John Bolton: ‘U.S. Has No Strategic Interest’ In A United Iraq
John Bolton: ‘U.S. Has No Strategic Interest’ In A United Iraq
While he was acting Ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton repeatedly said he was in favor of a “unified” Iraq:
“The United States remains committed to a unified, democratic and prosperous Iraq and looks forward to the continued cooperation of the international community for Iraq’s future.” [11/28/06]
“The unanimous adoption of this resolution is a vivid demonstration of broad international support for a ‘federal, democratic, pluralist and unified Iraq.’” [11/8/05]
Apparently, Bolton never really meant what he said. In a recent interview, Bolton said it’s not in the U.S.’s “strategic interest” for there to be a unified Iraq:
“The United States has no strategic interest in the fact that there’s one Iraq, or three Iraqs,” he was quoted as saying in the French daily Le Monde. “We have a strategic interest in the fact of ensuring that what emerges is not a state in complete collapse, which could become a refuge for terrorists or a terrorist state.”
The comments by Bolton marked the second time in less than a week that Bolton had contradicted Bush administration policy. Last week, he said the United States may not be able to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons because of a flawed diplomatic strategy. Bolton’s comments are a stark reminder of why he was unfit for the U.N. International diplomats could never determine what was his real agenda.
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Well, duh!
Nobody in the Bush administration is really concerned with Iraq or its people.
Its natural resources, on the other hand… (and those can be secured whether it’s one, two, or many “Iraqs”)
January 29th, 2007 at 5:34 pmMy, oh, my! Even John “Got Milk?” Bolton has wandered off the reservation. GDumbya should really have given him a Medal of Freedom award in order to shut him up.
January 29th, 2007 at 5:36 pmWhen Mr. neo-con speaks, the world should listen. All US wants is the oil, and a more fragmented Iraq, ensures continued US presence to get at the oil before the Iranians do which would reduce the West’s influence in the Middle East.
January 29th, 2007 at 5:38 pmActually Bolton may be truthful here. The Cons don’t tell the truth so it would not surprise me in the least it that the plan was to create civil war and divide the country into three factions. Sunni, Shia and Kurdish.
January 29th, 2007 at 5:38 pmIf Cheney’s glass is half full, Bolton’s is cracked.
January 29th, 2007 at 5:40 pmThe shelf life of their comments is about 30 days. Bolton’s were unusually long – 60 days. Must be those additives he keeps in his moustache.
January 29th, 2007 at 5:41 pmIt’s not that the U.S. doesn’t have a strategic interest in a united Iraq, as much as it has a strategic interest in a non-unified Iraq. An Iraq that is constantly weakened by internal strife is essential to the administration’s plan for permanent occupation of the region.
January 29th, 2007 at 5:41 pmOf course not. It never was about Iraq. It was only and ever about the American Empire expanding itself into the Middle East to protect its national interests, as always.
These freaks admire the Roman Empire to the point of trying to immitate it.
January 29th, 2007 at 5:42 pmBolton apparently doesn’t realize that what he’s saying makes HIM look like a moron as well.
January 29th, 2007 at 5:43 pmThe comments by Bolton marked the second time in less than a week that Bolton had contradicted Bush administration policy.
you should qualify that by saying “contradicted STATED Bush poliey.”…
we all know their REAL policy is the opposite of everything they declare…
Apparently, Bolton never really meant what he said
like i said…
January 29th, 2007 at 5:48 pmHere is the strategy folks, or the lack there of. I’m reading 2 books by Ron Suskind lately and the man is on it. Check this out . Enjoy…
January 29th, 2007 at 6:00 pmhttp://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2006/12/18/suskind_empiricism.html#more
Except for oil.
January 29th, 2007 at 6:04 pmBolton should be arrested, so charged with corruption, perjury and conspiracy against the American public. He also should be charged with war crimes against the Iraqi citizenry. Israel would love for the Kurds to break off to form their own nation in North Iraq, but Turkey says it will invade such a nation and slaughter the entire Kurd population. Thanks Bolton for helping to destroy the Middle East for criminal Bush Regime.
