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.
Since they wants to have the USA adopt a policy of sitting around with its collective thumb you know where waiting for the disaster rather than DOING something about it, Ron Paul and Rand Paul should make any American sick.
With all of the phobias being expressed lately around here over the mere possibility of military action, why do I get the impression that the Birchers have made inroads?
Then one questions how they are defined as the “right people” since they sure sound like people who need to be at least irritated and then crushed politically. Somehow it seems out of character for Trump to be a peace creep or otherwise anti-American in ANY way.
We're just tired of these stupid, expensive, destructive and pointless military campaigns that have now lasted longer than the U.S. involvement in both World Wars, the Korean War, and the Civil War -- COMBINED.
John Bolton wouldn't want to send an Ohio Class submarine anywhere as part of a military campaign. You rain death on a massive scale when you're trying to defeat an enemy, not build an empire.
Bolton is one of the few who know what muslims want to do. That’s all I care about.
He’s already had that gig. The UN is useless.
Also the ritual use of the term "globalist" bespeaks a Bircher mindset. Buckley and Whittaker Chambers read the JBS out of the conservative movement nearly 60 years ago. The JBS has done nothing to rehabilitate itself since.
Rand would like to keep them out of Kentucky. He is on board pretty much with Trump in regards to Muslim immigration, unlike the neocons and RINOs:
“Rand Paul Reacts To Trump’s Muslim Ban: ‘I’ve Called For Something Similar’
Paul’s legislation, which he introduced last month, is intended to prevent immigration to the United States from certain countries in the Middle East. It would have required the Department of Homeland Security to “suspend issuance of visas to nationals of countries with a high risk of terrorism” until additional security screenings could be implemented.
“And so we have examined where the high risk of terrorism comes from and it’s about 34 countries,” he continued in the radio interview. “And I would put a pause on all immigration from those 34 countries.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rand-paul-trump-muslim-ban
That’s what we have been doing for 15 years or more. Defending one group of Muslims from another group of Muslims. This is what Bolton and the rest of the war-o-cons believe in .... many deaths and casualties ... for what?
So team Shia can (temporarily) be top dog over team Sunni?
Pray tell who are we going to bomb from subs?
And why? Which team did we want to win and why?
Its a religious civil war that has been going on for over 1000 years, there is no ‘win’ for us.
Hell, I would take Lucifer over Romney but it is a close question.
You are correct. The challenge for the West is to keep Islamic violence, destruction and Sharia Law at bay by preventing them from bring their way of life into Western Nations.
Really? LMAO.
If that's the only qualification you're looking for, we'd be better off with a random Trump voter from a Rust Belt state as U.S. Secretary of State.
I would take a random homeless person over Romney but you know what? Neither of us has any influence on Trump’s pick so we can both laugh at each other.
Bolton would be a great choice. He would be excellent for Trump because he’s tough as nails, intelligent and a good communicator. I don’t think Bolton is going to go rogue on Donald Trump. If you want someone to implement your foreign policy, then I’d say Bolton is your guy.
Is there something inherently wrong with the idea of a New American Century? I know it offends paleos but I trust the USA quite a bit more than I trust Osama or Obama or Hillary or the United Nations or Erdogan or Assad or any other object of paleopacifist affection.
I suspect that you would prefer someone from the Project for a New Islamofascist Century. I mean, fighting them, defeating them, annihilating them might mean (your tender ears should pardon the expression) killing the SOBs on a grand scale. Death from the sky. No nation building. No caring to establish something vaguely imitating democracy. Just Islamofascists knuckling under or dying en masse. We don't have to be fair or give the enemy a sporting chance either. They CRUCIFY children for the crime of being Christians.
Bolton is a man's man which is more than can be said of any Secretary of State from either party since maybe John Foster Dulles.
You imagine you have any authority to “read” people out of the conservative movement?
Look at the National Review now. It is nothing.
