![](\"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hasan_Mehdi_Bolton.jpg)
<\/p>\nYou underestimate John Bolton at your peril.
\nRemember when he was passed over for the job of secretary of state because, we were told, Donald Trump didn\u2019t like his \u201cbrush-like mustache\u201c? How we laughed. Yet less than 18 months later, after regular appearances on the Fox News casting couch, he was appointed national security adviser, with an office around the corner from the president\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Remember when Defense Secretary James Mattis met with the new national security adviser on the steps of the Pentagon and joked that he was the \u201cdevil incarnate\u201d? Mattis is gone. Bolton is still standing.
\nRemember when White House chief of staff John Kelly got into a \u201cheated, profanity-laced shouting match\u201d with Bolton, over immigration, right outside the Oval Office? Kelly is gone. Bolton is still standing.<\/p>\n
Remember when Trump announced that the 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria were \u201call coming back, and they\u2019re coming back now,\u201d only a few weeks after Bolton had said they would be staying until all Iranian troops and proxies left the country? We were told that Bolton had been ignored, overruled, sidelined even. Not quite. Earlier this month, on a visit to Israel, the national security adviser confirmed that there was no timetable for pulling out the troops and it all would depend on the Turkish government guaranteeing the safety of U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters. \u201cJohn Bolton puts brakes on Trump withdrawal from Syria,\u201d read a headline in the Financial Times.
\nTrump\u2019s national security adviser is a hard man to keep down.
\nIn 2003, Bolton got the war he wanted with Iraq. As an influential, high-profile, hawkish member of the Bush administration, Bolton put pressure on intelligence analysts, threatened international officials, and told barefaced lies about weapons of mass destruction. He has never regretted his support for the illegal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of people.
\nNow, he wants a war with Iran. So say State Department and Pentagon officials, according to the Wall Street Journal, who were \u201crattled\u201d by his request to the Pentagon \u201cto provide the White House with military options to strike Iran last year.\u201d The New York Times also reported that \u201csenior Pentagon officials are voicing deepening fears\u201d that Bolton \u201ccould precipitate a conflict with Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n
Should we be surprised? In March 2015, Bolton, then a private citizen, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times headlined, \u201cTo Stop Iran\u2019s Bomb, Bomb Iran.\u201d In July 2017, just eight months prior to joining the Trump administration, Bolton told a gathering of the cultish Iranian exile group Mujahedin-e-Khalq that \u201cthe declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the mullahs\u2019 regime in Tehran\u201d and that \u201cbefore 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Despite leaks to the press over the past few days from \u201crattled\u201d but unnamed officials at the State Department and the Pentagon, Bolton is far from the only person close to Trump who is pushing a belligerent line on Iran. He has plenty of allies in the administration. As Vox reported on Monday, \u201cBolton has staffed up the NSC with people who share his views. Last week, he hired Richard Goldberg, a noted Iran hawk, to run the administration\u2019s pressure campaign against the country.\u201d
\nOutside of the Bolton-dominated National Security Council, there\u2019s also the hawkish Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who once suggested launching \u201c2,000 sorties to destroy the Iranian nuclear capacity.\u201d As I noted last week, in his recent speech on Middle East policy in Cairo, Pompeo made more than 20 references to \u201cmalevolent,\u201d \u201coppressive\u201d Iran and denounced \u201cIranian expansion\u201d and \u201cregional destruction,\u201d while giving Saudi Arabia a big wet kiss. \u201cCountries increasingly understand that we must confront the ayatollahs, not coddle them,\u201d he declared. Pompeo then told Fox News, before leaving Cairo, that the United States would be hosting an international summit on Iran in Poland next month.
\nSo how do these hawks plan to get their war with Tehran? Bolton, in particular, seems keen on two lines of attack. The first relates to the nuclear issue. \u201cWe have little doubt that Iran\u2019s leadership is still strategically committed to achieving deliverable nuclear weapons,\u201d the national security adviser told fellow Iran-hater Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem earlier this month. There is, however, not a shred of evidence for Bolton\u2019s claim; in fact, the U.S. intelligence community has flatly and repeatedly rejected it. \u201cWe do not know whether Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons,\u201d said Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, in his 2017 \u201cWorldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community.\u201d
\nThe second line of attack relates to the activities of Tehran-backed groups in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. According to the New York Times, Bolton\u2019s request for military options against Iran \u201ccame after Iranian-backed militants fired three mortars or rockets into an empty lot on the grounds of the United States Embassy in Baghdad in September.\u201d To be clear: No one was killed or injured in this attack.<\/p>\nAlso, how far does this retaliatory logic extend? The United States has been accused of supporting extremist, anti-government groups in Iran, as well as Israeli strikes on Iranian positions in Syria; does this mean that the Iranians have a right to launch retaliatory air strikes on U.S. soil? Do the Cubans have the right to bomb Miami, where a number of U.S.-supported anti-Castro groups reside and operate?
\nLogic, however, has never been Bolton\u2019s strong suit. He is an ideologue. \u201cIt is a big mistake,\u201d he once declaimed, \u201cfor us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so \u2014 because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States.\u201d
\nTo hell with international law. And the International Criminal Court. And civilian lives. The bellicose Bolton is going to spend much of 2019 making the case, both in public and in private, for war with Iran \u2014 a war that would make the invasion of Iraq look like a walk in the park. This is what makes the mustachioed national security adviser, with an office down the hallway from Trump, the most dangerous member of this reckless administration.
\nDevil incarnate? Perhaps that was an understatement.
\nMehdi Hasan , The Intercept<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You underestimate John Bolton at your peril. Remember when he was passed over for the job of secretary of state because, we were told, Donald Trump didn\u2019t like his \u201cbrush-like…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9423,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[90,178,20],"module":[81],"ctype":[17],"blog":[109],"class_list":["post-9421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mujahedin-khalq-proxy-force","tag-mujahedin-warmongers","tag-pmoi-iran-people","tag-third-view-mek","module-article","ctype-story","blog-western-bloggers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9421"},{"taxonomy":"module","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/module?post=9421"},{"taxonomy":"ctype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ctype?post=9421"},{"taxonomy":"blog","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog?post=9421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}