“Stop Listening To John Bolton”: He Has No Idea What He’s Talking About, And It’s Scary He Was Ever In Power To Begin With
There’s an old joke, or sort of joke, about how bombing for peace is like f*cking for virginity. In that analogy, John Bolton is trying to f*ck us all over.
Bolton, United States Ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, has written an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, the United States should bomb Iran. This “reasoning” is as reckless and unreliable as its messenger.
It has been reported that “almost the entire senior hierarchy of Israel’s military and security establishment is worried about a premature attack on Iran and apprehensive about the possible repercussions,” according to Israel’s former chief of defense forces. Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense under both Bush and Obama, cautioned against military strikes in Iran, warning, “A military solution, as far as I’m concerned … it will bring together a divided nation. It will make them absolutely committed to obtaining nuclear weapons. And they will just go deeper and more covert.”
Gates said the only long-term solution is convincing Iranians that nuclear weapons capacity is not in their interest—the goal of current diplomatic talks.
Even the director of the CIA under Bush said that the Bush Administration explored but ultimately rejected a military strike on Iran, concluding it would only “guarantee that which we are trying to prevent—an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon and that would build it in secret.”
News reports suggest that the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China are making headway in diplomatic negotiations with Iran that would halt nuclear weapons development in Iran for at least a decade and submit the country to rigorous inspections. But Republicans, so eager to bash President Obama on any count, have not only immorally (and possibly illegally) undermined U.S. diplomacy and credibility in the international community, they have argued President Obama is somehow causing brinksmanship by relying on smart diplomacy to avoid nuclear war.
We are supposed to believe this because John Bolton tells us to.
Bolton also asserts that somehow, though Israel having nuclear weapons has not been perceived as a threat in the region, “Iran is a different story.” Oh, okay. Why, exactly? “Extensive progress in uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing reveal its ambitions.” So Iran’s nuclear enrichment is extra-threatening because Iran is engaged in nuclear enrichment? I’m not saying we shouldn’t be treating a nuclear Iran as a major and especially-dangerous problem—clearly the Obama Administration is taking the threat seriously. No one is arguing, especially given Iran’s recent expansionist push into Yemen and Iraq, that Iran should be taken in general as anything other than a serious threat to the world, no matter what and even more so with nuclear capacity.
But Bolton is employing “just trust me” reasoning to hype military action. “Saudi, Egyptian and Turkish interests are complex and conflicting, but faced with Iran’s threat, all have concluded that nuclear weapons are essential.”
How do you know that, Mr. Bolton? “Obviously, the Saudis, Turkey and Egypt will not be issuing news releases trumpeting their intentions. But the evidence is accumulating that they have quickened their pace toward developing weapons.”
Would that be the same evidence you relied on to assert that Saddam Hussein was developing WMDs—the same intel the administration used as the justification for going to war in Iraq? Bolton provides little solid evidence of his sky-is-falling assertions. We’re just supposed to trust him, I guess, based on his reputation.
Now, I realize this is the point in the article where Republicans will drone on about liberals reliably pointing to George W. Bush as a way to avoid scrutinizing Barack Obama. Whine away, but the fact is that when veterans of the Bush Administration’s disastrous foreign policy drag their own selves out of the dustbin of history to proclaim their expertise and wisdom, reminding the nation of the bountiful evidence to the contrary is entirely fair game.
When former Vice President Dick Cheney went on Fox News to attack President Obama’s strategy in Iraq, host Megyn Kelly shot back, “But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well in Iraq, sir.” Kelly listed Cheney’s failings: “You said there was no doubt Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction; you said we would be greeted as liberators; you said the Iraq insurgency was in the last throes back in 2005; and you said that after our intervention, extremists would have to, quote, ‘rethink their strategy of jihad.’ Now, with almost a trillion dollars spent there, with 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you say to those who say you were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many?”
Cheney’s response was to disagree with Kelly’s characterization—and keep asserting his righteousness. And so it also goes with John Bolton.
