Last week’s firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and nomination of CIA Director Mike Pompeo to replace him was troubling. But something downright frightening has occurred this week.
President Trump has outdone himself, having picked one of the most dangerous, warmongering, racist and, frankly, asinine characters in Washington’s foreign policy establishment to replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser — John Bolton.
Bolton has served multiple Republican administrations. He played a critical part in perpetrating the worst international crime of the century so far — the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Bolton had a central role in ousting José Bustani as president of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Bustani believes, with good reason, the U.S. led the campaign to remove him because he was planning to inspect Iraq’s state facilities for chemical weapons. The OPCW would have likely found none, undermining the Bush administration’s justification for war.
Trump, despite frequent claims about having opposed the Iraq war, seems content to overlook Bolton’s role in it. Bolton hasn’t even revised his position. He said on Fox News earlier this month “the overthrow... of Saddam Hussein, that military action, was a resounding success.”
Bolton has been a vociferous proponent of attacking Iran. Like Trump, Bolton wants the U.S. to abrogate the Iran nuclear agreement. But Bolton goes even further, saying the U.S. should bomb Iran and enact regime change.
During the negotiation of the Iran deal in 2015, Bolton penned an op-ed in the New York Times, replete with falsehoods, calling on Obama to quit negotiating and bomb Iran’s nuclear sites instead.
Last summer, Bolton told a gathering of the People’s Mujahideen, a radical Iranian exile group and erstwhile U.S.-designated terrorist organization, “The declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran.”
“Before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran,” Bolton told the crowd.
Last month, he wrote another op-ed in favor of replacing diplomacy with bombs. This time, North Korea was the subject.
A pre-emptive strike on North Korea would risk a war of unprecedented proportions.
On top of all that, Bolton chairs the Gatestone Institute, which spreads racist and and Islamophobic myths like the notion that Europe is littered with neighborhoods non-Muslims can’t enter.
Few thoughts are more terrifying than that the two main sources of foreign policy ideas in the White House will now be John Bolton and, pending Senate confirmation, Mike Pompeo.
