Belligerent Bolton gets bounced
NEWS FLASH: PRESIDENT TRUMP DOES THE RIGHT THING: Earlier this week President Donald Trump decided to dump his national security advisor, John Bolton, saying he and others in his administration “disagreed strongly” with many of Bolton’s suggestions on how to keep the U.S.A. safe.
Bolton was the fourth national security advisor in three-and-a-half years and probably the scariest even though the other three were high ranking military types with substantial combat experience. Even the president jokingly admitted that “John has never seen a war he didn’t like.”
Hardly an inspiring testimonial. Unfortunately, it was a pretty good description of Bolton’s attitude toward ‘security’. One would have to go back to the days of Frank “the Enforcer” Nitti, underboss to Al Capone, to find anyone in American history so prone to solving problems through force of arms. The list of countries where Bolton wanted the U.S.A. to actively promote regime change included Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen and North Korea. Well, we know what happened in Syria and Libya and can guess what might transpire if the Americans put their well-meaning nose into the others on the list.
Not surprisingly, Bolton, like so many of his wealthy contemporaries, managed to avoid the one war he could have personally taken part in. During the sixties, while in university, Bolton joined the Maryland Army National Guard. This
meant that he could skip the draft and all that nastiness in Viet Nam. To be fair, he’s never lied or tried to hide what he did. He even went as far as to admit “I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy.” Nobody did.
His last previous high-profile government post was serving as temporary U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the Bush junior administration. The appointment was temporary because there was no way on earth that the Senate would confirm it given his reputation as the ultimate hard liner. Bolton’s disdain for the U.N. was open and loud. As a matter of fact he generally hated any international association that he thought hindered America’s right to act when and how it pleased, including the International Criminal Court. His attitude to the U.N. was summed up in his comments on the 38-story Secretariat building in Manhattan. “If you lost ten stories today it wouldn’t make a bit of difference” which is possibly true but hardly tactful.
As well as being a hard liner and an ardent believer in Senator, and presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater’s claim that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue” he is, from all accounts, a bully who has ruffled more feathers in The White House than a tom cat at a pigeon convention.
In short, John Bolton should probably never have been appointed as National Security Advisor in the first place given his history of belligerence and his belief in might is right. Particularly if the appointment was made by a President who regularly introduced him to foreign visitors by saying “You all know the great John Bolton. He’ll bomb you. He’ll take out your whole country.”
The up side in all this is that the man who made the appointment has a limited attention span and no patience with those who disagree with him so it’s farewell John.