January 29th, 2007 at 6:04 pm“Its natural resources, on the other hand”
What about its natural resources?
January 29th, 2007 at 6:07 pmI swear that the U.S. strategy all along has been to CREATE as much chaos as humanly possible.
Anything to protect our ’strategic interests’ whatever they may be.
January 29th, 2007 at 6:08 pm“…not a state in complete collapse, which could become a refuge for terrorists or a terrorist state.”
Er, isn’t that basically what we had with Saddam in power?
January 29th, 2007 at 6:34 pmBolton’s real agenda is to talk his way into Ann Coulter’s jockey shorts
January 29th, 2007 at 6:40 pmSomehow there are seriously eerie parallels here….
January 29th, 2007 at 6:44 pmhttp://www.starwars.com/databank/organization/thesith/
Unified Iraq…. Has anyone in the administration done there homework?
January 29th, 2007 at 6:45 pmBolton is just telling the truth about US policy.
Now that it has become clear to Bush and Co that they cannot have a unified Iraq as an ally (something that anyone with two brain cells could have told them before they invaded) it seems that have decided to instead have Kurdistan instead. Kirkuk has 40% of Iraq’s oil reserves anyway, and despite protests about the ethnic cleansing that Kurds are carrying out from just about all involved parties (and the UN), the US seems resolute in supporting them.
So the US loses Turkey and gains Kurdistan – not exactly the best bargain it ever made. Not to mention that in supporting PJAK attacks on Iran and turning a blind eye to PKK attacks on Turkey that the US has become the sort of terror supporting regime it was supposed to be fighting.
Apart from the cross border terrorism, Turkey also has to put up with hundreds of thousands of refugees. And yet despite having delivered all this terror and chaos to allies, we call them traitors because their parliament elected not to help us in doing this!
Given this, Kurds are probably the allies that the US under this admin deserves.
January 29th, 2007 at 6:55 pmThe USA and other “western interests” (Previously England and France) have never had a desire to have a democracy in the region. The preferred method of operation is to put a dictator in place who will give western counties all the oil they need which allows oil companies to make huge profits. Saddam was no longer “controllable” and thus bushco removed him.
Don’t ever expect that they will stand for a real democracy to be created in Iraq, but the problem bushco has now, is how to put a puppet government in place that will continue to give us what we want yet appear to be “free” and democratic. Additionally, they didn’t do their home work and failed to comprehend (among many other things) that the ancient hatreds would explode when the only control (Saddam) over this violence was removed.
January 29th, 2007 at 6:57 pmCaptain Video, this is not what the American people were sold. Failure to deliver professional services I believe is the term, how about misrepresentation? bait and switch. How is that Liberal blind hatred?3K+ of the US’ finest and Billions and Billions and Billions for this. The only reason it’s like this is because we wrecked the playing field. So now it’s ok after we trashed a country, stimulated a civil war and our standards for success are reduced to what? Nice try.
January 29th, 2007 at 6:59 pmIt was surprisingly easy to figure out bolton’s agenda, find the likud policy and you have bolton’s agenda.
January 29th, 2007 at 7:54 pm> No more romantic nonesense about turning Iraq into a westrn style democracy.
> What we do need to do is to prevent Iraq from becoming like Afghanistan under the
> Taliban. That should be our primary objective in Iraq.
Primary objecives they are a-changing
Go in, wreck the place, make them pay out of their nose for the war material that was dumped on them (remember that idea? war is gonna pay for itself?) then it’s “you ungrateful natives we are no longer interested in your country” (yeah, remember “we are not interested in nation building?” .. that kind of Rumsfeld bull? it’s finally coming true then) Yeah… the next one will be “but they did it to themselves”. A rapist’s excuses ..
January 29th, 2007 at 8:24 pmAh, Captain Video and his Video Rangers! The high point of early TV. They put Flash Gordon and the evil Ming to shame. Such vivid stunt effects! And, then, there was Howdy Dowdy and Buffalo Bob as a finale.
