Former national security adviser John Bolton: There never was a bad war or a good peace
Turns Benjamin Franklin's wisdom on its head
On March 24, 2023, former national security adviser John Bolton was asked by NPR host Steve Inskeep to reflect on the decision to attack Iraq 20 years earlier commencing a continuing war costing more than $2 trillion and climbing. Mr. Bolton was U.S. undersecretary of state when the invasion began, and he insisted that the decision to invade was irreproachable.
A fair characterization of the former national security adviser’s mindset is that, at least for the United States, there has never been a bad war or a good peace, a frontal assault on stateman Benjamin Franklin’s adage, “There never was a good war, or a bad peace,” in part because war is the legalization of first-degree murder and invites blowback.
Mr. Bolton has urged bombing Iran to extinguish its regional hegemony born of his 2003 handiwork in convulsing Iraq and turning it into a satellite of Iran’s mad mullahs. The last regime change the United States executed in Iran was the 1953 overthrow of democratically elected and popular Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh for the venal, megalomaniacal Rezi Shah Pahlavi. The Shah predictably bowed to Ayatollah Khomeini, and the hostage crisis ensued. Like the French Bourbon royalty, Mr. Bolton forgets nothing and learns nothing.
He was a drum major in college for the trillion-dollar Vietnam War debacle featuring war crimes such as My Lai, Napalm Girl, and Tiger Cages.
For every complex international question, Bolton has a simple answer: bomb the adversary back to the Stone Age. If that doesn’t work out, start a new conflict and blame the previous failure on the fog of war.
Bolton pins responsibility for the Iraqi war on 9/11 and justified fears that “terrorists” were hiding everywhere on the globe coiled for a reprise. Bolton impliedly defines terrorists as any person, organization, or nation opposed to world domination by the United States, which is a license for Bolton to kill his way to the summit of limitless power.
President George W. Bush and sidekick VP Dick Cheney were flirting with attacking Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration long before 9/11. Former Secretary of Treasury Paul O’Neil recounted on CBS’s 60 Minutes: "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go. For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap."
Moreover, contrary to Bolton’s insinuation, President Bush refrained from associating Iraq with 9/11 to justify the attack. It was all imaginary WMD.
Bolton sought to justify the legality of the aggression by invoking United Nations Security Council Resolutions and the United Nations Charter. But a treaty or executive agreement cannot override the Constitution as the United States Supreme Court explained in Reid v. Covert. And the Constitution entrusts exclusive responsibility for war to Congress in the Declare War Clause. James Wilson elaborated during the Pennsylvania ratification debates: “This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or single body of men, to involve us in such distress, for the important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature.”
Congress never voted a declaration of war against Iraq. It unconstitutionally punted to the President to flee from its constitutional responsibility.
Dr. Franklin announced at the conclusion of the constitutional convention that the American people had been bequeathed a Republic if they could keep it. We have failed the challenge, and our posterity will execrate us for that.