What's At Stake In the Bolton Nomination

If you read the latest on John Bolton you start to get a sense of the screwy politics of this whole thing. It isn't really the case that "the Bush administration" wants to put the guy in and the Democrats are trying to stop them. Rather, the Bush administration was divided on second term national security personnel decisions, the pro-Bolton faction basically lost out (they wanted him to be Deputy Secretary), and he got UN Ambassador as a kind of booby prize. What's at stake here will be the ability of Rice, Zoellick, and Hadley to effectively wage bureacratic war against Dick Cheney and his allies. You can get a sense of this from the behavior of Richard Lugar, whose clearly the sort of Republican who wants Rice to win. He's "supporting" the Bolton nomination out of loyalty to the White House, but he's also made a lot of procedural decisions as Foreign Relations Chair that make it harder for Bolton to be confirmed. Clearly, I think, he'd like him to be beaten (as would Rice, etc.) but he wants someone else to do the beating. And it really couldn't be clearer that Hagel is casting around rather desperately trying to square a desire not to vote for Bolton with a desire not to be too egregiously disloyal.