January 29th, 2007 at 9:10 pmOf course Bolty does not want a united Iraq, they would be a threat to another unnamed country in ther region. Just sayin’
January 29th, 2007 at 9:27 pmIraq is an invention of the United Kingdom, held together much like Yugoslavia was under Communism.
The deathgrip was released (unfortunately cosmicly coinciding with a global Jihadi movement) and now everyone is sorting themselves out.
I know you guys love to attack Bush, but this was inevitible.
Now if this civil war happened and we weren’t there, Christiana Amampour and Jamie Ruban would be crying for American assistance to end the genocide.
January 30th, 2007 at 12:20 amHey, come on guys, be fair. An ambassador speaks for our country, not his own opinion, on the job. Even says in the article quoting him, “The United
January 30th, 2007 at 2:57 amStates remains committed…” Now that Bolton is no longer a federal employee he is as entitled as anyone else to exercise his freedom of speech to give his opinion as a private citizen to anyone who wants to listen, and it obviously isn’t identical to that of the Bush administration in a lot of ways. If people would stop criticizing Bolton and actually pay attention to what he’s been saying lately and DO it, our foreign policy wouldn’t be such a mess–regime change for North Korea because we can’t trust them not to hide their bomb-making, same for Iran, through economic and political isolation because negotiations have failed. This man knows what he’s talking about now that he’s free to speak and those in the government would be wise to take his advice, although I’m doubtful it will happen.
Bolton’s just expressing a commonplace neoconservative opinion, albeit one that the wider American public may have failed to register. The original advocates of war against Iraq always were sympathetic to the view that it was in the strategic interest of both the US & Israel that the unified Iraqi state be destroyed, the better to eliminate a center of power in the Arab world. At a minimum, the prospect wasn’t viewed as a reason not the invade. They occasionally said as much, as the historical record attests.
In the event, things turn out to be more complicated, but this was the thinking.
January 30th, 2007 at 3:21 amThe problem is even if the entire administration straight out admit they’re in there for the oil, Bush is still in the office planning his vacation.
It’s too little too late.
January 30th, 2007 at 3:41 am” Bolton’s comments are a stark reminder of why he was unfit for the U.N. International diplomats could never determine what was his real agenda.”
O’Reilly.
“There IS NO MORE IRAQ. There WILL BE THREE TERRITORIES.”
– Kissinger, early 2004, briefing his Saudi clients.
• Jerry ‘Paul’ Bremer, past president of Kissinger Associates, arrives in Baghdad as CPA chief, and in first two orders unemploys the entire Iraq security structure — to the collective gasp of most of the military below Co-conspirator Staff level — and deBaathifying the gov’t to four levels:
CREATING MASS DISORDER and a lot of anger.
• Bushco failed to write any orders to guard Al-Qaqaa’s 380 metric tons of high-explosives, CENTCOM ‘lost’ 450 shoulder-fired missiles, and Iraq’s nine nuclear dumps were somehow not important to an invasion based on the danger of nuclear proliferation. All of the high-precision machine tools in the country are now missing, along with cannisters of cesium and strontium.
• The CIA burned the Koran-Torah Repository, and the invasion force allowed the destruction and looting of large amounts of Iraqi (and world) cultural property.
• Electricity was kept at below invasion levels to date. Reconstruction was just a boondoggle for contractors. Water just as bad.
• Hussein’s worst prison reactivated. Whole families abducted and transfered and tortured.
It’s a fomented Shake And Bake Civil War, ALL INGREDIENTS ADDED, AND SHAKE with the worst cruelty you can imagine.
It astounds me that you are trying to sell the hunched shoulders answer to ‘what the policy is’. Why don’t you get the Ouija board and ask Adolf?
January 30th, 2007 at 5:14 am#31 – First of all, comparing Saddam to Tito is f*cking stupid. The comparison fails on any number of levels, the foremost of which is that Tito – a national hero of the WW2 – did not foment ethnic division. In case your memory is a little dim, Milosevic tried the Saddam method of divide and rule, and this caused the country to break apart.
