SPECIAL REPORT: Bolton To The White House - Pre-Emptive War On The Way?
John Bolton, a central figure in peddling the lies of the 2003 Iraq invasion, has been chosen by President Trump to be a National Security Advisor. This is a very bad sign. We break down why it's a terrible and dangerous choice in a special extra edition of the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
John Bolton, a central figure in peddling the lies of the 2003 Iraq invasion, has been chosen by President Trump to be a National Security Advisor. This is a very bad sign. We break down why it's a terrible and dangerous choice in a special extra edition of the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
John Bolton, a central figure in peddling the lies of the 2003 Iraq invasion, has been chosen by President Trump to be a National Security Advisor. This is a very bad sign. We break down why it's a terrible and dangerous choice in a special extra edition of the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning into this special report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good to see you, Dr. Paul.
Well, we have a special issue that just came about that we want to make mention about and that of course is the appointment of John Bolton.
And, you know, when he wasn't appointed to the administration early on, we sort of had a sigh of relief because we saw him as a real danger.
And of course, now we can't be very pleased that he is going to be in the administration.
But Trump said that he is getting very close to being very happy with his cabinet.
Now that he has Pompeo in there and Bolton and Haley, so it can't make us feel much better.
But at least we see that this big news right now with Bolton being appointed a national security advisor with H.R. McMasters taken out.
But the history for Bolton, his reputation for libertarians and people who care about peace, very, very negative.
It seems like he has a pretty good reputation for the hawkish conservative neoconservatives.
In matter of fact, you might be able to call him an arch neoconservative.
Yeah, I think he's the hawk of the hawks.
He was central to pushing the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction to get us in the Iraq war.
He was key getting us in that war.
He still supports the war in Iraq.
He may still be the only American who still thinks it was a great idea.
We just didn't occupy it in perpetuity.
But there's no question that he is at the center of the neoconservative, hawk wing of the party.
Now, the one position he holds is most annoying to me.
And I had a chance to express myself in the presidential campaign, and that was Bush's policy of preemptive war.
Sounds, you know, not too devastating.
But if a president came up and he says, we are changing our foreign policy, not to a position in foreign policy of defending our nation if we are attacked with congressional approval, he said, we must, in the administration, be able to, at will, initiate preemptive war, which is aggression.
And that is the policy that Bush introduced.
They've used it, and Obama used it.
They have used it, but it's so blatant.
And this is exactly what is symbolic of Bolton's position.
Preemptive war.
What do you think we should expect with Iran and North Korea?
He's going to be very, very aggressive.
And with the people, his philosophic allies there, he's going to have some support there.
There's not going to be much discussion about foreign policy the way I see it.
And he's not shy at all about endorsing preemptive war.
In fact, we have a couple of his recent articles where he's just completely open about it.
We can put on, here's him in the Wall Street Journal just at the end of February.
The legal case for striking North Korea first.
This is the name of it.
And then a little while back, he had another article with a catchy headline, to stop Iran's bomb, bomb Iran.
So this is overtly, overtly in favor of preemptive war.
Well, maybe there was a time in his life where he was more for peace and not getting engaged.
I want to use a short little quote that he made a few years ago when somebody asked him about his service in the Vietnam War.
And he had an explanation for not being there.
I think he sort of ducked it and was able to avoid it.
And he said his explanation was, I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice patty.
I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.
Well, the Iraq war and some of these other wars, Afghanistan, they were lost before we even started it.
And that's where they really fall down.
They get involved.
But some of these people who promote the war have been in the service, and they're not quite as bad.
But the chicken hawk is something that should not be held in high esteem.
And people should be very skeptical of anybody who takes that position.
Your kids, somebody else, they can pay the bill and they can go and fight.
But no, I had to stay in college.
And we've had, how many people have been in that position?
A lot in our administrations that they got out of active duty or seeing warfare.
Well, my son just turned 18, so it's not theoretical for me.
I'm very concerned.
A lot of the Bush White House still maintains its hawkish line, George W. Bush.
But here's one that's very interesting.
This is a quote from Richard Painter, who was George W. Bush's White House ethics lawyer.
Here's what he said upon hearing that Bolton was going to get a top advisory post, the national security advisor to President Trump.
Here's what he said.
John Bolton was by far the most dangerous man we had in the entire eight years of the Bush administration.
Hiring him as the president's top national security advisor is an invitation to war, perhaps nuclear war.
