Let us return to Boltonland, shall we? With yet another ridiculous op-ed in a major paper, former U.S. ambassador to the UN (*shudder*) John Bolton gives us the current state of the Battle for Iran (war has already begun!): the people are longing to rise up, but they only need a helpful American hand to help them overthrow their government (not that we haven’t tried that before…); a feckless and “empathetic” Barack Obama is so eager to sit down and sip tea with Iran’s hardest hardliners that he can’t understand that Iran is going to nuke everyone and everything no matter what we do; and if we just poke a stick into Iran’s complicated ethnic politics, everything will be hunky-dory.
Ummm…
As vehement as his hatred for diplomacy may be, Bolton’s chief target here is, quite simply, the Obama Administration. The op-ed, like many others on Iran, is written for baldly partisan purposes. Nowhere does Bolton actually suggest how the United States could “support” his desired goal of regime change; he is able to get away with such ambiguous criticism because, were his preferred policies of strict belligerence and hawkish interference to actually be pursued, his party would bear the inevitable political fallout. As it is, though, even when he admits that “we’re not really in a position now to offer much concrete assistance” (h/t ThinkProgress), his criticism will emerge unscathed. And whenever something violent or unsavory happens in Iran — imagine that! — he will undoubtedly reclaim his mantle as the right wing’s favorite bullish prognosticator.