Posted on 11/19/2016 11:20:11 AM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Rumors are that Donald Trump might pick John Bolton for Secretary of State. Heaven forbid.
One of the things I occasionally liked about the President-elect was his opposition to the Iraq war and regime change. He not only grasped the mistake of that war early, but also seemed to fully understand how it disrupted the balance of power in the Middle East and even emboldened Iran.
We liberated Iraq, but today their best friend is Iran, their second greatest ally is Russia, and their third strongest alliance is with Syria. Trump really seems to get the lesson. Hillary Clinton never did.
Most importantly right now, John Bolton never learned and never will.
Bolton is a longtime member of the failed Washington elite that Trump vowed to oppose, hell-bent on repeating virtually every foreign policy mistake the U.S. has made in the last 15 years — particularly those Trump promised to avoid as president.
John Bolton more often stood with Hillary Clinton and against what Donald Trump has advised.
None of this is secret. It’s all out there. Perhaps the incoming administration should take a closer look.
Bolton was one of the loudest advocates of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and still stupefyingly insists it was the right call 13 years later. “I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct,” Bolton said just last year.
Trump, rightly, believes that decision was a colossal mistake that destabilized the region. “Iraq used to be no terrorists,” Trump said in 2015. “(N)ow it’s the Harvard of terrorism.”
“If you look at Iraq from years ago, I’m not saying he was a nice guy, he was a horrible guy,” Trump said of Saddam Hussein, “but it was a lot better than it is right now.”
Trump has said U.S. intervention in Iraq in 2003 “helped to throw the region into chaos and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper.” In contrast, Bolton has said explicitly that he wants to repeat Iraq-style regime change in Syrian and Iran.
You can’t learn from mistakes if you don’t see mistakes.
Trump has blamed George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for helping to create ISIS — but should add John Bolton to that list, who essentially agreed with all three on our regime change debacles.
In 2011, Bolton bashed Obama “for his refusal to directly target Gaddafi” and declared, “there is a strategic interest in toppling Gaddafi… But Obama missed it.” In fact, Obama actually took Bolton’s advice and bombed the Libyan dictator into the next world. Secretary of State Clinton bragged, “We came, we saw, he died.”
When Trump was asked last year if Libya and the region would be more stable today with Gaddafi in power, he replied “100 percent.” Mr. Trump is 100 percent right.
No man is more out of touch with the situation in the Middle East or more dangerous to our national security than Bolton.
All nuance is lost on the man. The fact that Russia has had a base in Syria for 50 years doesn’t deter Bolton from calling for all out, no holds barred war in Syria. Bolton criticized the current administration for offering only a tepid war. For Bolton, only a hot-blooded war to create democracy across the globe is demanded.
Woodrow Wilson would be proud, but the parents of our soldiers should be mortified. War should be the last resort, never the first. War should be understood to be a hell no one wishes for. Dwight Eisenhower understood this when he wrote, “I hate war like only a soldier can, the stupidity, the banality, the futility.”
Bolton would not understand this because, like many of his generation, he used every privilege to avoid serving himself. Bolton said, with the threat of the Vietnam draft over his head, that “he had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy.” But he’s seems to be okay with your son or daughter dying wherever his neoconservative impulse leads us: “Even before the Iraq War, John Bolton was a leading brain behind the neoconservatives’ war-and-conquest agenda,” notes The American Conservative’s Jon Utley.
At a time when Americans thirst for change and new thinking, Bolton is an old hand at failed foreign policy.
The man is a menace.
Our Constitution and our founding fathers were explicit war was not to be fought without the permission of Congress. No matter which party occupies the White House, I will not shrink from my constitutional duty to oppose any advocate for war.
The true statesmen realizes, with reluctance, that war is sometimes necessary but as a country, we should resist any would-be leader who wants to bomb now and think later.
President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on changing our disastrous foreign policy. To appoint John Bolton would be a major first step toward breaking that promise.
Rand Paul is the junior senator from Kentucky.
Without passing judgment on Bolton, the last person you want advice from on foreign policy is Ron’s whelp (other than Ron himself).