This must be stopped at all costs.
Yeah, that is not a good sign.
That's very, very dangerous.
And the one thing is, is we don't have much recourse.
You know, when they have a Senate appointment, at least we can organize.
And I know a senator that would have probably worked very, very hard not to get him appointed.
But there's no Senate approval on this.
And it's really a key position.
And it's interesting that Kelly had set up some rules that he couldn't even get into the White House.
So that'll be interesting to see how that works out because there'll be two strong characters there.
And who knows, maybe Kelly won't be there forever either.
That would be sort of par for the course with this administration.
Maybe Tom Cotton will be in his position soon.
That is a possibility.
Well, here's more Bolton.
Here's Bolton in 2013.
Talk about a dead end.
This just a few years ago.
Despite criticism of what happened after Saddam's defeat, it is indisputable that U.S.-led coalition accomplished military mission with low casualties and great speed, sending unmistakable signal of power and determination throughout the Middle East and around the world.
Mission accomplished.
We won.
There you go.
You know, the one obscene quote from Bolton is that he was sort of defaming or giving libertarianism a bad name.
He says, you know, talking about, you know, it's really tough being a libertarian in Washington.
I guess he's about as far removed from libertarianism or anybody who understands what peace is all about, anybody who understands anything about the Constitution or non-interventionist foreign policy, because these guys don't care.
Hardly anybody in Washington cares anymore about only going to war with a proper authority, you know, with the people getting a vote through their members of Congress.
So he certainly doesn't add much, and yet, you know, the president, that's his goal.
Sometimes I wonder, maybe we're completely wrong and it'll change tomorrow, but it's still very, very dangerous.
And it looks like war is on the table, whether it's a hot war, North Korea, whether we're dealing with bombing Iran, but we also have a trade war going on to add fuel to the fire.
And the markets aren't ignoring this.
And now we just looked at a budget that was just passed, massive increases in the military spending, and massive increases in the domestic spending.
It added on at the end, $118 billion.
And guess who was the most jubilant today?
It was Pelosi.
So it's really sad.
Even Trump the other day was very pleased with getting that extra money in the military.
And yet we have more money for the military in providing this than the next nine countries.
And they say, well, we have to rebuild the military.
You know what it reminds me of, not many people mention anymore.
One of the first elections I paid attention to was in 1960 when JFK was running against Nixon.
And it was close the missile gap.
Close the missile.
That was what he preached the whole time.
So that gave him his conservative credentials.
And later on, afterwards, somebody asked him about, you know, what are we going to do about closing the missile gap?
He says, oh, it wasn't quite as bad as I thought.
So there's a lot of that hyperbole.
But hopefully we can get a message out that will restrain these guys a little bit.
But this is not good news.
This is bad news.
And this hope that we're worried more than we have to be.
But if we have overemphasized our concerns, I will be very glad to say, you know, we misjudged it.
Peace did break out and everything is going to be okay.
And I worried more than I should have.
What worries me the most is where is the political opposition?
They've been obsessing for the past year and a half about Russia collusion, of which evidence we've seen zero.
They should be opposing this president's switch overnight from a dove as a candidate to a war hawk.
Concerns Over Iran Terrorism00:01:26
But I want to say one other thing about Bolton, if that's okay.
He goes on and on about Iran's terrorism, Iran's terrorism, like he's a real tough fighter against terrorism.
He's actually not that strong against terrorism.
In fact, he supports some terrorism.
We have a graphic here.
Here he's speaking at a conference organized by the Mujahideen Ekaq, the National Council for Resistance.
This is a terrorist organization.
They spent decades on the U.S. terrorist watch list.
They killed Americans.
They've blown up Americans.
That flag you saw behind him, we can blow that up.
This is their flag.
They are a Marxist-Leninist jihadist group that seeks the overthrow of Iran.
These are the kinds of people that he speaks to.
He likes terrorists like that.
So I would just finally close by saying we're very concerned, but I do want to have a little bit of a silver line, even though our hearts are heavy, and that is that next month we will meet in Charleston, South Carolina, for a conference to talk about non-interventionism.
Now it is more important than ever for us to really pack that house.
And tickets are selling fast.
They're very inexpensive, $5 students free.
Go to RonPaulInstitute.org/slash conference, get your tickets today.
We need a strong showing.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to this special report.
And you will be hearing more about this subject.
I'm sure we will be visiting on this issue in the near future.