NOT JUST “HAWKISH”
By Juan Cole
March 23, 2018 "Information Clearing House"
- John Bolton helped lie our country into an illegal
war of aggression that killed several hundred thousand Iraqis, wounded over a
million, and displaced 4 million from their homes, helped deliver
Baghdad into the hands of Iran, and helped create ISIL, which blew up Paris. In
a just world, Bolton would be on trial at the Hague for war crimes. Instead, he
has been promoted into a position to do to Iran what he did to Iraq.
He is also in the back pocket of the
MEK Iranian terrorist organization, which despite its violent and smelly past has proved so
useful to those plotting the apocalyptic destruction of Iran that the
Washington elite decided to take it off the list of terrorist organizations in
2012.
The acceptable political spectrum
inside the Beltway in Washington DC is a marvel to behold. Bernie
Sanders, a long-serving senator and public servant won
13.2 million popular votes to 16.8 million votes for Hillary Clinton (i.e.
he was backed by 43% of one of the two major parties in the country). But
Sanders was virtually blacked out from corporate television coverage during his
impressive presidential bid, while Jeff Zucker turned CNN over to Trump every
night at 7:30 pm throughout the summer and fall of 2016 and just let him talk,
or whatever he does, for an hour without even a semblance of journalistic
analysis. Supposedly left-leaning MSNBC did the same thing.
America’s corporations love the
fascist side of the spectrum, which is obvious from the way they
promoted Trump and Trumpism. Zucker also hired Cory Lewandowski, who was at the
time contractually obligated to avoid criticizing Trump, as a CNN commentator.
Fascism after all favors big corporations and vilifies and punishes workers and
the poor. Under Mussolini, the Italian poor were plunged into much deeper
poverty.
Television news also loves the
maniacal side of the spectrum. You seldom see normal people as
commentators on cable news, and much of the commentary is polarized and
superficial and often simply incorrect on the facts of the matter. Sometimes it
is even just a criminal conspiracy. During the Iraq War, the NYT revealed that
the Pentagon successfully pressed on CNN a gaggle of former
generals, many of them actively making money off of the Iraq War through
contracting while they were promoting it on television. They presented an Alice
in Wonderland view of the brutal US occupation of that country as a shining
success.
Tom Fenton, a career television journalist, once wrote a
book suggesting that television news is so bad that it
is actually a standing risk for US security, since an uninformed or misinformed
public cannot play the democratic role of watchdog and is not being
alerted to genuine threats. Maybe the maniacs draw eyeballs and increase
advertising dollars. Maybe Wall Street doesn’t see people as maniacs as long as
they advocate giving billionaires more money.
The fascination with the far right wing and with the
maniacal dovetails in the person of Bolton, now Trump’s National Security
Adviser. Jesus said that if the blind leads the blind,
both will fall into a ditch. The ditch in this case could well be a ruinous war
with Iran.
In a sane society, people like
Bolton wouldn’t be allowed on television, much less put in charge of American
security.
Bolton has assiduously tried to do
the same thing he did to Iraq to Iran. Big corporations like wars. Wars
mean you have to manufacture more shiny children-murdering weapons and bombs,
the ultimate in planned obsolescence. No war, and the factories fall silent and
the money-counting stops. People called “hawks” in Washington, a euphemism for
“murderous maniacs,” often get supported one way or another by the arms
industry. Sometimes it is direct and their bank accounts should be examined.
Iran has never had a nuclear weapons
program, and as long as the nuclear deal holds, it has no opportunity to
develop them. It has no heavy water reactor. It has a limited number of
centrifuges. It destroyed its stockpile of uranium enriched to 19.5% for its
medical reactor. It is being actively inspected. No country under active UN
arms inspections has ever developed a bomb.
Bolton wants to bomb Iran so badly
that he does not care about these facts. He wanted to bomb Iran himself
if he could, sort of like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove. If not he wanted to
have the Israelis do it.
He has a list. He’d like to bomb
nuclear-armed North Korea, too.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that keeps that clock showing how many minutes
the world is away from a nuclear midnight can put it away. With Bolton’s
appointment, it is past midnight.
…
Source: Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate
Professor of History at the University of Michigan. https://www.juancole.com
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