, but before we start recruiting people who we would ordinarily have rejected as unfit for service, extending tours to the point where real hardships are felt, and talking about a draft, why aren't we tapping into this existing reserve?   I am sure that - given their training, skill sets and civilian obligations, greater mobilization of the naval reserves is no panacea.  But I am curious why the numbers are so low, and whether it might not make sense to dig a little deeper here.

Addendum:  To the commenters who are replying "a sailor in Iraq?  you are crazy." What if any questions does this raise about maintaining a half-a-million strong force (active duty plus reserves) that is suitable for duty only at sea?  What role are these questions playing in the current debates on force realignment?

Democracy in Iraq, through the Looking Glass Posted by Michael Signer

On the Sy Hersh piece in The New Yorker about the Bush Administration's manipulation of Iraq's emerging quasi-democracy, I was trying to think of a metaphor or allegory for the neocons' continuing obliviousness to the failure of their theories to create the right reality, and was failing.  Maybe it's the heat.  The index in Richmond is 110 right now, and it's almost impossible to walk outside -- all the more reason to empathize with our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, to recap.  Hersh's piece is here.  Eric Alterman's angry synopsis and expansion is here.  Laura Rozen's coup de grace is here. 

Hersh's piece exposes that while the Administration was, like Socrates in Aristophanes' The Clouds, producing gaseous clouds of rhetoric about Democracy, it was simultaneously engaging in old-style ward politics that would make Richard Daley blush.

The Administration, Hersh reveals, was hosting a small civil war between weirdly hypocritical neocons who were willing to produce a counterfeit of democracy at any cost, and those who thought America should allow transparent elections to go forward, and let the chips fall where they may. 

On the one hand was a clutch of insiders who wanted to rig the elections against pro-Iranian Shiites -- with the goal of reducing Iraq's formal connections to this member of the Axis of Evil. 

On the other hand was a number of pro-democracy NGO's, as well as the more sensible duo of Richard Armitage and Colin Powell -- who argued that democratization would suffer both substantively and image-wise if it was so overtly manipulated, if transparency, well, disappeared. 

Here's Hersh's summary of the debate:

The main advocate for channelling aid to preferred parties was Thomas Warrick, a senior adviser on Iraq for the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, who was backed, in this debate, by his superiors and by the National Security Council. Warrick’s plan involved using forty million dollars that had been appropriated for the election to covertly provide cell phones, vehicles, radios, security, administrative help, and cash to the parties the Administration favored. The State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor resisted this plan, and turned to three American non-governmental organizations that have for decades helped to organize and monitor elections around the world: the National Democratic Institute (N.D.I.), the International Republican Institute (I.R.I.), and the National Endowment for Democracy (N.E.D.).

“It was a huge debate,” a participant in the discussions told me. “Warrick said he had gotten the Administration principals”—senior officials of the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council—“to agree.” The N.G.O.s “were fighting a rearguard action to get this election straight,” and emphasized at meetings that “the idea of picking favorites never works,” he said.

“There was a worry that a lot of money was being put aside in walking-around money for Allawi,” the participant in the discussions told me. “The N.G.O.s said, ‘We don’t do this—and, in any case, it’s crazy, because if anyone gets word of this manipulation it’ll ruin what could be a good thing. It’s the wrong way to do it.’ The N.G.O.s tried to drive a stake into the heart of it.”

Wouldn't you know, but the neocons won in the short-term, producing an election riddled with fraud, producing the marionette of Ayad Allawi.  The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq later estimated that 10% of ballots had been stuffed. 

And then when the actual government was formed in Iraq, the enterprise spun a little more out of control.  Ibrahim al-Jafaari became Prime Minister and, in early July, "stunned Washington" (in Hersh's words) by announcing a multi-billion dollar aid package with Iran.  The whole point was to separate the Iraqi government from Iran -- not connect them.

There are, thankfully, signs of progress for a stabilizing Iraq, if Sunnis have more of a hand in the government (as it looks like they might) and if the constitution-drafting proceeds apace -- but this is despite Washington, not because of it.