CFR members are house conservatives, aka neoCons.
Since the end of World War II, our wars have been rendered pointless by gutless, spineless politicians who REFUSE to allow our military to WIN.
Truman fired MacArthur.
Eisenhower "brought the boys home" (now Kim Jong Porkfat has nukes as a result).
LBJ wanted to be a war POTUS without actually, well, winning. Comrade McGovern and the newly communist Demonrat Party dug in against Tricky Dick (and his "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War) until Gerald Ford could have the opportunity to surrender outright to the heirs of Ho Chi Minh,
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 Younger was clearly in over his head and those of his thoroughly Establishmentarian administraitors and totally screwed up Gulf War II. Building schools is not waging war. Building temporary "democracy" is notwaging war. Exposing American military personnel on the ground to IUDs and truck bombs by unnecessarily occupying the land is not waging war. Bush the Younger seemed so willing to sacrifice the lives of American military personnel in order to spread the standards of LBJ's Great Society to the Middle East. Shock and Awe was short-lived. The misery of political incompetents visited upon our military? Not so much.
Barack Insane Obozo having dutifully undermined Gulf War II as a treasonweasel senator, continued that war and the one in Afghanistan under the usual senseless surrender monkey "rules of engagement" guaranteeing maximum American casualties lest we harm his ideological soulmates in Islamolunaticland while depleting our military resources to a dangerous level, replacing military patriot leaders with pantywaists and greenlighting Iran getting nukes. He compounded these crimes by welcoming every wannabe suicide bomber and Islamofascist with open arms and welfare benefits to bring the war here to our own country.
The troops would win every time but they were restrained and betrayed by the political whores. And YOU have nothing more serious to worry about than the possibility that we might have a man's man as Secretary of State?????
Again the abuse of the word "neocon." The neocons were (most are dead) a group of lifelong socialists rooted in New York City, graduates of City College, and mostly distinguished scholars and thinkers: Jewish thinkers like Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Donald Kagan, Alexander Bickel and a few non-Jews such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Being socialist does not mean being communist and when McGovern and the reds seized the Democrat Party and changed its rules permanently, the actual neo-cons chose country over party, joined the Nixon era GOP and waged war against the Demonrats.
The closest thing today to the actual neocons are their children like Bill Kristol who is no enthusiast for Trump but you knew that. Rand Paul was no enthusiast for Trump either. He is a paleopacifist weenie who fears that somehow, somewhere, we might fight a justified war and WIN it. He is a chip off the old blockhead.
Unless and until paleoPaulie II is willing to see Islamofascist blood shed in substantial quantity, he should have no seat at the table when policy is formed. His opinions are irrelevant. For now, he has a Senate seat. He may even do occasional good (probably by mistake). Jaw, jaw will NOT suffice against the Islamofascist enemy.
BTW, I am not a neocon. I am an interventionist and always have been. Unilateral intervention on OUR terms as WE see fit without permission from anyone. Death from the sky. No nation-building. Seize sufficient assets to pay the entire tab. Get the hell out. Rinse and repeat as necessary with increasing ferocity.
As to Rand Paul's expressed intent, he has also forfeited trust. I don't trust him any more than I trust Hillary or Obozo and for similar reasons. A simple ban on Muslim immigration will do fine. I don't know if Rand Paul has been noticing the floods of Islamofascists inundating Europe but taking in Islamic immigrants from the UK, France, Germany, Scandanavia, Italy and most of Europe wouldn't be very smart either.
I cannot imagine the surviving actual neocons having opinions on immigration. RINOs are stupid enough to think that they can use the Islamos to further suppress American wages and standard of living while Muffy's trust fund reaps the prophets.
We need a Secretary of State and government that makes our enemies afraid. Bolton would be perfect. You Loosertarian foreign policy idiots can take a hike, you never have and never will accomplish anything.
I agree. No neocon should ever serve in such a position again. It is what is wrong with the party.
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