How we laughed. Yet less than 18 months later, after regular appearances on the Fox News casting couch, he was appointed national security adviser, with an office around the corner from the president’s.
Remember when Defense Secretary James Mattis met with the new national security adviser on the steps of the Pentagon and joked that he was the “devil incarnate”? Mattis is gone. Bolton is still standing.
Remember when White House chief of staff John Kelly got into a “heated, profanity-laced shouting match” with Bolton, over immigration, right outside the Oval Office? Kelly is gone. Bolton is still standing.
Remember when Trump announced that the 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria were “all coming back, and they’re coming back now,” only a few weeks after Bolton had said they would be staying until all Iranian troops and proxies left the country? We were told that Bolton had been ignored, overruled, sidelined even. Not quite.
Earlier this month, on a visit to Israel, the national security adviser confirmed that there was no timetable for pulling out the troops and it all would depend on the Turkish government guaranteeing the safety of U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters. “John Bolton puts brakes on Trump withdrawal from Syria,” read a headline in the Financial Times. Trump’s national security adviser is a hard man to keep down.
IN 2003, BOLTON got the war he wanted with Iraq. As an influential, high-profile, hawkish member of the Bush administration, Bolton put pressure on intelligence analysts, threatened international officials, and told barefaced lies about weapons of mass destruction. He has never regretted his support for the illegal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Now, he wants a war with Iran. So say State Department and Pentagon officials, according to the Wall Street Journal, who were “rattled” by his request to the Pentagon “to provide the White House with military options to strike Iran last year.” The New York Times also reported that “senior Pentagon officials are voicing deepening fears” that Bolton “could precipitate a conflict with Iran.” Should we be surprised?
In March 2015, Bolton, then a private citizen, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times headlined, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” In July 2017, just eight months prior to joining the Trump administration, Bolton told a gathering of the cultish Iranian exile group Mujahedin-e-Khalq that “the declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran” and that “before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran.”
Despite leaks to the press over the past few days from “rattled” but unnamed officials at the State Department and the Pentagon, Bolton is far from the only person close to Trump who is pushing a belligerent line on Iran. He has plenty of allies in the administration.
As Vox reported on Monday, “Bolton has staffed up the NSC with people who share his views. Last week, he hired Richard Goldberg, a noted Iran hawk, to run the administration’s pressure campaign against the country.”
Outside of the Bolton-dominated National Security Council, there’s also the hawkish Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who once suggested launching “2,000 sorties to destroy the Iranian nuclear capacity.” In his recent speech on Middle East policy in Cairo, Pompeo made more than 20 references to “malevolent,” “oppressive” Iran and denounced “Iranian expansion” and “regional destruction,” while giving Saudi Arabia a big wet kiss.
“Countries increasingly understand that we must confront the ayatollahs, not coddle them,” he declared. Pompeo then told Fox News, before leaving Cairo, that the United States would be hosting an international summit on Iran in Poland next month.
So how do these hawks plan to get their war with Tehran? Bolton, in particular, seems keen on two lines of attack. The first relates to the nuclear issue. “We have little doubt that Iran’s leadership is still strategically committed to achieving deliverable nuclear weapons,” the national security adviser told fellow Iran-hater Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem earlier this month.
The second line of attack relates to the activities of Tehran-backed groups in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. According to the New York Times, Bolton’s request for military options against Iran “came after Iranian-backed militants fired three mortars or rockets into an empty lot on the grounds of the United States Embassy in Baghdad in September.” To be clear: No one was killed or injured in this attack.
Also, how far does this retaliatory logic extend? The United States has been accused of supporting extremist, anti-government groups in Iran, as well as Israeli strikes on Iranian positions in Syria; does this mean that the Iranians have a right to launch retaliatory air strikes on U.S. soil? Do the Cubans have the right to bomb Miami, where a number of U.S.-supported anti-Castro groups reside and operate?
Logic, however, has never been Bolton’s strong suit. He is an ideologue. “It is a big mistake,” he once declaimed, “for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so — because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States.”
To hell with international law. And the International Criminal Court. And civilian lives. The bellicose Bolton is going to spend much of 2019 making the case, both in public and in private, for war with Iran — a war that would make the invasion of Iraq look like a walk in the park.