So where does this all get us?  A ripe example of the ideology of this Administration.  Marx defined "ideology" as "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es," which means, "They do not know it, but they are doing it."  Here's how the political theorist Slavoj Zizek summarizes it:

The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naïveté: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality and our distorted representation, our false consciousness of it.

This is ideology, in the classic sense:  the fusion of home-schooling, faith-based reasoning, and salvationist, millenarian politics (which culminates in the emergence of the "rapture index" as something politically-engaged rightists actually care about) leads neocons to become so absorbed in the rhetoric of democratization that they think the worst kind of realpolitik is justified to produce the image (rather than reality) of Democracy. 

Where there's smoke, there's no fire -- or something like that:

I want so much to know whether they've a fire in the winter: you never can tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too -- but that may be only pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire.

This is from Alice in Wonderland, but it kind of seems appropriate today.

Through the looking-glass, indeed.

Some Army Relief Posted by Derek Chollet

A few months ago we wrote about a study by the policy group Third Way that detailed the crisis between the demand and supply of American troop strength, calling for adding 100,000 troops to the U.S. Army.  Last week several prominent members of Congress, including Senators Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, Bill Nelson, Jack Reed, Ken Salazar and Representatives Mark Udall and Ellen Tauscher proposed legislation to do just that.  Entitled the “United States Army Relief Act,” this is a bold proposal to deal with the mismatch between the forces we need and the forces we have (the press release and text of the legislation can be found here).

This drew some nice media attention for the Hillary factor – with many stories using her work on the armed services committee and future aspirations as the news hook.  But the proposal was also (apparently coincidentally) timed with the release of a new report from RAND which explains that if the current tempo of deployments continue – and there is no reason to believe that it won’t for the next few years at least – we will have “serious problems” in active duty readiness.  This also coincided with an alarming study released last week by the GAO that provides a lot of detail about the crisis in the Army Reserves – pointing out that due to equipment and personnel shortages, it will be “increasingly difficult for [the Reserve] to provide ready forces.”

Given all of this, the politics of the Army Relief Act make a lot of sense: by calling for a larger army, this legislation allows key Democrats to be tough on defense while at the same time make the case for how badly the Pentagon has been managed (remember the days when the Clinton Administration was criticized for creating a “hollow army”?!?!).  This is a gutsy plan that puts the political opposition or those that defend the status quo, well, on the defensive.      

That said, some still have concerns on the substance.  Although these ideas have been endorsed by former Army generals (including two at the Congressional rollout, the former heads of West Point and the Army War College), as well as the New York Times editorial page, several civilian military experts I’ve spoken to (while sympathetic with the politics and especially the urgency of the supply-demand problem) argue that adding 100,000 troops is not the way to solve the problem.  They point to everything from the cost (at least $15 billion) to the difficulty of actually recruiting these new forces to the fact that such a move might actually hinder the Army’s continuing transformation.  Instead, they call for a troop increase of anywhere from 40,000 (which is what the Kerry-Edwards campaign proposed) to over 60,000.

I don’t have near enough military expertise to judge the merits of 40,000 vs. 60,000 vs. 100,000, but I am convinced that we need more.  And good for these members of Congress (and their friends at Third Way) for putting a serious idea on the table.         

Top 10 Questions About the Long-Term Future of U.S. Foreign Policy Posted by Suzanne Nossel

This is a pretty indulgent one - - but, hey, its mid-summer and apart from the London investigation, the smoldering of Iraq and Plamegate, things seem a tad slow.  The big event at our house is that this week my son Leo turns one.   I always thought it cheesy when politicians advocated various policies as being in the interests of "our children."   But motherhood has changed all that.  With Leo growing longer in years, my thoughts turn to the foreign policy issues that concern me most in terms of his future.  Here are 10 of the questions that most concern me in terms of the world we'll hand to Leo and his generation sometime in 2040 or s0:

1.    Will nuclear weapons still be a threat -  I grew up in the era of "The Day After" and the enduring threat of nuclear conflict between the U.S. and the USSR.  Though that threat has changed radically it hasn't disappeared and is in now in many ways harder to manage and control.  The real question, though almost to frightening to raise, is whether nukes will be used in my son's lifetime.   At the going rate, without only halting progress on non-proliferation and control of loose nukes, the answer could well be yes.

