Jacob Heilbrunn, an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, writes oday under his own name that the UN needs the "bitter medicine" of John Bolton.

...there is a rich GOP tradition of appointing critics of the U.N. as ambassadors to that body, a tradition that has proved remarkably effective....

When the General Assembly passed a resolution calling Zionism racism, Moynihan declared: "This is a lie." After Idi Amin spoke to the General Assembly in October 1975 and called for the "extinction of Israel as a state," Moynihan did not hide behind the diplomatic niceties usually on display in the chamber — he called Amin a "racist murderer." Moynihan was defending liberal democracy against what he saw as the despotic Third World countries that were perverting the true mission of the United Nations.

The same went for Ronald Reagan's ambassador, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick. She had no patience for what she viewed as the idiocies of the General Assembly that had been tolerated and encouraged by her Carter administration predecessor, Andrew Young. Like her fellow neoconservative, Moynihan, she bluntly assailed the "nonaligned movement" of Third World countries. After the 1983 liberation of Grenada, Kirkpatrick told the Security Council that the U.N. Charter "does not require that people submit supinely to terror, nor that their neighbors be indifferent to their terrorization."

Ed Lasky   3 9 05