© Boing BoingJohn Bolton
"John Bolton is a bully," José Bustani, the retired Brazilian diplomat and former head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, told me when I reached him by phone in Paris earlier this month.
There are a number of people who claim to have been bullied or intimidated by Bolton - including Bustani. The latter's criticisms of the famously mustachioed hawk have been public for many years now, but some of the details of his tense encounter with Bolton at the OPCW have never been reported before in English.
In early 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration was putting intense pressure on Bustani to quit as director-general of the OPCW - despite the fact that he had been unanimously re-elected to head the 145-nation body just two years earlier. His transgression? Negotiating with Saddam Hussein's Iraq to allow OPCW weapons inspectors to make unannounced visits to that country - thereby undermining Washington's rationale for regime change.
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