Unsure the Senate would confirm his nomination to stay on as U.N. ambassador, John Bolton decided to drop the fight and leave the Bush administration at the end of last year. Why? “I didn’t like the direction of our policy on too many issues, particularly Iran, North Korea, and Arab-Israeli issues,” he writes in a new book, due out in stores November 6.

“Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad” is a sweeping, painstakingly detailed work by the most hawkish member of Mr. Bush’s foreign policy team.

As the race to replace Kofi Annan as U.N. secretary-general heated up in spring 2006, Mr. Bolton writes, it became clear that Secretary of State Rice “had a ‘short list’ of one name: Ban Kimoon.” The former South Korean foreign minister was America’s pick because, as Ms. Rice told Mr. Bolton earlier: “I’m not sure we want a strong secretary-general.” On October 17, 2006, in the first meeting between President Bush and Mr. Ban, the president told the secretary-general-elect that he should “get rid” of all the senior U.N. staff, Mr. Bolton writes. Specifically, Mr. Bush said, “get rid of Malloch Brown.”

Mr. Bush described Mark Malloch Brown, deputy secretary-general under Mr. Annan, as “anti-American,” Mr. Bolton writes. A protégé of George Soros — “who was also subsidizing his housing” — Mr. Malloch Brown, who currently serves as a junior Cabinet member in the British government, was one of Mr. Bolton’s top targets in what he calls the “target rich environment” of Turtle Bay. In the book, which in journalistic terms belongs more to the op-ed pages than the news, Mr. Bolton occasionally displays the biting sense of humor that won him so many fans and enemies. Describing one draft of a U.N. reform plan, he writes, “It was so bad that Annan and Jimmy Carter quickly endorsed it.”

Is reforming Turtle Bay possible? Mr. Bolton quotes a one-time Democratic presidential candidate, Eugene McCarthy, as saying the word reform “should be banished from the English language.” Besides the United Nations, Mr. Bolton describes his government career as an endless struggle against weak-kneed “EUroids,” against the prevailing wisdom at the State Department, and at times against his own bosses. British diplomats are specifically targeted, portrayed often in starker terms than their French counterparts. The British, he writes, see their role as being “Athens to America’s Rome.”

The three years in which Europe led a diplomatic effort to halt Iran’s race to become a nuclear power were useless, he writes: “Iran will never voluntarily give up its nuclear program, and a policy based on the contrary assumption is not just delusional but dangerous. This is the road to the Nuclear Holocaust.”

Mr. Bolton’s earlier attempt to expose nuclear cooperation between Syria and North Korea has been in the news lately. Now he writes that Detlev Mehlis, the U.N. investigator into the 2005 killing of a former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, told him that “of course” President al-Assad of Syria was involved in the assassination. Mr. Mehlis’s successor, Serge Brammertz, “seemed to have no basic disagreement” with that conclusion, Mr. Bolton writes — a sentiment that will surely raise the ire of Damascus.

Despite disagreements with the two secretaries of state he served, Colin Powell and Ms. Rice, Mr. Bolton stresses that only once, during deliberations on last summer’s U.N. Security Council resolution that ended the war between Israel and Hezbollah, did he come “as close as I ever did in government to refusing a direct order” from his boss.

He did not refuse, which is the reason that only now he is “free at last” to criticize Bush administration policies — including its advocacy of last summer’s council resolution establishing the U.N. force in Lebanon. To this day, the U.N. force has not done much to disarm Hezbollah.

On the other hand, Mr. Bolton writes that just prior to the end of Mr. Bush’s first term, Mr. Powell worked against the administration’s policies, pursuing strategies “mostly of carrots” that consisted of conscious attempts by the secretary of state to distance himself from Mr. Bush.

Mr. Bolton ended his tenure after a former Republican senator of Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee, decided to use the confirmation process to criticize the administration’s policies as too pro-Israel. The Democrats decided to use this as a delaying tactic, as their current leader, Senator Reid of Nevada, expressed concern that “our Jewish friends don’t want” to see a Democratic filibuster preventing Mr. Bolton’s confirmation.

It is perhaps fitting that Mr. Bolton’s demise in government would be ascribed to the perception that his loyalties lie too much with Israel. To be sure, however, Mr. Bolton is not Jewish. Speaking of Mr. Annan, who was often described in secular god-like terms, Mr. Bolton writes, “Being a Lutheran, I didn’t even believe in religious popes, and was absolutely determined there weren’t going to be any more ‘secular popes'” at Turtle Bay.

bavni@nysun.com