In 2002, while serving as Bush’s Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, Bolton said, “We are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq.” And regarding launching war in Iraq, Bolton assured, “I expect that the American role actually will be fairly minimal. I think we’ll have an important security role.” And now Bolton is the foreign policy advisor for Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign. Which doesn’t exactly burnish his credibility.
Now Mr. Bolton wants to lead the charge, once again, into war. In fact, he’s gone a step further this time. In the case of Iraq, at least Mr. Bolton and the Bush Administration could claim preemptive military action against a tyrannical government that had allegedly actually obtained weapons of mass destruction, even though those allegations ultimately (knowingly?) were false.
But here, Bolton is using the future threat of acquisition of nuclear weapons to justify preemptive military action now. In 1992, right-wing hawk Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Iran was just “three to five years away” from nuclear weapons capacity. Should we have preemptively bombed them then? I mean, facts schmacts right?
Secretary of State John Kerry says that Iran is still six years away from nuclear capacity. Others say it’s more like two or three, but even still: Reasonable people would argue there’s still time to let a diplomatic solution be worked out and tested. And reasonable people would try other plausible solutions before resorting to all-out war. But Republicans are, increasingly, not reasonable—perpetually too eager to both criticize President Obama and pull the trigger on war regardless of the fact that their track record has been a perpetual f*cking mess.
By: Sally Kohn, The Daily Beast, March 26, 2015
“Netanyahu’s Missed Opportunity”: And If Bibi Is Correct, The Real Solution Is … What Exactly?
All eyes were on Capitol Hill this morning, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress, hoping to undermine nuclear diplomacy with Iran. Everyone involved in the debate, regardless of their position, had a pretty good idea as to what the Israeli leader was going to say, and he met expectations.
A senior administration official told Jake Tapper there was “literally not one new idea” in Netanyahu’s speech, and “not one single concrete alternative” to the ongoing P5+1 talks. The official added that the prime minister’s speech was “all rhetoric, no action.”
The complaints have the benefit of being true.
Putting aside the fear-mongering and the Cheney-esque rhetoric, what Netanyahu’s remarks boiled down to was a straightforward message: Iran is bad and the deal that’s coming together with Iran won’t work. What Netanyahu’s speech was supposed to do was offer policymakers and critics of the talks a viable alternative solution, and on this front, the prime minister blew it. As Jon Chait noted:
Netanyahu’s panicked plea for what he called ”the survival of our country” is hardly a figment of his imagination. His recitation of the evils of Iran’s regime was largely correct. He might conceivably be correct that the Obama administration could have secured a stronger deal with Iran than the one it is negotiating, though that conclusion is hard to vouchsafe without detailed knowledge of the negotiations. […]
But Netanyahu did not make even the barest case for a better alternative.
It’s a familiar problem for President Obama’s critics: there’s an obvious problem in need of a solution; there’s a proposal preferred by the White House; and there are Obama’s critics, insisting they hate the president’s solution without offering a credible alternative of their own.
It’s not that Netanyahu critique is necessarily unpersuasive. Iran does not have a trustworthy track record, and no one in the Western world thinks it’d be a positive development for Tehran to have nuclear weapons. In fact, Obama has already said all of this; it’s an accepted consensus.
But it’s the case the Israeli leader builds on this foundation that’s problematic. For Netanyahu, no deal with Iran will work. No system of inspections will work. No verification process will work. No promises from Iran can be trusted.
And if Netanyahu is correct, the real solution is … what exactly? The prime minister had the platform to present a more effective vision, but he chose not to present one.
Perhaps the message was implicit and unstated. Maybe the audience was supposed to simply understand that Netanyahu prefers a military solution, disrupting an Iranian nuclear program through airstrikes. But (a) if that is the prime minister’s solution he should say so; and (b) there’s no reason to assume that a military campaign against a possible Iranian threat will permanently derail the country’s nuclear ambitions. On the contrary, it might even do the opposite.
“The alternative to this bad deal is a much better deal,” he told American lawmakers today. In theory, that sounds great – better deals are always, by definition, superior to bad deals. But where is this elusive better deal? What are its details? How would it receive international support? How would it be implemented?
