Gage Skidmore/Geralt/Mrill Ingram
In 2007, John Bolton appeared on the CSPAN program Q&A to promote his new book, which he wrote after a bipartisan U.S. Senate refused to confirm him as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations two years prior.
Bolton, now President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, said he was “shocked” on election night 1964, when he as working on the presidential campaign of Barry “Let's Use Nukes in Vietnam” Goldwater. Not only did his guy not win, but he was rejected by one of the largest margins in U. S. history.
Bolton said he felt Goldwater had been treated unfairly and right then and there concluded that, “surrender is not an option” and would make a great book title. That’s how his book got its title.
But, as is the case with many war hawks, personal surrender was an option a when Bolton sidestepped going to Vietnam by getting a plum National Guard post during President Nixon’s first term, saying later, despite his support of the war, “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the Vietnam War already lost.”
In his professional view, however, any regime around the world that poses a threat to the United States (real or imagined) must be overthrown. Anything less is surrender.
Bolton’s list of countries with “bad apple” regimes in need of a good toppling seems pretty long.
“Who wouldn’t you bomb?” Jon Stewart asked Bolton back in 2009. Despite the rhetorical nature of the question, Bolton gave a strange answer suggesting, well, just about anyone.
“There isn’t that much difference between me and people that want a world without nuclear weapons,” he told Stewart. “I just want one country to have nuclear weapons . . . and you’re sitting in?”
There is no doubt Bolton was never interested any deal with this regime.
Asked if he regretted being part of Bush 43’s invasion of Iraq, despite not finding weapons of mass destruction, he casually Bolt-splained that we’re all mis-remembering the reason for going to war. “It was the regime itself in Baghdad that posed the threat to international peace and security.”
Ah, “the regime itself.”
And who decides if the “regime itself” poses a threat? John Bolton!
This same John Bolton has a troubling history of getting his warhawk way by grossly manipulating intelligence to fit his agenda.
As then-Senator Barack Obama said back in 2005, when he and other Senators successfully blocked Bolton’s nomination for U.N. Ambassador, “there are very specific, very credible allegations that Mr. Bolton sought to shade intelligence and sideline career intelligence analysts who did not agree with his policy views” and that Bolton “sought to massage intelligence to fit an ideological bias.”
Not only was Bolton part of Bush’s WMDs-in-Iraq gang, but, as ProPublica revealed in March, he also argued in 2002 that Cuba was secretly developing biological weapons. In 2010, under President Barack Obama, the U.S. State Department concluded that the “available information did not indicate” that Cuba was involved in any prohibited weapons activities.
Left to his own devices the last dozen years, Bolton has got even nuttier as head of a “think” tank called Gatestone Institute. Remember the fake news stories about “no-go zones” in Europe that Muslims controlled and police never entered? That and many other “jihadist takeover” stories that were lucky to have a grain of truth originated from Bolton’s group.
On Thursday Trump announced that he was cancelling a planned summit in Singapore with North Korea president Kim Jong Un, largely because North Korea had already signaled they were pulling out over comments made by John Bolton (and later Vice President Pence) pushing for North Korea to follow “the Libya model.”
That would be the same Libya that Bolton and Company convinced to give up nuclear development only to have United States later militarily aid in the overthrow of the regime—at the behest of Bolton and other warhawks that were demanding it of President Obama.
There is no doubt Bolton was never interested any deal with this regime.
“Talking to North Korea is a waste of time,” Bolton bellowed back in January in one of his regular appearances on Fox News. A few months before that, Bolton wrote an op-ed asserting, “Kim Jong Un and his predecessors were never going to be chit-chatted out of their nuclear-weapons program, which they have always regarded as essential to regime survival. . . . There is simply no point in negotiations with Pyongyang.”
Bolton is applying the same logic to Iran, withdrawing from the hard-won nuclear deal, despite Iran holding up its end of the bargain.
And there’s the problem. If the only way to avoid “regime change,” such as the United States led or aided invasions of Iraq or Libya in recent years, it is to have a nuclear bomb as a deterrent, then there is no reason to not have nuclear weapons.
One thing is for sure, as long as Bolton is Trump’s National Security Advisor, that has only tool in his diplomacy tool box—a sword—don’t expect anything other than regime change achieved with someone else’s kid’s blood.
Jud Lounsbury is a political writer based in Madison, Wisconsin and a frequent contributor to The Progressive. He also blogs at uppitywis.org and you can find him on Twitter @judlounsbury.