The New York Sun mourns the loss of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and has some interesting ideas for replacing him.

One had the feeling that Mr. Bolton got up earlier, worked harder on the minutiae of the matters under discussion, and prospered by knowing the system better than his adversaries, which is no doubt why the United Nations apologists went to such extremes to oppose him, with Secretary General Annan’s deputy, Mark Malloch Brown, entering the American domestic political fray in the effort to block Mr. Bolton’s confirmation.

There will be now a scramble to fill Mr. Bolton’s shoes. Among those touted as potential successors are George Mitchell, a Democrat who was a failure as a Middle East peacemaker; Senator DeWine, who doesn’t have much of a foreign policy reputation and who failed to win re-election in Ohio; and Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador in Baghdad who has skillfully deflected onto President Bush the blame for what has gone wrong in Iraq. Our own instinct is that at this point a good confirmation fight would be worth more than the confirmation of any one of the above.

Mr. Bush could get this kind of illuminating fight with the nomination of, say, Claudia Rosett, the brilliant journalist who pursued so doggedly the oil-for-food scandal. Senator Coleman and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen are other inspired partisans who come to mind. But there will be plenty to choose from. To the extent the United Nations is useful at all, it is as a megaphone for explaining American policy to the world. Sending anyone to Turtle Bay with hopes of doing anything other than delivering the American message, trying to catch crooks misusing taxpayer dollars, and blowing the whistle on the anti- Israel bias would be naive. The best move the president would make is to react to the defeat of Mr. Bolton by moving now to hold back as much money as he can of the $5 billion a year America spends on the United Nations. It’s the least he could do if he can’t get his most trusted choice as envoy to look out for how our money is spent.

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