To Ousted Boss, Arms Watchdog Was Seen as an Obstacle in Iraq by 1kiki

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To Ousted Boss, Arms Watchdog Was Seen as an Obstacle in Iraq

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Saturday, October 19, 2013 20:36
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Saturday, October 19, 2013 1:33 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

To Ousted Boss, Arms Watchdog Was Seen as an Obstacle in Iraq
Marlise Simons, New York Times, October 13, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/world/to-ousted-boss-arms-watchdog-w
as-seen-as-an-obstacle-in-iraq.html

Paris - More than a decade before the international agency that monitors chemical weapons won the Nobel Peace Prize, John R. Bolton marched into the office of its boss to inform him that he would be fired. "He told me I had 24 hours to resign," said José Bustani, who was director general of the agency, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. "And if I didn’t I would have to face the consequences."

Mr. Bolton, then an under secretary of state and later the American ambassador to the United Nations, told Mr. Bustani that the Bush administration was unhappy with his management style. But Mr. Bustani, 68, who had been re-elected unanimously just 11 months earlier, refused, and weeks later, on April 22, 2002, he was ousted in a special session of the 145-nation chemical weapons watchdog.

The story behind his ouster has been the subject of interpretation and speculation for years, and Mr. Bustani, a Brazilian diplomat, has kept a low profile since then. But with the agency thrust into the spotlight with news of the Nobel Prize last week, Mr. Bustani agreed to discuss what he said was the real reason: the Bush administration’s fear that chemical weapons inspections in Iraq would conflict with Washington’s rationale for invading it. Several officials involved in the events, some speaking publicly about them for the first time, confirmed his account.
[...]
As Mr. Bustani tells the story, the campaign against him began in late 2001, after Iraq and Libya had indicated that they wanted to join (Yep and we invaded both) the Chemical Weapons Convention, the international treaty that the watchdog agency oversees. To join, countries have to provide a list of stockpiles and agree to the inspection and destruction of weapons, as Syria did last month after applying. Inspectors from the agency were making plans to visit Iraq in late January 2002, he said.

"We had a lot of discussions because we knew it would be difficult," Mr. Bustani, who is now Brazil’s ambassador to France, said Friday in his embassy office in Paris. The plans, which he had conveyed to a number of countries, "caused an uproar in Washington," he said. Soon, he was receiving warnings from American and other diplomats. "By the end of December 2001, it became evident that the Americans were serious about getting rid of me," he said. "People were telling me, ‘They want your head.’ "
[...]
But Mr. Bustani and some senior officials, both in Brazil and the United States, say Washington acted because it believed that the organization under Mr. Bustani threatened to become an obstacle to the administration’s plans to invade Iraq. As justification, Washington was claiming that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, possessed chemical weapons, but Mr. Bustani said his own experts had told him that those weapons were destroyed in the 1990s, after the Persian Gulf war.

"Everybody knew there weren’t any," he said. "An inspection would make it obvious there were no weapons to destroy. This would completely nullify the decision to invade."
[...]
On Friday, while fielding a flow of messages in his office, Mr. Bustani said he felt gratified about the Nobel Prize news and did not regret his days at the agency. "I had to start it from the beginning, create a code of conduct, a program of technical assistance," he said. "We almost doubled the membership."

He reflected on the contrast between Iraq and Syria. Inspectors from the agency are there now, cataloging the government’s stockpiles of chemical weapons as a step forward in Syria’s civil war, now in its third year. (Yep thanks to Vladimirovich Putin)

"In 2002, the U.S. was determined to oppose Iraq joining the convention against the weapons, which it did not even have," he said. "This time, joining the convention and having the inspectors present is part of the Syrian peace plan. It is such a fundamental shift."

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Saturday, October 19, 2013 5:20 AM

FREMDFIRMA

You ever known one of those egomanical jock-jerk gym teachers who managed to offend EVERYONE in range within seconds of opening his mouth ?

Well take that and fucking SQUARE it, and you got Bolton - sending him to the UN as our rep got us kicked off multiple councils, ruined any hope of support for our imperialist adventures and prettymuch had EVERYONE ON THE PLANET despising us within a month.
Whoever made that decision should be dragged out back and SHOT.

Honestly, we wasted Clinton as a president, we shoulda made him our UN Rep, we'd have owned the whole goddamn world and they'd have been happy to give it to us, but nooooo.... the right wing had to send the scummiest, most offensive complete slimebag asshole they could find to dictate to people who were in essence, holding all the important cards, and you see how *THAT* turned out.

And if you wanna know what Bolton is really like, well take a look at Rappy and imagine him even MORE offensive.

Seriously, Bolton is even worse than ann clueless or rush limberger, he's not just a complete tool living in his own reality, he's so insane as to actually BELIEVE the bullshit that spews unwanted from his goddamn piehole, he's Gollum with a mustache, and the only place he belongs is at the bottom of a fucking sewer right next to Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger and Oliver North.

-Frem

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Saturday, October 19, 2013 8:36 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

"Whoever made that decision ..."

John Bolton
dek Chip East / Reuters

As a lawyer for the Bush campaign during the 2000 Florida recount, John Bolton was held in such high esteem that Dick Cheney said Bolton was deserving of any job he wanted. Five years later, the walrus-mustached gentleman who had previously said about the United Nations that "The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference" was nominated ... get ready ... for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Oh, the irony.

Senate Dems (and some Republicans) were not having it, though, resulting in Bush having to appoint Bolton a temporary representative to the U.N., where his confrontational manner meshed none too well with the purposefully deliberative body. When the president again submitted Bolton's nomination in 2006, Bolton decided to ditch the job.

Read more: http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1872508
_1872490_1872488,00.html #ixzz2iDZ90yEg

According to this it was Bush. I wonder if it was really Cheney.

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