Tag: John Bolton

As news about Iran has faded from television and the print media in all the hub-bub about the death of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, as well as the resignation of Sarah Palin, the Washington Post‘s Op-Ed publication Thursday of yet another neo-conservative’s view about Iran has gone pretty much unnoticed. That view is nothing new. It’s bomb, bomb, bomb.

Why the Washington Post‘s editors think this perspective deserves repeating is, of course, not a difficult question to answer given who runs the editorial pages and given the alter-the-debate, pay-for-a-seat salons recently proposed by the newspaper.

This time, the bomb, bomb, bomb barker is John Bolton. One of the founding crew at the Project for a New American Century, he’s been at his noxious efforts in various government posts since the Reagan administration. He capped his career as America’s public face at the United Nations for five months in 2005 until Congress refused to extend his recess appointment from Mister Bush. One of the few times in eight years that we saw some spine from moderate Democrats in matters of foreign policy.

Give Bolton and the other PNACkers credit. They never shied away from the term “imperialism”; they embraced it as eagerly as a previous generation embraced Manifest Destiny, without shame or irony or the least modicum of restraint. And they have, as we know too well, not been shy about proposing invasions and bombings in support of the empire.

Like many of his kind – from Bill Kristol to Newt Gingrich – Bolton has been pushing to bomb Iran for years. He wanted the U.S. to bomb alleged training camps, to bomb it during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and always, always, always to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. This call for illegal pre-emptive action is made all the more disgusting in light of the neo-conservatives’ recent support for the protesters in the streets of Tehran, Isfahan and other Iranian cities. Had they gotten their way during the Cheney-Bush administration, a lot of those protesters would have been blown to bits long before the mullahs’ militias clashed with them over rigged elections.

But the prospect of a few thousand dead civilians has never before been a barrier to such proposals.

You see the Spiegel headline, and it seems obvious:

‘Bush’s Foreign Policy Is in Free Fall’

You think of the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, the obstruction of progress at the Bali climate conference, the transparently dishonest attempts to catapult the propaganda about Iran, Putin crushing democracy in Russia, Israel and the Palestinians farther than ever from making peace, and America more hated than ever, everywhere. The headline makes sense. Everything Bush touches, he destroys. He’s the anti-Midas. But then you see this:

SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH FORMER US DIPLOMAT JOHN BOLTON

It must be a joke, right? Surely, John Bolton hasn’t come to his senses, and realized that the Bush Administration is a catastrophe, has he? Well, actually, he has made the realization. But for the wrong reasons. For the opposite reasons. If it weren’t on a credible news site, it would not be believable.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Ambassador, you worked closely with the president and you shared his hawkish views on Iraq. But your new book is fiercely critical of George W. Bush. Why?

Bolton: His foreign policy is in free fall. The president is turning against his own best judgment and instincts under the influence of Secretary (of State Condoleeza) Rice. She is the dominant voice, indeed, almost the only voice on foreign policy in this administration.

SPIEGEL: The popular reading of her looks a bit different. She is presumed to be weak and not particularly efficient.

Bolton: No. Rice is channeling the views of the liberal career bureaucrats in the State Department. The president is focusing all his attention on Iraq and, by doing so, has allowed the secretary to become captured by the State Department. He is not adequately supervising her. It is a mistake.

Got that? Bush is in free fall because he’s going soft! It includes the obvious garbage: North Korea is dangerous, Iraq was a threat, and the Iraq War has made us safer. Reality still eludes the deranged man’s grasp.

(more)

Why haven’t I been reading more Glenn Greenwald?

He hits another one out of the park today with his blistering dissection of Fred Hiatt’s September 5th WaPo editorial, Rogue Regulator, and the other neocon chicken hawk cheerleaders and conspirators like John Bolten who have been smearing Elbaradi for years so they can get their war on.

Our serious foreign policy geniuses strike again

Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

Tuesday December 4, 2007 03:59 EST

How far does the rot go?  To very core of our policy and media establishment-

…

Somehow, it was decided in our political establishment that being completely wrong about the worst strategic disaster in our country’s history — the invasion of Iraq — is not a cause for any diminished credibility at all (and having been right is no cause for enhanced credibility). Even after the invasion of Iraq, our Hiatt-modeled political establishment even proceeded to smear and target those such as Mohamed ElBardei who were clearly proven right, as though being right was a crime.

An interesting dimension of the Bush Administration’s attempts to catapult the propaganda about Iran has been reported in a series of separate articles, in the Guardian, the past couple weeks. They’re trying to sell a war to Britain. Thus far, Britain’s not buying.

On September 30, the Guardian reported that John Bolton was in England, doing what John Bolton does: warmonger.

John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, told Tory delegates today that efforts by the UK and the EU to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country….

He added that any strike should be followed by an attempt to remove the “source of the problem”, Mr Ahmadinejad.

Because that worked so well in Iraq, let’s try it again: bomb them, then remove their leadership. Because we’re allowed to do such things. Because we’re exceptional.

On Monday, the Guardian reported that some-time general, and increasingly full-time political hack, David Petraeus, was also in England, also to sell a war:

The commander of US forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, yesterday sharpened America’s confrontation with Iran, claiming that a leader of its Revolutionary Guard corps was in direct charge of policy in Baghdad.

The charge that Tehran’s ambassador to Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, was a member of the Quds force, a unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, takes US accusations of Iranian meddling in Iraq’s violence to a new level. It strengthens suggestions that Washington is ratcheting up the rhetoric against Tehran in preparation for military strikes against Revolutionary Guard facilities in Iran.

Ratcheting up the rhetoric is right. Whether or not the rhetoric has any relation to the truth is, as always with the Bush Administration and its minions, irrelevant. And the Guardian had already reported that during last Spring’s standoff over the Iranian capture of fifteen British sailors, even Tony Blair’s government turned down Bush Administration offers of aggressive and provocative military patrols in Iranian airspace.

The latest encouraging news came from the Guardian’s sister paper, the Observer, last Sunday:

The new Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker has both good news and bad news, on the Bush Administration’s warmongering against Iran.

The good news?

I was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the “execute order” that would be required for a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be issued.

Furthermore, understanding that the American public isn’t buying his demonizing of Iran, Bush has realized that he can’t sell an all-out war. He also seems to understand that Iran really is at least five years from having nuclear weapons capabilities, so there is no imminent threat.

The bad news?

Bush realizes that Iran is the big winner of his Iraq disaster. So, he has to do something. As an average adolescent would, Bush seems to have decided that the best way to reverse the victory he handed Iran, by invading Iraq, is to bomb them.

(T)here has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning. In mid-August, senior officials told reporters that the Administration intended to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of the Iranian Operations Group.

Three points: