Luongo: Trump Thumping Bolton Is A Good Start

Authored by Tom Luongo,

Donald Trump finally fired National Security Adviser and all-around disgraceful human being John Bolton.

Good riddance.

Bolton was a diversity hire by Trump. His allegiance to the Israeli Firsters who helped get Trump into power, namely Sheldon Adelson, got him the job.

The strongest Iran hawk in Washington in the wake of John McCain’s brain tumor valiantly giving up its life to end McCain’s, Bolton’s role was to keep Trump on program delivering maximum force and intimidation to everyone who so much as looked sideways at the U.S.

He was the proxy in the White House for liar and war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The turning point was Trump’s refusal to take Bolton’s bait to retaliate against Iran for shooting down the Global Hawk Drone back in June.

After the incident I asked the question, “Who Survives the Iran Counter-Offensive?” I expected then that one of Bolton, Mike “The Buffet Line” Pompeo at State or Gina “Miss Rendition” Haspel at CIA to be fired within six to eight weeks.

It took Trump eleven.

And he did this…

… Because the implications here are that he is being boxed in on all sides by his administration and his allies — the Saudis, Israelis and the UAE — and frogmarched to a war he doesn’t want.

He wants Iran to heel but he doesn’t know how to go about it.
That Iran then chose the next day to openly declare that they were not confused or misled and knew exactly what they were doing puts Trump in an even worse position.

Because an unmanned drone, as he said in his futile tweetstorm, is not worth going to war over, especially one whose position in in dispute.

And everyone knows it. Europe wouldn’t condemn Iran here. No one did. Only the U.S. And that silence is deafening as Pompeo, Bolton and Haspel again over-extend themselves.

We are downstream of this event in a way that has forced Trump to realize he’s put thousands of U.S. troops at risk across multiple deployment zones.

And the final straw was apparently Bolton working to scuttle Trump’s talks with the Taliban at Camp David to end the Afghanistan War. I’ll bet good money Bolton leaked this to the press to humiliate Trump because there can be no war on Iran without full U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

Ultimately we are here because Netanyahu will not accept Trump’s passivity here. Since that day Netanyahu has:

• Openly bombed Iraqi militias putting the U.S.’s invitation there at risk and Iran-backed retaliation against U.S. troops on the table.

• Attempted to assassinate Hezbollah personnel in Beirut only to have his drones captured and his border troops killed in retaliation.

• Bombed Syrian Army positions in and around Damascus

• pledged to annex the Valley of Jordan publicly likely without Trump’s approval.

Bolton was a key voice in that policy of embargo and death.

Armchair bullies like Trump and Bolton are a dime a dozen in D.C. And from them spews the most disgusting jingoism to justify murder, starvation, privation and corruption.

For the eighteen months Bolton was in the White House the Trump administration has been worse than a laughing stock the world over. From the Bay of Fat Pigs failed coup in Venezuela to the pathetic detaining of the Grace One oil tanker in Gibraltar no act of statecraft was beneath this gang of thugs.

And psychopaths like Bolton have nothing but contempt for the people he says he’s trying to liberate. Only the stick works in John Bolton’s world, here must not be any carrots.

Because if he had one ounce of sympathy for Venezuelans struggling under Nicolas Maduro, Syrians under Bashar al-Assad or Iranians under the Mullahs he wouldn’t be starving them through sanctions and embargo but enriching them through trade and commerce.

And since Trump himself is both a bully and a liar, as Chinese Premier Xi Jinping now fully believes, he and Bolton, I’m sure, got along famously at first with John telling Don how great all of these policies will be.

Big wins. Yuge.

Bolton was brought on board along with Pompeo to toughen up Trump’s team to pressure Iran and the rest of Israel’s enemies across the Shia Crescent. He would cow China into helping Trump bring North Korea in from the nuclear cold.

Russian President Vladimir Putin would give up Crimea and the breakaway republics of the Donbass. Then Putin would give up his hypersonic missiles.

Instead Putin offered to sell them to Trump to level the playing field.

Honestly, that story leaking may have been the final indignation for Trump, for whom image is everything. The embarrassment of Putin’s offer in front of the other G-20 members had to gall him to the core.

This is what Bolton and the Neocons have done for Trump’s presidency, reduced it to a clown show where no one listens to the American President anymore because he’s irrelevant.

But the maximum pressure policy has done none of these things save make Trump look like an unstable lunatic and strengthen the resolve of the U.S.’s opposition.

The INF Treaty is dead. The START 2 Treaty in jeopardy.

The Shia Crescent is closer to completion than at any point in recent memory. Only the holdout annoyances of U.S. troops at Al-Tanf and near Deir Ezzor is stopping that now.

Once the Al-Bukamai border crossing between Syria and Iraq is secure and opened publicly the point of the U.S. presence east of the Euphrates River will be moot.

Trump’s foreign policy ideas are at least twenty years out of date. He’s spouted the same nonsensical effluvia about China at least that long. And it didn’t matter if the timing of his Presidency was wrong, if the world had moved to a state incompatible with his ideas, he would them out anyway.

Because a tiger doesn’t change his stripes. Personnel is policy in D.C. and every other national capitol in the world.

Bolton was the height of the neoconservative ethos; an academic with no real world experience, daddy issues and a knack for getting close to the most influential people in the world to warp policy to their Trotskyite goals of permanent revolution.

Now, thankfully, he’s out of a job. Next up has to be Haspel at the CIA as well as Mike Pompeo. These people are a stain on the U.S. They diminish not only Trump, who doesn’t apparently need any help in this regard, but all of us as Americans.

It’s clear Trump made this move for re-election purposes. Bolton was a liability. If more heads don’t roll after three years of foreign policy blunders of epic proportions Trump’s second term will look just like his first, a shambolic mess long on bravado and short on consistency.

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