John Bolton – Another Wrongheaded Neocon

I have written about many of the prominent neocons that are influencing the direction of this country. There is Eliot Cohen who joined Condolezza Rice as her council while she is trying to play the role of diplomat in the Middle East. There are the quotes from both Bush and Rumsfeld about the presence of neocons in the Administration. David Frum, a neocon from American Enterprise Institute (AEI), basically said they must be right about whatever subject they speak on because they have big spenders supporting them. I’ve also written about their threat to our liberties, and it’s much more likely than any terrorist threat. They will just tell us the appropriate Noble Lie and we will gladly give up our rights.

Now I would like to introduce you to another know-it-all neocon and show that as confident as he may be in his speech and manner, you can’t always believe him.

He recently resigned as our ambassador to the U.N., to which he was appointed without Congressional confirmation in 2005 by President Bush, after Bush concluded that the new Congress was even less likely to confirm his renomination the second time around.

According to Right Web

• He is a close associate of William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard.
• He has been a key figure of the Republican Party since the 1980’s.
• On July 19, 2002, The Wall Street Journal reported Bolton’s “most memorable moment came after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a halt to the recount, when Mr. Bolton strode into a Tallahassee library, where the count was still going on, and declared: ‘I’m with the Bush-Cheney team, and I’m here to stop the count’.”
• Senator Joe Lieberman voted with Republicans to confirm Bolton for undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs.
• Before joining the Bush administration, Bolton was a member of the New Atlantic Initiative, a bipartisan initiative sponsored by AEI and funded by two right-wing foundations, the Olin Foundation and the Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation.
• In 1997, he said in effect that, international treaties signed by the United States should not be considered as a body of law that the United States should respect in its international engagement, but rather just political considerations that can be ignored.
• He has been a senior vice president of AEI.
• Bolton is an outspoken hawk on U.S. policy in the Middle East, and has since the mid-1990s been closely associated with a number of neoconservative organizations and pressure groups that are close to the right-wing Likud Party in Israel, including AEI, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf (CPSG).
• In February 2003, Bolton said that once regime change plans in Iraq were completed, “It will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran, and North Korea afterwards”
• In 1999, Bolton, speaking as an AEI scholar, said: “Diplomatic recognition of Taiwan would be just the kind of demonstration of U.S. leadership that the region needs and that many of its people hope for. The notion that China would actually respond with force is a fantasy.”

According to Source-watch, here is a list of “Bolton Scandals:”

• National Congressional Club
• Iran-Contra
• Taiwangate
• Abolition of International Law
• Pushing the Iraq war
• Foreign Travel

As an example of Mr. Bolton’s Noble Lies, listen to the melding of two interviews in the embedded video below. One interview is with John Bolton, in which he claims he has a better understanding of President Lincoln, and other things like Democracy, than Jon Stewart’s recollections from his interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin. Doris Goodwin is the author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln where she confirms that Bolton is just plain wrong.

An article on John Bolton by the Center for American Progress, concluded with, “At this point it is clear that the world Bolton has left us four years later is one that is more dangerous. He can only do more damage from a position of greater power.”