A great deal of attention has been paid to the stratagems of John Bolton, the fiercely anti-UN diplomat whom President Bush recently appointed US ambassador to the UN, and rightly so. But what has tended to get lost in these discussions are the malign synergies between a Third World suspicious that so-called humanitarian interventions are only colonialism redux and a unilateralist US administration wedded to the concept of pre-emptive war against enemies that it equates with states that violate human rights.