The blowing up of Donald Trump's attempt to end the 18-year Afghan War was the straw which broke the camel’s back for the US president, who on Tuesday fired his national security adviser John Bolton.
Trump's attempt to bring to a close the longest war in US history – longer, in fact, than their direct involvement in WWI, WWII and the Vietnam War put together – was to be his own "Camp David moment." It would have mimicked both Carter and Clinton's "triumphs" there with Arafat and Begin and Arafat and Rabin (neither of which have in fact turned out to be triumphs but were wonderful photo-ops).
Bolton's rearguard action and the Taliban's killing of a single US soldier there in the week of the summit brought the Camp David caper crashing down, much to the president's fury, and prompted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to boast that the US had killed a thousand Taliban in the previous 10 days.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. National Security Advisor, John Bolton © REUTERS/Peter Nicholls
But it was not one damn thing, but one damned thing after another, which has caused the final forking of the "bureaucratic tape-worm" John Bolton, who has slithered through every right-wing administration in living memory.
Bolton caused the implosion of the Hanoi summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un, which put US-Korean relations in the toilet just when they seemed headed for the bridal suite. His mad-cap carry-on in Venezuela was another typical Bolton Blunder. Working with his henchman – the doctors of death in Central America in the 1980s were Bolton and Elliott Abrams – he led the president into the recognition of a man in the street in Caracas, Juan Guido, who claimed he was the rightful president of the oil-rich country and was capable of a coup to prove it.
What followed was a comic-opera coup which could have been a "Carry-On Up the Amazon" Ealing Comedy circa 1972. Before the day was out, the main coup leaders were hiding out in foreign embassies or – in the case of Guaido – wandering around telling the fewer and fewer who would listen to him that he had once been the president...
Bolton did his damned best to undermine Trump's troop withdrawals from Syria too, another disastrous foreign imbroglio Trump inherited from the Obama-Clinton gang. Despite his campaign promises, he has been quite unable to extricate himself from it, despite it being plain to everyone else in the world that Assad Must Go Nowhere and the gang of cut-throat foreign mercenaries sent in to destroy Syria had completely, abysmally, failed leaving the perennially under-estimated President Bashar Assad the most – perhaps the only – popular head of state in the Arab world.
I have maintained from the start that President Trump did not want war against Iran. But that John Bolton – on his way to a slot on Fox News as I write – surely did. Trump wanted to treat the Iran "negotiations" like the North Korean ones: A blizzard of blood-curdling threats and economic sanctions, culminating in a bear-hugging personally brokered "deal" on prime-time with the Iranian leadership.
What followed was a comic-opera coup which could have been a "Carry-On Up the Amazon" Ealing Comedy circa 1972. Before the day was out, the main coup leaders were hiding out in foreign embassies or – in the case of Guaido – wandering around telling the fewer and fewer who would listen to him that he had once been the president...
Bolton did his damned best to undermine Trump's troop withdrawals from Syria too, another disastrous foreign imbroglio Trump inherited from the Obama-Clinton gang. Despite his campaign promises, he has been quite unable to extricate himself from it, despite it being plain to everyone else in the world that Assad Must Go Nowhere and the gang of cut-throat foreign mercenaries sent in to destroy Syria had completely, abysmally, failed leaving the perennially under-estimated President Bashar Assad the most – perhaps the only – popular head of state in the Arab world.
I have maintained from the start that President Trump did not want war against Iran. But that John Bolton – on his way to a slot on Fox News as I write – surely did. Trump wanted to treat the Iran "negotiations" like the North Korean ones: A blizzard of blood-curdling threats and economic sanctions, culminating in a bear-hugging personally brokered "deal" on prime-time with the Iranian leadership.
Op-Ed by George Galloway
John Bolton belongs behind bars..
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It’s about damned time his ass got the boot! War... good god y’all... what is it good for... absolutely nothing!
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This article seems very anti-Bolton. I wonder if it is just because he was let go. I honestly don't know much about the man and only clicked on this in the hopes that Trump fired Michael Bolton.
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Not a resume to be proud of, last two years the US foreign policy has been raher erratic... But most likely a man with even more blood thirst will replace him.
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