The battered and bruised Bush Administration is being pressured to make a foreign policy mistake that would further infuriate its conservative base—nominate defeated liberal Republican Rep. Jim Leach as the next U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Leach is a favorite of the crowd that favors world government financed by global taxes. He would fit in quite nicely at the world body. But he would not be a reliable defender of American interests.

The candidate being put forward by the pro-American lobby is international lawyer and former Ambassador Frank Ruddy, who has the experience, credentials and character to represent the U.S. effectively at the international organization. He believes in moving the organization away from grand visions of “global governance.” Ruddy was the Deputy Chairman of a U.N. Peacekeeping Referendum for the Western Sahara in 1994 and has testified about the problems and flaws in U.N. operations worldwide.

While other names besides Leach have been put forward to replace Bolton, such as Zalmay Khalilzad, who is leaving his post as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ruddy has direct experience in working with the U.N. and understands, like Bolton did, the obstacles that stand in the way of asserting American interests at the world body. Ruddy would be able to pick up where Bolton left off.

Ruddy’s impressive career has included serving as general counsel for the U.S. Department of Energy; U.S. Ambassador to Equatorial Guinea; and assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Ruddy is also very familiar with never-ending efforts at U.N. “reform.” In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, he noted that former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, who served as Undersecretary for Management at the U.N., had submitted a report to then-U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1993 proposing the streamlining of the U.N., in order to eliminate waste and fraud and save hundreds of millions of dollars. But Ruddy noted that “Boutros-Ghali, as Thornburgh has stated publicly, had the report suppressed and remaining copies shredded.”

If U.N. “reform” is still supposed to be a priority at the world body, Ruddy knows what needs to be done and who and what stand in the way.

Reps. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat, and Jim Walsh, a Republican, are leading the congressional campaign to have President Bush nominate Leach, arguing that he would set “a new course in foreign policy” at the world organization. That is certainly the case. But it would be a foreign policy more in line with the views of liberals who would like to see the U.N. further expand its scope and authority in global affairs. Leach is noteworthy for co-sponsoring a bill, along with Rep. Albert Wynn (D-Md.), to create a U.N. Emergency Peace Service, giving the world body even more power in an area where its peacekeepers have been accused of notorious human rights abuses, including the rape of children.

Nominating Leach would add insult to injury in the ongoing saga of the failure to get Bolton confirmed to the post. Bolton had been serving in a recess capacity, through a special appointment by President Bush, because Senate liberals wouldn’t allow the Senate to have an up-or-down vote on his nomination. While liberal Democrats have taken most of the blame, one of those who sabotaged Bolton’s nomination, liberal Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee, was rewarded with White House help during his battle to retain his Senate seat. Chafee beat his conservative challenger in the primary but lost the general election to a Democrat, leaving the White House without a Senate seat in Rhode Island and without Bolton ultimately getting what he deserved?an up-or-down vote in the full Senate and a permanent appointment.

The White House resubmitted Bolton’s nomination to the Senate after the Republicans lost the House and Senate on November 7, but the ingrate Chafee, who never even voted for President Bush in 2004, still wouldn’t consider giving Bolton the up-or-down vote that he deserved. So Bolton threw in the towel, offering his resignation. It was a fiasco all the way around, when an objective assessment shows that Bolton had performed excellently at the world body, defending U.S. interests and lining up important votes against U.S. adversaries and enemies on matters involving the North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons programs.

If anybody deserved the post of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., it was Bolton, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the U.N. system and understood the insidious process whereby the U.N. exploits almost every world problem and crisis to gather more power for itself.

It was Bolton, for example, who noticed that someone had slipped a provision into a proposed final document of the 2005 World Summit endorsing global taxes. The U.S. does not accept global taxes, Bolton declared, to the astonishment of the U.N., its lobby, and the major media. The provision was rewritten so that the U.S. would not be put on record in favor of international taxation schemes. This is just one example of how Bolton was determined not to have the U.N. lobby, which includes very powerful non-government organizations that play a largely behind-the-scenes role at the world body, slip something into a conference document that the U.S. and American taxpayers would oppose and come to regret.

Leach’s defenders say he has experience at the U.N., having served there under then-Ambassador George H.W. Bush. But he has proven to be a captive of the well-funded U.N. lobby, which includes the Open Society Institute of George Soros, the U.N. Foundation of Ted Turner, and Citizens for Global Solutions (CGS), a nice-sounding organization that wants people to forget that it was originally known as the World Federalist Association (WFA), an advocate of world government financed by global taxes. Leach was a featured speaker at the recent national CGS conference, where CGS President Charles Brown tried to assure me that the group was not officially in support of what the WFA used to stand for. In its report card on members of Congress, which evaluates votes on everything from the “global environment” to U.N. funding to rights for terrorists, Leach got a grade of “A.”

Leach is said to have “bipartisan” support, since Republican Walsh is one of the two initiators of the letter on his behalf, and a few signers of the letter are Republicans as well. Not surprisingly, all of them are liberal Republicans. The vast majority of the signers are liberal Democrats. Like Leach, Walsh, for example, got a grade of “A” from the CGS. It would be a tremendous coup for the liberals if they get Leach installed as Ambassador to the U.N. under the cover of phony bipartisanship.

Ambassador Frank Ruddy, by contrast, is independent of the U.N. lobby and has testified before the U.S. Congress on U.N. corruption. He is not afraid to shake things up in a bureaucracy as large and complex as the U.N. He would not need any on-the-job training from a U.S. mission to the U.N. staff that includes John Kerry’s sister Peggy.

(Author’s note: Ruddy serves on the board of America’s Survival, Inc. http://www.usasurvival.org, which I serve as president).

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