2.   Will the U.S. still be the only superpower - My hope is yes, my fear is no.  I suspect that 35 years from now the U.S. will share political, economic and military dominance with China.  If that comes true, can a polarized duality be avoided, and is there a scenario where the two countries collaborate to solve global problems?  I find it difficult to predict and will be fascinated to see how this plays out.

3.  Will terrorism be a major feature of U.S. life - There will undoubtedly still be terrorism 35 years from now, but will the terrorist threat against the U.S. be a permanent feature of life in the 21st century?  Will future attacks on U.S. soil lead us to become more like Israel - a security state where issues of life-and-death surface amid the most workaday activities like eating pizza or shopping in a mall?  My hope is that a combination of settling the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and slow but steady liberalization and economic development in the Middle East dampen Islamic terrorism to a point where its occasional flare-ups are out-of-the-ordinary enough not to impact daily life in the U.S.  This is very optimistic.

4.  Will we have faced environmental disaster - Environmental issues are not my area of expertise, and are questions we probably don't spend enough time on on this blog.   But I do worry that global warming may really catch up with us sometime in the next generation, and that we will have only ourselves (and President Bush) to blame for failing to act when we could have.

5.  Will the U.S. still be the center of economic opportunity - While I could do without some of his polemics, I do worry about Thomas Friedman's thesis in The World is Flat about eroding American competitiveness in education, innovation and technology.  Where I part ways with Friedman is his implicit notion that the competition from India and elsewhere is to be feared:  I think we ought to just be energized by the idea that the game is being played harder and faster than ever before, and work on positioning the U.S. to win.   I do worry that we're underinvesting right now in tools like broadband and wide-scale internet access and literacy that we will need to keep up.  I hope we soon have leadership that changes that.

Arsenal Abroad: Welcome Anita Sharma Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Now batting Wednesday mornings and whenever else she desires for the next week, please welcome Anita Sharma.  Anita is currently working tsunami relief in Indonesia for the International Organization for Migration, having previously served with IOM in Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait. She is also a veteran of the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, and Kerry-Edwards ’04, among other fine causes.

I am leaving behind the laptop and hitting the road for a week, with my beloved, the BloggerBabe, a backseat of new car toys, and a frontseat full of reading to catch up on. (Granta, the New Yorker, Squandered Victory, Matt Bai’s piece on George Lakoff, a bio of George Balanchine, who am I kidding?).  See you offline.

Another Go at Exceptionalism Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Maybe it's because I am getting ready to head off to my high school reunion, but in the aftermath of the London bombings I've been remembering my first encounters with the different ways American and European societies confront our problems with ethnicity and race.

We had Swedish exchange students one summer, and the first thing those supposedly-sophisticated young folk wanted to do was go "see some black people in a slum."  I remember my mother shamefacedly trying to talk them out of it.

So you can imagine my astonishment when I got to puttering around Western Europe a few years later and discovered that Britain and France had slums and no-go zones, too.  Then I got to Eastern Europe and was hailed by a Nicaraguan student -- "ah, Americans, not racist like the Soviets."

If this is my 20th high school reunion I'm far too old to be shocked, but I was, um, surprised to hear people on the BBC feeling betrayed that this carnage had been unleashed by their "fellow Britons."

Americans who have lived in many European countries for any length of time will tell you, much as they love the people, the atmosphere, the politics, the way of life, they often are surprised at how much a foreigner they feel after decades, marriage, children, real commitment to the society.  Immigrants from less-developed countries will often tell you worse.

