Reply #34: "Lugar, Hagel and Chafee need to hear from you. Be polite."

[swag]

from the esteemed Laura Rozen at www.warandpiece.com

"For now, one battle at a time. Lugar, Hagel and Chafee need to hear from you. Be polite; these are the GOP guys who have voiced willingness to hear the facts before making their vote. But the WaPo revelations overnight really reveal inside-Bush administration concerns about Bolton to a whole new degree of magnitude. This is a man neither Rice nor Powell trusted to be an honest broker on WMD issues, which was, after all, Bolton's job. They were, after all, Bolton's bosses. According to the WaPo's Dafna Linzer, Bolton has repeatedly suppressed Iran intelligence from his superiors, Powell, Armitage and Rice, to the point, Linzer reports, that Rice has quietly excluded Bolton from the State Department discussion on Iran.

This goes so far beyond the revelations that Bolton is an unpleasant person to work with, to demonstrating a private agenda obsession that puts this country's national security at risk. There's ample evidence that Bolton's bosses don't trust him, and that he gave them enormous reasons to distrust him, indeed, to set up alternative channels to get the information they required to serve the president and the country. Bolton has shown repeatedly that he is unwilling to respect the chain of command and that he went to some lengths to sabotage his superiors. He should be kept outside it. If the Vice President wants Bolton on his staff, he should hire him. Not make him his operative in NY, where Bolton would be about the least credible vehicle for bringing the case on Iran's nuclear program to the world that one could conceive of. Not even good soldier Condoleezza Rice will permit Bolton to participate in the State Iran debate, the Washington Post reports, because he deliberately withheld information on international opposition to his lobbying effort against the IAEA's ElBaradei from her. What more of a non-endorsement is there than that?"