Therefore, that is my authority to read paleolimpwrists out of the conservative movement. Actually, that feat had long since been achieved by the Imperial Japanese Navy over Pearl Harbor and by the shameful cowardice of British PM Neville Chamberlain. Charles Lindbergh, Colonel MacCormack, John Flynn and their fellow ignorant ostriches at "America First" knew they were done on December 7, 1941, held a press conference in Chicago the very next day (as Congress declared war) and disbanded their movement in humiliation. For Lindbergh it meant no more enjoying Hitler's hospitality and no more possibilities of business deals with the Third Reich. There are the roots of your "movement" along with the soulless little bankers in the back room on Main Street, Nowheresville, USA, dutifully clipping coupons while our nation starved.
National Review was great while it and Bill Buckley lasted. My wife worked for Bill. Bill Rusher was a great man. James Burnham. Willmoore Kendall. Will Herberg. Frank and Elsie Meyer. National Review is no longer great because it is now run by second rate pipsqueaks. Even now, it has Victor Davis Hanson and a handful of others but it sure ain't what it used to be. Something else will come along and it WON'T be the paleopeacecreep The American "Conservative." Just because Pat Buchanan (never a movement conservative) went over the cliff embracing cowardice as foreign policy did NOT mean that conservatism would change.
Bill Buckley was a CFR member and should not have been. If Bolton is a CFR member, it would be like a Catholic politician being a Knight of Columbus. Those who have nervous breakdowns over the Council on Foreign Relations would do well to set up a competitor organization of sounder views. CFR members are generally knee jerk liberals or worse not "house conservatives."
It is interesting that you are obsessed with the misnomer "neocons" which was invented by the red left to ridicule the actual neocons when they abandoned McGovern's Demonrat Party.
Who are we going to bomb? We don't have to choose among them. We want them ALL to lose. We can wipe them all out and they well know it.
I will never trust anybody in Washington who supported a foreign policy in the early 2000s that involved the U.S. spending hundreds of billions of dollars and pissing away thousands of American lives to topple the Ba'athist government in Iraq and replace it with an unstable mess that is even worse off today than it was before we invaded.
These PNAC jackasses can't even tell us who the "enemy" is supposed to be. That's very typical when you're taking sides in a civil war.
I DO have an interest in bringing these bastards to heel or killing them. It is up to them.
No, it's up to us. If the U.S. government is going to commit lives and money to wage a military campaign, it either has to do it right or it shouldn't be done at all.
Bush the Elder used a magnificent General Stormin' Norman Schwartzkopf to win half a war with very few American casualties to free Kuwait but leave So Damn Insane in power (necessitating a second Gulf War and a LOT more American casualties).
Bush the Elder was acting under the advice of a U.S. Defense Secretary named Dick Cheney who knew damn well that invading Iraq would be a disaster. He even predicted (very accurately) what would happen if the Ba'athist government was overthrown -- and it was not a good scenario. That pr!ck suddenly changed his tune when he was the vice president ten years later, and history will not remember him kindly.
Keep in mind that these "neo-cons" have spent 25 years pushing a government model in the U.S. that has involved massive military commitments all over the world even while maintaining open borders right here in the U.S. This 2016 election was the result of a lot of people finally getting pissed off because they realize that they don't even live in a real country anymore. I figured this out more than a decade ago, when the Bush administration pushed that outrageous invasion of Iraq, only to leave behind an Iraqi government with a new constitution in which Islam is enshrined as the official state religion.
And those PNAC "neo-con" f#%&ers were responsible for that.
I can guarantee you that Donald Trump will destroy his credibility among a big chunk of his supporters if he nominates one of them to be the U.S. Secretary of State.
They are not going to be extinct because you cannot kill 24% of the entire world’s population which is spread over a vast area of the globe. They are not all in the Middle East.
Besides being wrong to kill billions of people, it is not doable. It is an impotent fantasy. We couldn’t do it even if we wanted to do it.
A more realistic goal is to keep them out of Western countries and from taking over any more territory. Given their fast growing population (and the rapidly declining population of Western peoples) even this might not be doable in the long run, though I’m projecting several centuries ahead on that one. For the purposes of the next 10 or so generations, we should focus on containment.