Netanyahu didn’t, and wouldn’t, say. What a missed opportunity.
Postscript: At one point, the prime minister said, “I can only urge the leaders of the world not to repeat the mistakes of the past.” This isn’t what Netanyahu meant, one of the mistakes of our recent past was listening to him when he said invading Iraq was a great idea. If we’re going to avoid repeating mistakes, maybe we can start here.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 4, 2015
“The Catastrophe Bibi Is Courting”: Bolstering His Re-Election And Pushing For War, He Should Be Careful What You Wishes For
So Bibi Netanyahu did not back down, and he’s here now in the United States, and he’s giving the speech Tuesday. In doing so, he has forced a true low point in U.S.-Israel relations. As has been often observed, he’s turning Israel into a partisan issue—up to somewhere around a quarter of congressional Democrats are refusing to attend the speech. That’s a crack, a big one. If he remains prime minister after the March 17 elections, the fissures between Netanyahu’s government and Barack Obama and the Democrats will only widen.
Congressional support for Israel is due for a reconsideration. As Scott McConnell wrote last month in The American Conservative (an anti-neocon magazine), Congress “does not come close to representing the views of the American people” on Israel, either with respect to Iran or the occupation. McConnell cites all the requisite poll numbers that make the case.
Now, Congress can go a long time without representing American public opinion. On certain big-money issues like banking, that’s all Congress does. But on most issues, Congress at least has to act like it’s listening to the American people, and on foreign policy questions in particular, Congress, and for that matter the president, can’t usually go where the American people don’t want to go. Obama probably wanted to drop a smattering of bombs on Syria in 2013, but public opinion was dead set against it. And remember how the Bush administration had to work public opinion in 2002 and 2003 to make sure the lies about Saddam Husssein’s nuclear ambitions got support levels up to 60 percent or so before it launched the war.
So one of these days, in two years or five or six, congressional fealty to Israel will cease being so bipartisan and reflexive—and that will be entirely an outcome of Netanyahu (and John Boehner’s and Ron Dermer’s and AIPAC’s) making.
But all that is just politics. Netanyahu is creating a much bigger problem here. Ultimately, he wants war with Iran. And American neoconservatives want it, too. Few of them will say so (although some do—see below). But that’s what they want, and we need to be clear about it.
Think about it. What is the alternative to negotiating with Iran? Well, there is only one: not negotiating with Iran. And what are the possible courses of action under that option? At the end of the day, there are two. Number one, let Iran do what it wants. Number two, ultimately, be willing to start a war to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Knowing the neocons’ world view as I’m sure you do, how willing do you think they’d be to let Iran do what it wants? Correct. Not very. That leaves war. There is the step of tougher sanctions as a middle course, but sanctions, even crippling ones, don’t usually change a regime’s behavior. So the clear implication of the anti-negotiation position is war—with a country of 77 million people, a huge army, and formidable wealth. As a point of comparison, Iraq in 2003 had about a third of Iran’s population.
As noted above, not many on the right are going to be honest enough to speak openly of war. The Republican presidential candidates, for example, don’t want the American public to think they’re crazy, so they won’t admit this—although interestingly, Rick Santorum became, I believe, the first Republican candidate to call for up to 10,000 U.S. combat troops on the ground to fight the so-called Islamic State.
With regard to Iran, the candidates hide behind the usual euphemisms. But a few war-makers are coming out of the closet. Matt Welch of Reason noted last week that on a panel at CPAC, both John Bolton and new Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton spoke openly of the desire for regime change in Iran. Bolton said U.S. policy toward Iran should be “overthrow of the ayatollahs.” Cotton added that we need regime change and “replacement with a pro-Western regime.”
Where is Netanyahu on this? Every indication he’s given us is that he’s on the Bolton-Cotton team. I don’t doubt that the prime minister sincerely believes that a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic would be catastrophic for Israel, and we should not dismiss that concern. No opponent of the neoconservative approach should be foolish enough to think that we can trust Iran. Israel has good reason to be worried. (I will, however, mention here Israel’s own 100-odd nuclear warheads, just on principle, because they always go unmentioned in columns like these.)
