WASHINGTON (AP) – John R. Bolton, President Bush’s choice to be U.N. ambassador, once said it wouldn’t matter if 10 stories of the world body’s headquarters simply vanished. He has also said the United States is the world’s only real authority.

He once lambasted the chief U.N. human rights monitor as a rogue bureaucrat whose conduct “is a threat that we ignore at our own risk.”

Democrats are gathering an arsenal of such material, and predict a contentious confirmation debate in the Senate. If confirmed, Bolton would enter the belly of the beast he has criticized as outsized and ineffectual.

“There is no such thing as the United Nations,” he said in a 1994 speech. “There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that is the United States.”

Bolton’s nomination is somewhat out of step with Bush’s second-term emphasis on partnership and cooperation with European allies and with a recent detente in the administration’s squabbles with the U.N. bureaucracy. He would succeed John Danforth, a former senator and an ordained minister.

Currently the State Department’s arms control chief, Bolton is a hard-liner in discussions about nuclear ambitions in Iran and North Korea. He was similarly hawkish about Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, and he is an enthusiastic proponent of a North American defensive missile shield.

Bolton keeps a model of a hand grenade in his State Department office, befitting his reputation for lobbing verbal bombshells.

“Admittedly, not all American governmental institutions are democratic,” Bolton wrote in a 1999 opinion piece in the journal Legal Times. “But even if key government bodies are far removed from popular accountability and unelected bureaucrats have been delegated vast power, they nonetheless are part of a coherent constitutional structure. By contrast, we find no coherence in the United Nations, just a mass of institutions that has grown over the years like a coral reef. “

Bolton’s critics in the Senate have a lot to work with. A Yale-trained lawyer, he is known as brilliant, prolific, obstinate and mouthy. He served in the previous Bush administration, made the rounds of op-ed pages and conferences as a conservative think tank scholar during the Clinton administration and helped out on the Bush-Cheney legal team during the Florida recount in 2000.

Two years ago, Bolton denounced North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as a “tyrannical dictator” at a time when the official State Department line was much more accommodating.

Furious, a North Korean spokesman said that “such human scum” would be closed out of negotiations over the country’s nuclear weapons program.

The North Koreans were already leery of Bolton. In 1999, while out of government, he said the United States should be “indifferent” to normal relations with Pyongyang.

“We should also make clear that diplomatic normalization with the U.S. is only going to come when North Korea becomes a normal country,” he said then.

Writing in The Dallas Morning News in 2000, Bolton accused the Clinton administration of “an unambiguous act of appeasement” for agreeing to shield Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi if he handed over two suspects in the Pan Am 103 bombing for trial.

“Mr. Gadhafi likely will never have to answer for his role in the tragedy,” Bolton wrote. “We can only hope that public release of the black-and-white evidence of our surrender will slow the administration’s rush to normalize diplomatic and commercial relations with his still-criminal regime.”

In a 2000 op-ed in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Bolton questioned whether U.N. peacekeeping missions were becoming too plentiful and ambitious. He also said Kofi Annan, then as now the U.N. Secretary-General, was too eager to transform U.N. peacekeepers into warriors.

“This is not simply a budgeteer’s bean-counting quarrel over personnel levels, but a fundamental disagreement about the most appropriate and feasible role for the U.N. in international conflicts,” Bolton wrote.

“Peacekeeping historically has relied on the consent of and cooperation by parties to a conflict. Where that is absent, not only does peacekeeping fail, but so too will ‘peace’ itself.”

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