John Bolton has his panties in a knot because of Syria and North Korea: The leader to Bolton’s article in today’s Wall Street Journal reads:
So Pyongyang was helping Syria build a reactor? Must be time for more concessions.
http://online.wsj.com/...
Bolton opens up with the usual unfactual accusation (the code words with diclaimer: Facts about–albeit still incompletely. . .):
Facts about Israel's Sept. 6 raid on a suspected nuclear facility in Syria continue to emerge -- albeit still incompletely, especially regarding the involvement of the Democratic People's Republic of (North) Korea.
He even goes on to accuse the Bush administration of shameful concessions to North Korea:
The concessions continue to flow in essentially only one direction, crossing repeated "red lines" Washington had drawn.
These include: (1) the humiliating U.S. collapse on North Korea's access to international financial markets; (2) accepting a mere "freeze" of Yongbyon (misleadingly called "disablement" by the administration) rather than real dismantlement; (3) failing to ensure enforcement of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718's sanctions, imposed after Pyongyang's nuclear test; and (4) the State Department's palpable hunger to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and the Trading With the Enemy Act's prohibitions, and re-establish full diplomatic relations.
Woe! Gnashing angst! Concession after concession after concession! And, oh God! Diplomacy! Bolton even tosses in an insulting criticism from the left:
Even critics from the left now worry that State is conceding far more than it should.
And slaps Condoleeza Rice:
Our current Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and other partisans of the six-party talks respond to all internal administration complaints or criticisms by asking, "What is your alternative? What would you have us do otherwise, risk war on the Peninsula?"
Our "current" Secretary of State, Mr. Bolton? Is that a hint of something dark and foreboding and subterranean afoot? Something of the odeur of Monsieur Cheney? Who never asks such sissified questions? Nay! No questions from he who only barks out commands.
He, Bolton, almost pleads with Bush to draw "a deep line in the sand." Ah, the longing for a manly man with a heavy and pendulous, a penetrom de libramentum, if not of liberation, to flop out like a bomb from an attack plane, tracing "a deep line in the sand." I doubt that Senor Bush is so endowed.
My goodness! Mr. Bolton is even concerned about:
Third, consider the severely negative effect these repeated concessions have on our relations with Japan and South Korea.
Whatever happened to the hearty unilateralism of the past, Mr. Bolton? Wouldn’t these present day actions of multilateral cooperation threaten the position of the "unitary executive"?
Bolton, apparently, has not yet totally lost hope. He closes his article with:
For President Bush, I can only hope he re-reads his first term speeches on North Korea.
Yes, the good old days when Bolton was ranging free to throw things in rage and kill initiatives on arms controls, abuse women in Russian hotels, require strange things from wives, the good old days.
This timely article also serves to promote Bolton’s book: Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations, out next week from Simon & Schuster/Threshold Editions.
Shades of Tom DeLay’s Book, No Retreat, No Surrender. How did that book ever sell, by the way?