You want American exceptionalism, here it is:  we are better, not perfect, not faultless, not immune from such attacks but better, at offering anyone who comes here the chance to fit in as much as they want to.  Have dark skin?  You're still American.  Speak funny-sounding English?  Hey, join the club.  Practice an unusual religion -- you've still got a fighting shot.  Have a baby here, as of yet, anyhow, and the kid is an American, no questions asked.

This isn't something any political movement can claim credit for -- we're an immigrant society.  And it does have a dark side -- Americanization can be pretty relentless, and yes, the resulting culture can be rather lowest common denominator.  (On the other hand, much European tv is abominably bad too.) 

But this is something American politics can ruin.  We can ruin it by preaching a version of American exceptionalism that ignores our failings and is so grandiose we couldn't possibly live up to it. 

We can ruin it by undermining the level of tolerance we've achieved, by failing to use our secular and spiritual pulpits to keep America's climate open and inclusive.  (Compare the pronouncements of Blair, other British officials, and British religious figures with some of the things that happened after 9-11, when clergypeople from conservative and "liberal" denominations were denounced for appearing on pulpits with Muslim clergy.)

And, by the way, we could ruin it by slamming our doors shut on immigrants.

With that, I'm off to celebrate that temple to liberty, the American high school.  (Gulp.)

Have Foot, Will Shoot Posted by Michael Signer

Last week, I wrote a piece suggesting that Al Qaeda's strategy to continue to catalyze world opinion against America may have backfired by attacking Great Britain during the G-8 summit.  The argument there was that Al Qaeda, viewed as a strategic actor, wants and needs to have major nations tilting against the United States and toward sympathy with Palestine and allegedly embattled Muslim nations in general.  But it screws this up by attacking a nation who's not as obviously polarizing -- the United Kingdom.

A WaPo article today by Robin Wright suggests that Al Qaeda may have stumbled in another way -- this time domestically (among its own people) rather than internationally (among the world community).  The article discusses survey results among several Muslim nations about Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and democratization.  The survey was completed before the London bombings, but its results suggest what Al Qaeda was already up against:

Osama bin Laden's standing has dropped significantly in some pivotal Muslim countries, while support for suicide bombings and other acts of violence has "declined dramatically," according to a new survey released yesterday.

Predominantly Muslim populations in a sampling of six North African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries share to a "considerable degree" Western concerns about Islamic extremism, according to the poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, conducted by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan and nonprofit organization.

The numbers are significant.  2 percent of Lebanese respondents and 7 percent of Turkish thought OBL would "do the right thing regarding world affairs."  In Morocco, OBL's support dropped from 50% to about 25% over the last two years, and in Indonesia from 58 percent to 37 percent.

The one exception was in support for opposition to the American occupying forces in Iraq.  Again, taking everyday, lay Muslims as the audience (rather than supercharged fanatical extremists), this makes a certain kind of sense.  It's easy to rationalize, generically, attacks on the imperialist superpower; it's harder to accept the strategy when it bleeds across boundaries into countries that you can conceive as your neighbor.  Ms. Wright quotes an academic:

"Muslims, like non-Muslims, are plugged into the world. . . . It is one thing to be caught up in the supposed glamour of attacking the superpower or global bully, but it is quite another to have to pay the consequences economically, politically -- not to mention personally. This is what has happened in places like Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey, where many people now see extremist Islam as a threat to their lives, not a fantasy game of kick Uncle Sam."

The tipping point will come when everyday Muslims see extremist Islam, lurking in their communities and living nextdoor, as the threat.  People overshoot their aims all the time (as we've done in Iraq).  Hopefully, Al Qaeda has done the same thing by bombing innocent civilians in Great Britain, a country that has been gracious about assimilating Muslims (like, ironically, its large Pakistani community). 

God willing, they're pushing themselves over a cliff already.  If only the Bush Administration had the diplomatic savvy to give them a hand.

