A Bolt from the past
Last week, President Donald Trump named John Bolton as National Security Adviser. The selection of Bolton and the firing of the previous National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster, qualifies as the most insane thing that happened in Washington last a week. And this was a week of heightened lunacy and chaos even by the standards of the Trump administration.
McMaster is a top military officer with vast and distinguished command and combat experience. He was a voice of sanity inside the administration. John Bolton is a dangerous man. He is not just a “hawk among hawks” as he has been described in the media. He is a fanatic among fanatics.
As National Security Adviser, Bolton on his own has no power to, for instance, start a war. But Trump does, and he has threatened to do so often. Thankfully, Trump has never made good on those threats. But Bolton will be a multiplier of every bellicose and blustering instinct in Trump. Bolton just might be the missing ingredient in a formula for the disaster called “preventive war.”
The last Republican administration was bellicose enough. But most of the neo-cons who came to power and prominence during the George W. Bush administration were merely neo-Lithic, New Stone Age. Bolton was paleolithic, Old Stone Age. The neoliths were hot to invade Iraq. The paleolithic neo-cons wanted to throw in Iran, North Korea and Cuba.
George W. Bush named Bolton U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. It was worse than spitting in the face of a world body created by the United States and headquartered on its soil. For, on Feb. 3, 1994, John Bolton had declared: “The [UN] Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”
The Senate never confirmed Bolton, but that is almost beside the point. What Bolton said on that day in February 1994 is a fantasy about mass homicide. Homicidal people express homicidal fantasies. The Parkland killer, Nikolas Cruz, certainly did, as have many others that have committed similar atrocities. And how does a building lose ten stories? We found out on September 11th. The Al Qaeda fanatics hoped to do just that, but they exceeded their expectation and took down both Twin Towers killing almost 3,000 people.
The comparison might seem far-fetched, even outrageous. But consider that Bolton has advocated a first strike against North Korea. Military experts predict a death toll from the ensuing war that far exceeds that on 9/11.
Bolton also favors tearing up the Iran nuclear agreement and instead wants a military strike against that country. Iran is a proud country that fought off a war of aggression waged against it by Saddam Hussein. It has many ways to retaliate against the United States and its partners and many allies that will join it in such a jihad.
A U.S. military strike against Iran also would be a sure-fire way to unite an Iranian people increasingly weary of the rule of the ayatollahs. The resulting disaster would dwarf the Iraq debacle, an adventure Bolton enthusiastically championed. A U.S. strike against Iran would further destabilize the entire region, especially Iraq, which like Iran is a majority Shia country.
Bolton’s ascension was only the scariest event in a week in which Trump’s Washington came to resemble the late Roman empire, complete with multiple women accusing the emperor of debauchery and paying money to conceal it. There was almost a government shutdown, only barely averted by an appeal from the Defense Secretary not to veto the budget because it grants a bounty to the military. That for Trump seems to have outweighed all other considerations. Trump signed, citing national security, but he did it kicking and screaming and vowing he would never agree to such a budget again.
And these were not the only Trump administration scandals that mushroomed this week. The Russia probe yielded new revelations suggesting collusion and obstruction of justice by the Trump campaign. In response, Trump purged his legal team of lawyers who advised him to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in favor of combative lawyers itching for a scorched-earth strategy against Mueller.
The atmosphere of utter disorder in the White House contrasted sharply with another thing happening in the nation’s capital, the March for Our Lives. The event, organized by teenagers, drew a huge crowd and was amazingly well-organized and -conducted. It was inclusive and cooperative. Idealistic and effective. It was in contact with reality and not caught in the denialism that says that guns don’t kill people. It was everything the Trump administration is not.
Two versions of America were on display in the capital. In one, two vicious old men, Donald Trump and John Bolton, cynical and aggressive, joined together to bring back their version of the good old days. The Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, mutually assured destruction (MAD), and all that. The other version of America featured youths that know that this nation can be—and can do—better, and who are determined to be the agents of that change.