I respect John Bolton’s character and service and I will admit to liking his persona. However his time has passed and Trump needs to sever ties with the establishment where ever possible.
Serious question: has anyone ever seen him smile? Any evidence?
Funny how Rand Paul is so against importing Muslims that he brings them into Kentucky by the boatload. Bowling Green is now 10% Somalian thanks to him. He is as dirty as a Democrat. He pushed Kentucky to have a caucus instead of a primary so he could run for President without giving up his Senate seat.
Our wars MUST indeed be fought right or not at all. No nation building. No humanitarian waste of $$$$$ better used on the military rebuilding. No boots on the ground. Maximum death from the sky for the enemy.
I don't personally care whether the Iraqis worship Mickey Mouse or the fictional god of the 7th century camel jockey/child molester. We don't really need their oil any more now that comrade imam is out of the White House come 1/20/17.
There may be a mini-feather of isolationists wimps who convinced themselves that Trump was in their camp. They can leave now and be replaced by patriots and veterans who can join a movement that looks like our military at war. Trump can bring jobs to the inner cities and the rest of the country, cultivate blacks and Hispanics, build the wall to protect everyone's job and leave the airy fairy distaste for necessary wars to the elitists and other demonrats.
Compared to the massive cost of the welfare state, death from the sky is downright economical and does not put American lives at risk.
Even incompetently fought and dragging all the unnecessary "humanitarian" baggage, we won the war you despise and had So Damn Insane hanged. Get over it.
I would also close most American military bases around the world. We need some naval bases to repair and refuel ships. We need a few strategically placed airfields to land, repair and refuel planes. We could easily abrogate the spaghetti bowl of entangling treaties, expel the UN and stop funding it and stop kissing its anti-American diployakker ass.
If you don't care enough about your country to advance its interests in the world, then why should you have a say in foreign and military policy. We are not going to become creampuff nation, sitting around the old camp fire with our enemies crooning Kumbaya. There are entire peace creep nations out there. Move to one.
Should read 10% Muslim; Syrian, Somalian, Bosnian, Russian and Iraqi.
Rand is right.
If we had remembered that the function of the military is to kill our enemies and break their things, the result of the wars you are whining about would have been a LOT more satisfactory.
Not to be jerked around by OPEC when it still had the hammer was one noble reason. Killing Saddam was another. If we used death from the sky, we would have "pissed away" few lives and probably none.
Chaos and disorder in the Middle East beats the hell out of order and international cooperation there against the interests of the US.
You will never trust, etc. You and your little platoon of paleopacifists have no more of a thumb on the scale than Lindbergh and MacCormack did, probably less. Next time we are attacked, don't bother showing up in public to whine. Your "solution" has never worked and never will.
I am enjoying your posts. I basically agree.
What I wonder about is, Wasn’t the Iraq War different from the Obama efforts to destabilize the Middle East? Saddam’s nuclear plant had to be destroyed by Israel in 1981. Saddam was giving $25,000 to every family that lost a jihadi. It seemed to me that the world was stable after we won in Iraq, until Obama came along and (purposely? for political reasons and other reasons?) destroyed the victory.
Then he began the destruction of our allies in the Middle East, in order to create chaos and a radical Muslim dominance.
You are very well informed, so I would be interested in your opinion. It seems to me that you can’t put Gulf Wars I and II in the same basket with the Arab Spring. The first was in our interests. The second wasn’t.
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Another irrelevant Rand Paul rant...
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There is absolutely nothing ‘neocon’ about Bolton.
He favors dissolving the UN completely.
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Nah, Sessions was a good pick.
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The Dulles brothers thought that they were descended from “Jesus Christ” and Mary Magdeline.
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>> “ It seemed to me that the world was stable after we won in Iraq, until Obama came along and (purposely? for political reasons and other reasons?) destroyed the victory.” <<
That is the essence thereof!
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John Bolton? I’ve seen him smile before, especially on Red Eye. Of course, he’s usually laughing at the time.
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