Facing a Terrorist Posted by Suzanne Nossel

The story is out today about how one of the London suicide bombers was a beloved teacher of immigrant kids in a primary school.  He is being described as "gently spoken, endlessly patient and hugely popular with children."

This is very tough to square with the mentality driving the Global War on Terror.  Among the 19 9/11 hijackers, there never really emerged a human story that gave one cause to consider them as anything but the face of evil.  It will take time to see what if any impact these revelations from Britain have on how terrorist acts by extremists are viewed, but in the meantime one personal story that I've long struggled with:

During the early 1990s I worked in South Africa for something called the National Peace Accord, a multi-party initiative to curb the political violence burning in the country's townships in-between Nelson Mandela's release from prison in 1990 and the first elections in 1994.

At the time, one of the notorious political prisoners in the country was a guy named Robert McBride who was on death row for having plotted a 1984 bombing at a beachfront bar called Magoos that had killed 3 people and injured 69.   The incident was part of the ANC's campaign of violence against "soft targets" - meaning civilians.   I had grown up associating the term terrorist primarily with Yasser Arafat and I mentally classed McBride in the same camp.   When I heard or read his name, the image was one of a dangerous deviant.

In my Peace Accord work I dealt daily with the ANC (a signatory to the Accord), but was often frustrated with the party's disorganization.  The ANC lacked a full-time regional coordinator who could help me plan our efforts to mediate disputes, convene local multi-party committees and monitor rallies and funerals.    One day an ANC contact told me that a new staffer had just been hired and put him on the phone.  This man was on the ball, cooperative and helpful.  We finalized plans for that weekend's rally and exchanged phone numbers.  Just before hanging up I asked his name.  I will never forget the feeling in my stomach when he said Robert McBride.

McBride had been pardoned as part of a political deal.  He is now (no joke) a police chief:

McBride is also the subject of a terrific documentary on SA's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

At the time I encountered McBride, I was dealing daily with members of the holdover apartheid era South African police and armed forces, people responsible for razing shanty-towns, brutal interrogations, deaths in detention, and (as we suspected and was later proven) funneling guns and money to stoke the very violence they professed to be trying to curb.  How to compare these men to McBride?

The ANC's cause was what had led me to South Africa - I thought theirs was the great liberation struggle of my time, and (as the daughter of 2 South Africans) I wanted to be part of it in some way.  I gradually understood that the definition of terrorist that covered McBride also probably covered Nelson Mandela, who led the ANC into armed resistance.   

Remember the saying "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter"?  That's not something we've heard much since 9/11.  We associate it with another kind of terrorism an older and less menacing (though still deadly) version.  Freedom fighters are not out to destroy whole swaths of society.

What of al Qaeda?   I put them in a singular class:  a nihilistic cult of death with no concrete political aspirations or grievances, no openness to reason, no capacity to engage productively in society.  With many notable exceptions including this piece by Zbigniew Brzezinski, pointing out that some terrorists may be acting in part based on legitimate grievances has been a political no-go zone in America for the last four years. 

We don't know enough about this British schoolteacher to say whether his case challenges any of that.  That he lived a quiet, respectable life and was an ostensibly productive member of society says nothing about what his grievances and goals - real or imagined - may have been.    There's a good chance the primary school job was nothing more than a foolproof cover.  Maybe he was a naive flunky who got lured in to do the dirty work.  Was his effort part of a wholesale assault on the West, an heir to 9/11 or did he see it as something different?

We are a long way from understanding the motivations behind this schoolteacher-turned-suicide-bomber (or was it the other way 'round?), his predecessors, and those who will inevitably follow.    But we shouldn't let ourselves off the hook without even trying.

No Excuses Posted by Lorelei Kelly

Well, I thought I could write something this evening about the Irregular Warfare conference that I attended Monday and Tuesday at Quantico, VA Marine Corps Headquarters.  Instead, however, having just taken a flight from DC to New Orleans to visit southern kin and having just returned from Jacques Imo's restaurant where I got to choose from a menu that included amberjack with mojo sauce and something called Godzilla meets the green tomatoes (this is a batter fried soft shell crab atop an empire state building of tomatoes) and having just taken a pause from listening to a song called "Fat Shrimp" at the Maple Leaf Bar, and jumped at the chance for ten minutes on a powerbook, I don't think I can do justice to the Marine Corps at the moment.

Suffice it to say that the Irregular Warfare conference gave me much hope and encouragement that our military institutions are growing and changing  and learning many lessons despite the hardships of high tempo deployment and the Cold War additctions of the US Congress.  And, not surprisingly, the Marine Corps is leading the way to a modern understanding of how to fight wars in an era of globalization.  The Marines are progressive traditionalists--or perhaps traditional progressives is a better way to put it. A scrappy and inventive group, the Marines are updating their storied Small Wars manual to better reflect how the world has changed.  One theme of the conference was that war remains unchanged--it is still a contest of wills between enemies. What has changed is the technology available to impose said will.  Moreover, defeating today's enemies will require far more than policy made at the pointy end of the spear. Prevention is key.

The Marines have been expeditionary since their 1775 genesis--and so it is in their very nature to lead the way in figuring out how to fight in an era when large massed combat will be replaced by hundreds of conflicts--often taking place far away from US borders and at the level of the individual.   Another common theme of the conference was the need for far more investments in understanding culture, psychology, anthropology and other social sciences.  Oddly, these discussions reminded me of the recent comments of Karl Rove--that pouty scamp and national security risk--who resides in the White House and makes pronouncements about how liberals want to give therapy to terrorists. Well, Karl should hang out at Quantico to realize just how ridiculous he is.  The Irregular Warfare conference covered everything from group dynamics to social bonding to understanding the identities, motivations and intentions of terrorists.  Seems that achieving victory in the age of terror is going to require a lot of time on the couch for everyone.

I'm going to lose my turn at the powerbook in 30 seconds, but promise to write more about what I learned at Quantico before I head North.

Bolton Down the Hatches Posted by Suzanne Nossel

The latest word from the WashPost is that Bolton is now saying he'd deign to accept a recess appointment.  Offering him one is bad idea on an array of fronts, as I wrote last week in The Prospect.

Stygius (whoever that is, exactly), asked me for my take on a side-note in the Post piece, reporting that Bolton was seeking to enlarge the office suite allotted to the so-called USUN-W, the Washington office of the U.S. Ambassador to the UN.  The Post reported that:

Two months ago, while his confirmation was in trouble, Bolton began efforts to double the office space reserved within the State Department for the ambassador to the United Nations, according to three senior department officials who were involved in handling the request.

Previous ambassadors have kept a small staff in Washington in a modest suite. Bolton told several colleagues he needs more space and a larger staff in Washington because, if confirmed, he intends to spend more time here than his predecessors did.

"Bolton isn't going to sit in New York while policy gets made in Washington," the administration source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the source lacks authorization to discuss this on the record. But Bolton's efforts to obtain more space have encountered resistance. Two colleagues said Bolton's request was inappropriate because he had not been confirmed.

My take is this:

- USUN-W is an important office, because - as I lay out in the Prospect piece - a key element of the UN Ambassadorship is to not just represent the U.S. at the UN, but also to represent the UN's interests and concerns to official Washington.  The State Department office takes the lead on this;

- Bolton's move, however, raises several concerns:

1.  That, contrary to Condi Rice's promise that Bolton will be kept on a tight leash, if appointed Bolton intends to make the most of his contacts and sway in Washington.

2.  Bolton intends to focus heavily on Washington even though, with no U.S. perm rep at the UN for 6 months and the U.S.'s influence at the world body and with our allies around the world in question, the efforts of the ambassador must be trained on repairing relations with other countries and advocating U.S. positions and policies to the UN membership.

3.  Despite all the misgivings about Bolton's high-handedness and power-mongering, there's not the faintest sign of repentance on his part.   This latest maneuver - done while Bolton's nomination was on the rocks - signals just the opposite.