Bolton is the anti-Obama. A longtime target of Liberals and Tehran’s Enemy
Il Giornale, March 26, 2018
The title of John Bolton’s 2007 book was Surrender Is Not an Option. One of his notorious phrase (and of course the most controversial) is the following: “If the UN headquarters lost 10 floors, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference”. Over the weekend, US President Donald Trump appointed John Bolton, 69, as his new National Security Advisor, a key card in the White House staff shake-up that will see him replace Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, and which led to the ousting of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Bolton and Pompeo, when attempting to define the rotating circus underway by the current US administration, are on the same side - both are fervent Republicans with ironclad principles – and Trump's chief of staff, John Kelly, is counting upon them to reorder the stormy and constantly evolving landscape.
Bolton will be in charge of a security staff consisting of close to a hundred thousand specialists from every sector imaginable and cognizant of all areas of the world, including many employees from the Pentagon, the State Department and intelligence agencies. He will, despite the left’s opposition and scorn, advise Trump on all of today’s most sensitive issues, from North Korea to the Middle East, China and Islamic radicalism, including ISIS and al-Qaeda.
A month ago he wrote in the Wall Street Journal an article entitled: "The Legal Case to Strike North Korea First"; and in 2015, while Obama was still negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, he voiced his unequivocal dissent with an op-ed in that the New York Times, clearly in an effort to arouse controversy, entitled: "To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran”. But these gross generalizations hardly do justice to a diplomat/intellectual who is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a famous conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. who already was a former Assistant Secretary of State in the George H.W. Bush administration and later, following the attack on the Twin Towers, worked as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security from 2001 to 2005 in the George W. Bush administration.
Bolton has never said anything about the
destruction itself of the Iranian reactor, but rather about the treaty that is
now considered by many to be incredibly inadequate and essentially
irresponsible. "Not only does the entire agreement reflect appeasement,
but President Obama's diplomacy produced weak, ambiguous and confusing language
in many specific provisions”. And who can deny this today?
The billows of the New York Times, and the rest of the liberal press have arrived as far as Europe. A former Bush administration official will now become part of Trump’s, what better feast could be served to the media accustomed to constant derision when they hear that “surrender is not an option”? Actually, usually they think that, of course, it is.
Yet Bolton’s character, specifically his intellectual and moral strength, has forced even the New York Times to publish an article about his praises at least in relation to the UN. Why? Because he was among the first to denounce its corruption, indifference to human rights and even its criminality, as well as the its incredible cowardice in standing against the slaughter of defenseless populations from Srebrenica to Sudan. It was Bolton who also succeeded to repeal the worst curse of the anti- Israel bias, when the UN assembly voted upon a resolution that declared “Zionism is racism”; and it is again he who wrote that Kim Jong-Un is “a horrible dictator under whom life is hell”. No, Bolton is not dangerous, as the press has proclaimed. The truth is that today’s global reality is. Therefore, it’s a good thing that there’s someone like Bolton who knows how to realistically confront it.
Translation by Amy Rosenthal