Former US Ambassador to the UN John BoltonJohn Bolton’s Return: The Neocons Have Taken Over the Asylum
John Wight
SputnikNews.com
23.03.2018
With John Bolton’s appointment as Trump’s new national security adviser, the circle closes on any remaining hope of the 45th President of the United States embarking on a different course from every other president that has preceded him in the Oval Office in recent years, when it comes to foreign policy.
A devoted disciple of the ‘bomb them to hell and ask questions later’ school of US politics, Bolton’s hawkish foreign policy credentials are so extreme he makes John McCain seem like Bambi by comparison. Nobody, for sure, would ever mistake him for Marcus Aurelius, the famed Roman emperor and Stoic who was legendary for his advocacy of restraint in all things, including war. For a man such as Mr Bolton restraint is blasphemy. After all, what’s the point of amassing the largest and most destructive military in human history if you can’t use it?
When it comes to international law, for the likes of John Bolton this is for wimps. Real men and real countries bomb whom the hell they want when the hell they want, and screw the consequences.
Even worse than Bolton’s appointment is the timing of it.
It comes just after the fifteenth anniversary of the start of the war on Iraq, involving the US and UK unleashing hell against Iraq and its people on the basis of we now know beyond doubt were lies.
In his capacity as US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, Bolton was a key advocate of this illegal and imperialist war, thus making his return to frontline US politics in such a high profile role tantamount to spitting on the graves of the up to one million Iraqis who were killed as a consequence.
Yet despite the carnage and elemental suffering of the Iraqi people as a result of Bush and Blair’s war, plunging the country into a sectarian bloodbath even though we and they had been assured that it would prove the catalyst for a new dawn of liberal democracy, Bolton continued and continues to defend it. In a 2015 interview he said, “I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct.” He then goes on to claim, with all the insouciance of an arsonist who has never seen a fire he didn’t relish, that the disaster to befall the country and region afterwards was not connected to the war in 2003.
Bolton was appointed US ambassador to the United Nations by Bush in 2005. It was a decidedly strange appointment given Bolton’s disdain for the institution and everything it represents, infamously asserting that there was “no such thing” as the UN and claiming that the US was the world’s “only real power.” For Bolton and his ilk, you see, US hegemony is the natural order of things, divinely ordained much as the Emperor Augustus erroneously perceived the Roman empire: “You cheer my heart, who build as if Rome would be eternal.”
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