Second, sectarian and ethnic divisions in post-Saddam Iraq were inevitable – civil war was not. The problem now is that we helped start the civil war, which gives us no credibility when we say we are trying to stop it. We had the ability to intervene in Kosovo and East Timor for example, because we weren’t a source of instability. In Iraq, where we’ve everything ass-backwards from Day 1, our presence, despite every argument that we have honorable intentions, is deeply problematic.
And finally, John Bolton’s argument here is a sick joke. We face the possibility of 1 Iraq or 3 new countries. He says we’re strategically neutral on the outsome…
Okay then. Let’s work up the possibility that a unified Iraq comes into existence – isn’t that what we really want? One government, at least not hostile to us, able to maintain a semblance of law and order, and willing to confront Al Qaeda extremists… Someone tell me that isn’t in our strategic interests?
The alternative is a Sunni Republic – basically a reconstitution of Saddam’s Baathist regime; a Shi’ite Republic – Mini-me to Iran; and a Kurdish Republic, which will headquarter a movement for the establishment of Greater Kurdistan (and thus a threat to Turkey’s territorial integrity).
Note to Bolton and other dumbf*cks. Turkey is a member of NATO. If it is under threat, as NATO allies, we are obligated to go to Turkey’s defense. Which will mean going to war with the Kurds.
Just another reason why listening to Bolton makes you stupid.
January 30th, 2007 at 6:29 amHis agenda was like everyone else hired by the Bush administration. Lie while we employ you and speak the truth after we get rid of you.
January 30th, 2007 at 7:39 am37: That’s the job of all those working for a govt in the dipomatic field.
Having said that, John Bolton is a respectable man, tone down your hate.
January 30th, 2007 at 8:17 amDumbFox: dont act like you are concerned about a “united Iraq”. If you were, you’d be against the groupthink here that demands we leave Iraq to the wolves.
January 30th, 2007 at 8:18 amBolton’s vacillation is easily explained his change in allegiance. Whereas he was speaking for the Bush administration, now he speaks for himself (or whomever is giving him money).
Iraq must remain one country; a divided Iraq will further destabalize the Mid-East. First there would be border disputes over cities and settlements and claims of natural resources. Massive sectarian relocations are next. Not just within Iraq, but in the entire region (e.g. Kurds in Turkey). The stability of neighboring countries would be threatened–governments don’t like to cede territory nor human resources. If borders are ever drawn, then new governments must emerge in the former-Iraqi nations. That is, evidently, an arduous task, let alone cause for the raise of oppressive regimes that harbour terrorists.
January 30th, 2007 at 9:03 amWe have a strategic interest in the fact of ensuring that what emerges is not a state in complete collapse,
Why does Bushco hate our strategic interests?
January 30th, 2007 at 10:07 amThe U.S. has no strategic interest in Israel, so why does it continue to throw away 6-8 billion dollars per year on it?
The U.S. does not need Israel in anyway, shape, or form. But without U.S. aid, military and political support, Israel is done for. Zionist neocon Bolton does not think about cut-and-run there, does he? The American strategic position would improve if it cut off all aid to Israel and switched.
One of the funniest jokes on this thread, “Having said that, John Bolton is a respectable man, tone down your hate.” There are many things you could say about bully and thug Bolton, but “respectable” would not come to mind.
January 30th, 2007 at 11:28 amMr. Bolton’s statement cames after Mr. Bush’s new strategy in Iraq,The US has tried to have a unified Iraq, and it is in the interest of the Iraqi neighborer’s which they have in fact supported the terrorist groups in Iraq.So the US has until now worked against our interest in the region, and we have to punish the Iraqi neighbors through dividing Iraq so they understand we have worked for Iraqi neighbors interest until yesterday.
January 31st, 2007 at 3:30 amNo S$#@ A$$ face!!!!
January 31st, 2007 at 12:51 pm