Joseph Kony is a lot of things to a lot of people. To his followers in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), he is God-like, with mystical powers that render him immortal. To the president of Uganda, he is a murderous gadfly who has been terrorizing the population of the northern provinces for nearly two decades. […]
Mark Leon Goldberg
Mark Leon Goldberg is the executive editor of UN Dispatch and host of the Global Dispatches podcast.
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UN-Reformed
Under normal circumstances, the stalled negotiations over the most significant package of United Nations reforms in 60 years would be front-page news. But as public and media attention is focused on John Roberts, William Rehnquist, and Hurricane Katrina, it is easy to forget that next week the United States will play host to the largest […]
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Bring Him On
In June, the Web site that served as the public clearinghouse of news and analysis on John Bolton’s fledgling United Nations nomination, Steve Clemons’ blog www.theWashingtonNote.com, reprinted a satiric cartoon depicting Bolton’s first day at the UN. In the drawing, the political cartoonist Jonah Lobe portrayed a mustachioed Bolton clinging to the underside of a […]
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Trick or Treaty
An eleventh-hour attempt by the Republican House leadership to save the unpopular Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) trade pact has apparently shifted into overdrive. If rumors abuzz on Capitol Hill are to be believed, members of Congress who seek CAFTA’s defeat had best stock up on No-Doz and Red Bull. And if you’re […]
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Docudrama
The prospect of a recess appointment for John Bolton has loomed ever since a second cloture vote on the nomination failed last week. Now, as Congress approaches the July 4 holiday, Senate Democrats have stuck to their pledge to tie up Bolton’s nomination until the president acquiesces to bipartisan requests that documents relevant to the […]
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Khartoum Characters
As President George W. Bush sat down at a joint press conference with South African President Thabo Mbeki on June 1, he preempted a question about the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, one of the topics of the two men’s White House luncheon. It had been 142 days since Bush had uttered the […]
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Leader of the Band
Back in January, not long after Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist committed his caucus to the nuclear option, Senator John Warner came as close as he has yet in taking a side on the filibuster debate now at a rolling boil in the Senate. Not surprisingly, for the seasoned legislator, it came the way of […]
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Bolton From the Blue
About halfway through Senator Richard Lugar’s droning opening statement in the May 12 confirmation hearing of John Bolton to become the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a yawn made its way around the press table. And it lingered — until Lugar ceded the floor to the incalculable senator from Ohio, George Voinovich, when […]
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Zoellick’s Appeasement Tour
On April 14, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick became the highest ranking U.S. envoy to set foot on Sudanese soil since Secretary of State Colin Powell’s September 2004 declaration that the government of Sudan was complicit in an ongoing genocide in the Darfur region. The presence of such a senior U.S. envoy in the […]
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Conversion Diversion
By now, John Bolton’s crass assessment of the utility of 10 floors of the UN building in New York is well known. Known, too, is his disdain for the very idea of international law and his dealings with foreign agents. Indeed, in his decades in and out of public service and think tankdom, he has […]
