Il Communication

Despite the succeess of Bill Clinton’s  trip to North Korea and meeting with Kim Jong Il, mustachioed former UN Ambassador and preemptive war enthusiast John Bolton took the opportunity to attack Clinton and grind his axe yesterday.  In the Guardian today, Jeremy Goldkorn asks a good question:  why does the U.S. media still take this discredited zealot seriously?

As Goldkorn points out, in addition to clinging to a wildly dishonest (delusional?) view of the Iraq war and continuing to support the idea of preemtive war (which should be more than enough to put him on the sidelines), Bolton also seems to have no idea what’s happening or what happened.  Like others who became caught up in the neocon nightmare, he seems to think that blind faith in ideology and catchphrases will trump reality.  Goldkorn:

It’s scary enough that the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq has apparently not dented Bolton’s belief in violent toppling of other country’s governments, but it was something else he said on The Daily Show that was even scarier:

My argument for regime change in Iran is that in the few examples we have where there has been regime change of countries pursuing nuclear weapons and have given them up and there’s a prospect that could happen in Iran.The best example is South Africa where when the apartheid regime fell and we got a truly democratic government, the new government under Mandela renounced the quest for nuclear weapons. I think that’s possible in Iran.

Aside from the fact that regime change in South Africa came through a peaceful settlement negotiated by South Africans themselves, the apartheid government stopped the nuclear programme in 1989 and ensured that there were no nuclear bombs left to hand over to the country’s new rulers. The apartheid government made sure the country would not have the bomb long before Mandela got into office.

Bolton’s ignorance is astounding. It’s a relief that he no longer represents the diplomatic interests of the US, but a shame that he he is still taken seriously by the American media.

Your average freshman political science major could point out the flaws in Bolton’s Iran/South Africa comparison.  Most importantly, “regime change” in South Africa didn’t happen in the neocon-prescribed fashion, for example.  But Bolton still gets space in WAPO.  And as one of the chief cheerleaders for the catastrophic Bush-era foreign policy, which always placed war and intimidation before diplomacy, Bolton has the gall to attack Clinton for his meeting with Kim Jong Il.   Wow.

We need informed debate and argument in our political culture.  But we don’t get that from ideologues like Bolton and Bill Kristol.  We just get ideological zealotry.  As Goldkorn says, it is at least a relief that Bolton and his ilk aren’t in charge of Iran policy right now.

Tagged as: Jeremy Goldkorn, John Bolton, North Korea