This is what makes the mustachioed national security adviser, with an office down the hallway from Trump, the most dangerous member of this reckless administration. Devil incarnate? Perhaps that was an understatement.
(26 March 2015) FOR years, experts worried that the Middle East would face an uncontrollable nuclear-arms race if Iran ever acquired weapons capability. Given the region’s political, religious and ethnic conflicts, the logic is straightforward.
As in other nuclear proliferation cases like India, Pakistan and North Korea, America and the West were guilty of inattention when they should have been vigilant. But failing to act in the past is no excuse for making the same mistakes now. All presidents enter office facing the cumulative effects of their predecessors’ decisions. But each is responsible for what happens on his watch. President Obama’s approach on Iran has brought a bad situation to the brink of catastrophe.
In theory, comprehensive international sanctions, rigorously enforced and universally adhered to, might have broken the back of Iran’s nuclear program. But the sanctions imposed have not met those criteria. Naturally, Tehran wants to be free of them, but the president’s own director of National Intelligence testified in 2014 that they had not stopped Iran’s progressing its nuclear program.
There is now widespread acknowledgment that the rosy 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which judged that Iran’s weapons program was halted in 2003, was an embarrassment, little more than wishful thinking.
Even absent palpable proof, like a nuclear test, Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear weapons has long been evident. Now the arms race has begun: Neighboring countries are moving forward, driven by fears that Mr. Obama’s diplomacy is fostering a nuclear Iran.
Saudi Arabia, keystone of the oil-producing monarchies, has long been expected to move first. No way would the Sunni Saudis allow the Shiite Persians to outpace them in the quest for dominance within Islam and Middle Eastern geopolitical hegemony.
Because of reports of early Saudi funding, analysts have long believed that Saudi Arabia has an option to obtain nuclear weapons from Pakistan, allowing it to become a nuclear-weapons state overnight. Egypt and Turkey, both with imperial legacies and modern aspirations, and similarly distrustful of Tehran, would be right behind.
Ironically perhaps, Israel’s nuclear weapons have not triggered an arms race. Other states in the region understood — even if they couldn’t admit it publicly — that Israel’s nukes were intended as a deterrent, not as an offensive measure.
Iran is a different story. Extensive progress in uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing reveal its ambitions. Saudi, Egyptian and Turkish interests are complex and conflicting, but faced with Iran’s threat, all have concluded that nuclear weapons are essential.
Saudi Arabia has signed nuclear cooperation agreements with South Korea, China, France and Argentina, aiming to build a total of 16 reactors by 2030. The Saudis also just hosted meetings with the leaders of Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey; nuclear matters were almost certainly on the agenda. Pakistan could quickly supply nuclear weapons or technology to Egypt, Turkey and others. Or, for the right price, North Korea might sell behind the backs of its Iranian friends.
The Obama administration’s increasingly frantic efforts to reach agreement with Iran have spurred demands for ever-greater concessions from Washington. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican, worked hard, with varying success, to forestall or terminate efforts to acquire nuclear weapons by states as diverse as South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil and South Africa. Even where civilian nuclear reactors were tolerated, access to the rest of the nuclear fuel cycle was typically avoided. Everyone involved understood why.
This gold standard is now everywhere in jeopardy because the president’s policy is empowering Iran. Whether diplomacy and sanctions would ever have worked against the hard-liners running Iran is unlikely. But abandoning the red line on weapons-grade fuel drawn originally by the Europeans in 2003, and by the United Nations Security Council in several resolutions, has alarmed the Middle East and effectively handed a permit to Iran’s nuclear weapons establishment.
The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure. The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.
Rendering inoperable the Natanz and Fordow uranium-enrichment installations and the Arak heavy-water production facility and reactor would be priorities. So, too, would be the little-noticed but critical uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan. An attack need not destroy all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but by breaking key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle, it could set back its program by three to five years.
The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.
Mr. Obama’s fascination with an Iranian nuclear deal always had an air of unreality. But by ignoring the strategic implications of such diplomacy, these talks have triggered a potential wave of nuclear programs. The president’s biggest legacy could be a thoroughly nuclear-weaponized Middle East.
(John R. Bolton, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was the United States ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006.)