1 Boring Old Man

Bolton on whether Bush might bomb Iran before he leaves office:
‘I think so, definitely.’

In a Fox News interview this afternoon, former UN Ambassador John Bolton discussed his desire to bomb camps inside Iran that are reportedly training and arming Shiite insurgents who fight in Iraq. Fox host Martha McCallum asked, “Can you imagine a scenario where President Bush would do that before the end of his term?” Bolton responded, “I think so, definitely.” He added later, “This is entirely responsible on our part.” Asked by McCallum whether Israel would be supportive of the strikes given the possibility of Iranian retaliation, Bolton responded, “I think they’d be delighted.”

There’s no way to know if Bolton is currently preaching the Gospel of the Bush Administration, or just his own agenda. But historically, it’s dangerous not to see him representing the party line. It cannot be possible that they don’t know that the American people are not behind this policy. It’s equally not possible that they don’t know that Congress would not support military action against Iran. It’s hard to imagine that we will accept their word that Iran is training our enemies. And for what it’s worth, if they asked me, I’d say we shouldn’t bomb Iran even if they are supporting the Iraq insurgency [I doubt that they’ll ask]. Yet there’s a real possibility that they’ll go ahead…

The origins of this set of ideas remains obscure to me. What we know is that they first surfaced in the latter days of the George H.W. Bush Administration with Paul Wolfowitz’s Defense Guidance, written when he was the Assistant to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney [1991]. When it was leaked, Papa Bush quashed it. Publicly, Cheney said he agreed with Bush’s decision to withdraw after the First Gulf War – but one wonders if he was telling the truth. Wolfowitz states now that shortly thereafter, they thought our pulling back was a mistake. But then, to their surprise, Clinton beat Bush and they were out of the game. During those years, the lot of them hung out at the American Enterprise Institute where this notion of Reagan-esque spending on the military, "regime change" in Iraq, and some kind of war with Iran smoldered unchecked to the present. It must have been agony for them to watch the Communist Bloc dissolve, and leave them powerless to make their power play.