President Bush’s nomination of neoconservative pit bull John R. Bolton to become ambassador to the United Nations is raising red flags among liberals.

“Bush gives the U.N. the finger,” complained the Nation’s David Corn. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, signaling a nasty confirmation battle ahead, called the selection of Bolton “a disappointing choice and one that sends all the wrong signals.”

Bolton has made no secret of his disdain for the United Nations. “There is no such thing as the United Nations,” he said as early as 1994. “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, when it suits our interest and we can get others to go along.”

Despite the rhetoric, it would be foolish to dismiss Bolton, now undersecretary of State, as an obstructionist conservative troglodyte. In fact, there is a rich GOP tradition of appointing critics of the United Nations as ambassadors to that body, a tradition that has proved remarkably effective.

It began with President Ford’s naming of Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1975. Moynihan did not just display contempt for the United Nations, he flaunted it.

When the General Assembly passed a resolution calling Zionism racism, Moynihan declared: “This is a lie.” After Idi Amin spoke to the General Assembly in October 1975 and called for the “extinction of Israel as a state,” Moynihan did not hide behind the diplomatic niceties usually on display in the chamber — he called Amin a “racist murderer.” Moynihan was defending liberal democracy against what he saw as the despotic Third World countries that were perverting the true mission of the United Nations.

The same went for Ronald Reagan’s ambassador, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick. She had no patience for what she viewed as the idiocies of the General Assembly that had been tolerated and encouraged by her Carter administration predecessor, Andrew Young. Like her fellow neoconservative, Moynihan, she bluntly assailed the “nonaligned movement” of Third World countries. After the 1983 liberation of Grenada, Kirkpatrick told the Security Council that the U.N. Charter “does not require that people submit supinely to terror, nor that their neighbors be indifferent to their terrorization.”

Where does this put Bolton? Like Moynihan and Kirkpatrick before him, Bolton’s well-known antipathy to the United Nations means that he is well-suited for the job of trying to rebuild the institution, which has accomplished the remarkable feat of squandering what little credibility it has left.

Unlike the colorless John C. Danforth — who left the U.N. ambassadorship in January and had little effect during his tenure — Bolton may be able to convince the right that the organization is changing while simultaneously keeping the pressure on to ensure that it really does.

In fact, Bolton carries more credibility with the right than his predecessors. After all, he was admired by former Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., who tried to cut off U.S. dues to the United Nations in the 1990s and demanded its reform.

But Bolton also has the intellectual neocon sheen, from having spent time at the American Enterprise Institute and from his close ties to Vice President Dick Cheney. He bridges the gap between the two camps. After all, attacking the United Nations really only became intellectually respectable once the neocons joined in during the 1970s. Until then, anti-U.N. sentiment was largely confined to right-wing kooks.

But these days, conservative fervor about the United Nations has reached a fever pitch. At the annual February gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference, the right made the United Nations its main target. Wayne LaPierre, the chief executive of the National Rifle Assn., railed against the United Nations for trying to take away weapons around the globe, while Cheney gave Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., the Defender of the Constitution award for investigating the United Nations’ oil-for-food program in Iraq.

Most conservatives, of course, realize by now that abolishing, or withdrawing from, the United Nations is never going to happen. Instead, they’re seeking to bring it to heel.

The strategy is outlined by former Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Dore Gold in his book, “Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos.” His solution is to create a bloc of countries — including Eastern Europe nations — to push a pro-Western agenda.

With Bush pushing for democracy in the Middle East, Bolton has a chance to help denounce and purge the United Nations of the inclination to whitewash terrorism and defend the tyranny that has festered in its chambers for decades.

For too long, the organization has functioned as a kind of laboratory of anti-Americanism, and Bolton’s plain-speaking approach may be the only way to achieve results.

— Jacob Heilbrunn is an editorial writer at the Times.