More Mark Steyn

Steyn identifies why the left is in a dither over Bolton's nomination as ambassador to the U.N.:

Yet the assumption behind much of the criticism of Bolton from the likes of Kerry is that, regardless of his government's foreign policy, a U.N. ambassador has to be at some level a U.N. booster. Twenty years ago, Secretary of State George Schulz used to welcome the Reagan administration's ambassadorial appointments to his office and invite each chap to identify his country on the map. The guy who'd just landed the embassy in Chad would invariably point to Chad. "No," Schulz would say, "this is your country" -- and point to the United States. Nobody would expect a U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union to be a big booster for the Soviets. And, given that in a unipolar world the most plausible challenger to the United States is transnationalism, these days the Schulz test is even more pertinent for the U.N. ambassador: his country is the United States, not the ersatz jurisdiction of Annan's embryo world government.

Reporting on the Bolton appointment in the Financial Times, James Harding wrote,''Mr. Bush is eager to re-engage with allies, but is unapologetic about the Iraq war, the policy of preemption and the transformational agenda." "Unapologetic"? What exactly should he be apologizing for? The toppling of Saddam? The Iraq election? The first green shoots of liberty in the desert of Middle Eastern "stability"? When you unpick the assumptions behind Harding's sentence, Bush's principal offense is that he remains "unapologetic" about doing all this without the blessing of the formal transnational decision-making process.

He ends with:
Bolton's sin isn't that he's "undiplomatic," but that he's correct.