The United States has been in active combat operations since September 11, 2001, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, elsewhere on the African continent, and probably in a few places we don’t know about.
John Bolton is a man who once said, "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost," and, "[B]y the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to take it away from.”
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This same man who did not want to die in the rice patties of Vietnam, who joined the National Guard for the express purpose of not being drafted, and who still defends the debacle of the Iraq War, now wants to send my child and other children to die in yet another pointless, unjustified war in the Middle East. And he is the country’s current national security adviser. Says The National Interest:
Bolton was one of the leading advocates for invading Iraq in 2003. Yet even after the invasion was proven to be a disastrous move (remember, there were no Al Qaeda forces in Iraq, and ISIS didn’t exist, prior to the invasion Bolton promoted), he still defends this mistake to this day, calling it “fully justified.”
John Bolton has never been in a position where he has heard a shot fired in anger. He has no idea what it is like to be 18 years old and have to write out a will and decide who is going to get your survivor benefits. He has never in his life had to contemplate dying in a foreign land at a young age. Yet he is one of the first to rush to send American men and women into battle.
Sending aircraft carriers and B-52s to the Middle East is going to do nothing nothing more than provoke a response from Iran. Imagine if Iran started sending troops to Venezuela. Pretty sure that would provoke a response from the United States.
Bolton and his ilk in the Republican Party have wanted to invade Iran since 1979. This is not really about Iran sponsoring terrorism, or even about Iran pursuing nuclear weapons. It is simply about revenge for the American embassy being taken over and Americans being taken hostage. And the idea of invading and/or bombing Iran has been revived since at least the George W. Bush administration, when Bush named it as part of his “axis of evil.”
In 2007, John McCain, then running for the Republican nomination for president sang this little ditty at a town hall.
I do not believe for one second that there is any intelligence revealing that Iran is planning to do something. This is the yellowcake lie all over again. A British general has gone on record stating that there is no increased threat. The Independent reports that “Major General Chris Ghika, deputy commander of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), the US-led coalition fighting Isis, disputed claims from the White House that forces in the Middle East are facing an increased threat from Iran or its allies.”
Major General Ghika is not the only one doubting the intelligence.
Spain has recalled a frigate accompanying a U.S. aircraft carrier to the Middle East because of rising tensions between Washington and Tehran, the defense ministry said Tuesday, May 14.
“For the moment the frigate Mendez Nunez has left the combat group of the USS Abraham Lincoln,” a ministry spokesperson told AFP, confirming a report in the Spanish daily El Pais.
“It’s a temporary withdrawal, decided by Defense Minister Margarita Robles, as long as the American aircraft carrier is in this zone,” the spokesman added.
He said the Spanish frigate had joined the aircraft carrier’s strike group for a military exercise.
“No possible confrontation or warlike action is envisaged [by Spain] and it is for this reason that the participation is suspended for the moment,” he added.
There have been reports that the United States is planning on sending 120,000 troops to the Middle East.
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented a military plan at a meeting of top national security officials last week that would send as many as 120,000 US troops to the Middle East in the event that Iran strikes American forces in the region or speeds up its development of nuclear weapons.
Now, I would be remiss if I did not say that, had Trump not pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, we would likely not need to worry about it speeding up the development of nuclear weapons. Bolton’s fantasy of invading Iran needs to be just that: a fantasy. He is trying his damnedest to get Iran to attack U.S. interests. Let’s hope it sees this and cooler heads prevail. If anything, as a nation we should have learned something about pre-emptive strikes in the Middle East, especially when we are led by an administration full of liars.