So Netanyahu wants, at the very least, a bombing campaign. But you know as well as I do that most of the leading experts say Iran’s centrifuge capacities are now too numerous and too geographically disparate for a bombing campaign of the usual scope to be very effective. That means a bombing campaign of unusual scope.
Do Netanyahu and Bolton really expect that Iran would not retaliate in such a case? Of course it would retaliate. And far more likely against Israel than against the United States. But the United States would be dragged into it, which is exactly what Bolton and Cotton told CPAC we should all want.
It seems to be what Netanyahu wants, too. It’s what he wanted back in 2002, when—then as a private citizen—he went to Congress and made the case for war against Iraq. As Josh Marshall noted last week, some of his words from back then are enough to make you shudder: “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”
It had the opposite effect, of course. It strengthened Iran and gave us ISIS. And now we’re supposed to make up for that huge mistake by trusting Netanyahu and the neocons again?
I’m sure Netanyahu’s words will be measured Tuesday. He wants Israel’s levels of support in America to be high, and he wants to win re-election. But don’t be fooled. He and his Republican backers are leading us down a potentially catastrophic path. And catastrophic not least for Israel itself: If this path someday reaches its logical end point, it won’t be only liberal Democrats in America who’ll conclude that we should just let Israel fight its own battles.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 2, 2015
“Viva La Incompétence!”: Boehner’s and Bibi’s Blunders ‘Liberate’ U.S. Foreign Policy From NeoCons
It’s all happening because I am completely ignoring every urge towards common sense and good judgment I’ve ever had–George Costanza, “Seinfeld”.
President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the growing power of the military-industrial complex, but even the former 5-star general Supreme Allied Commander in World War II couldn’t do it. The quagmire of Vietnam couldn’t do it. The quicksand of Iraq couldn’t do it. The killing fields of Cambodia couldn’t do it. The Bush/Cheney failure on 9/11 couldn’t do it. Allowing bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora, and then failing to find and capture him, couldn’t do it. Allowing Pakistan to develop the “Islamic bomb” couldn’t do it.
Even the election of the Iraq invasion’s opponent as president couldn’t do it.
But, John Boehner (R-OH) has done it.
He cannot do much else, but he has achieved what no other politician could do for half a century: expose the entire Republican national security “brand” as a fraud.
Remember the pious platitudes about the first function of government to be protecting the American people? Remember the decades of demagoguery skewering Democrats as being lax on security issues, the disgusting draft-dodging Saxby Chambliss leveling that accusation on war hero and triple amputee Max Cleland (D-GA) in the waning days of a senate campaign? Recall the Bush/Cheney 2004 ads showing snarling wolves that would be unleashed against the American people if John Kerry were elected?
Now, thanks to Speaker Boehner, the Republicans have no credibility or standing on national security. None, zero, zorch, nada. The next time you hear a Republican bleating about national security, you can have a good laugh.
They were willing to leave us vulnerable, and took their threats to the brink.
A minimally competent Democratic party should be and would be screaming bloody murder. After all, Republicans are playing political games with our lives and our families’ security. Democrats would be filling the airwaves and the (now-neutral!) net non-stop, spreading the alarm to “every town, middlesex, village and farm” that Republicans will sacrifice our nation’s safety, and raise legitimate issues about their love of country.
[Not hearing that? Well, do not ignore the qualifier “minimally competent”.]
Not to be outdone, however, Bibi’s blunder is even worse for the neoconistas. At least since the Yom Kippur war in 1973, and perhaps earlier as well, it has been virtually impossible for US foreign policy to diverge in meaningful ways (i.e., those that might actually lead to peace) from Israel’s as defined by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Any president, member of Congress, or candidate who criticized Israeli policy, who even spoke about pressuring Israel was immediately pounced upon by AIPAC, carrying with it the threat of political oblivion.
Until Bibi’s blunder, support for Israel was considered to be 100% support for whatever the government of Israel du jour decided to do.
The political price to be paid for deviating from that support was always more of the myth than reality. American Jews, although backing Israel, nevertheless vote more on economic and social issues than they do on competing claims of which candidates are helping Israel more.
Now, that myth is exposed. President Obama and many Democrats are shunning Bibi, but not wavering in their support of Israel. They refuse to be pawns in his political games to win the Israeli election. They refuse to scuttle prematurely the opportunity of avoiding another major armed conflict. They refuse to compromise the moral authority the US will have achieved by going the last mile with Iran if the negotiations fail.
From this day forth, presidents and members of Congress can oppose new settlements on the West Bank as impediments to peace without waiting until their retirements. They can let the Israelis know that our support is strong, but that we have expectations of them, too, that need to be honored.
Thanks to John Boehner (R-OH), Republicans have relinquished their (specious) claim to caring more and fighting harder to perform government’s primary mission, safety and security. Fearmongering 101 is not only no longer available to them, it will be fodder for mockery.
And, thanks to Bibi, liberated from the need to express support for everything any Israeli government does as a measure of how much they support Israel, the US will now become a more effective partner to bring peace and security to Israel and dignity to Palestinians.
Bibi has neglected to realize that Americans, like other people, do not appreciate a foreign leader who deliberately tries to embarrass the President, just like foreign countries tend not to enjoy being invaded and occupied.
There has always been a segment of the population who cannot abide a black man in the White House, especially exercising the powers of his office. The visual images rankle. [Obama is not just the first person of color to be president, he is the first black man ever to rule a white majority nation]. Some of that same segment, however, may find themselves for the first time siding emotionally with him as President when an Israeli (yes, Jewish) leader tries to embarrass him.
By asserting American priorities and not being cowed by Bibi’s influence in the US, the President will gain support among the American people, not just from his own base, but from die-hard opponents as well, exactly the opposite of what Bibi wanted.
Achieving the precise opposite of one’s intended outcome is one definition of incompetence. The US adventures in Vietnam and Iraq spring immediately to mind.
Boehner’s and Bibi’s blunders have liberated US foreign policy from the iron grip of the neoconistas.
Viva la incompétence!
By: Paul Abrams, The Blog, The Hufington Post, February 28, 2015
“The Dangers Of Another Bush In The White House”: Jeb Bush Conveniently Started Promoting Fracking After Investing In It
The more we learn about Jeb Bush, the more less he appears ready for primetime:
“Some states, like yours here in New York, are choosing not to grow. They won’t approve fracking,” Bush said, his veiled shot at Cuomo drawing roars of approval from Republicans gathered at a Sheraton in Manhattan. “Meanwhile, in parts of New York where huge opportunities exist for the restoration of economic activity, people languish.”
Bush left unmentioned that fracking in the Marcellus Shale beneath the New York-Pennsylvania border also presented a big opportunity for himself.
One of his private equity enterprises at that time was raising $40 million to back a Denver-based company acquiring fracking wells in hopes New York would lift its ban. The company, Inflection Energy, has active leases in Pennsylvania, and one of Bush’s equity partners sits on the board. He also has fracking ties through a separate business with both of his sons.
The intersection between Bush’s private and public life — calls for fracking have been a part of his speeches and came as recently as last month in San Francisco — triggers questions of disclosure.
It’s not just that fracking is a horrid, unpopular practice. It’s that the self-dealing in this case is so obvious it will confirm voters’ suspicions about the dangers of putting another Bush in the White House. One of the less highlighted but most damaging subtexts of the Bush Administration was the number of members of the Bush White House who were invested in moneymaking schemes directly profiting off the invasion of Iraq, not least of them being Dick Cheney and Halliburton.
With Jeb Bush hiring the same foreign policy advisors, ramping up rhetoric for war with Iran and evidently engaged in self-dealing over oil in his speeches, the same suspicions will arise with him. As well they should.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, February 23, 2015
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